‘Friendship Bench’ program proves effective at alleviating mental illness symptoms

Their offices are simple wooden seats, called Friendship Benches, located in the grounds of health clinics around Harare and other major cities in Zimbabwe.

 The practitioners are lay health workers known as community “Grandmothers,” trained to listen to and support patients living with anxiety, depression and other common mental disorders… Six months after undergoing six weekly “problem solving therapy” sessions on the Friendship Benches, participants showed significant differences in severity of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts based on locally validated questionnaires for depression and anxiety: the Shona Symptom Questionnaire (SSQ), the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) and the Generalised Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD). The results were striking.