HARARE, Zimbabwe – After her son, the family’s shining light and sole breadwinner, was arrested last year, Tambudzai Tembo collapsed. In Zimbabwe, where clinical mental health services are scarce, their chances of getting professional help were close to zero. She thought about suicide.
“I didn’t want to live anymore. People who saw me would think everything was fine. But inside my head was spinning,” said the 57-year-old. “I was alone.”
A wooden bench and an empathetic grandmother saved her.
Elderly people are at the center of a local form of mental health therapy in Zimbabwe that is now being adopted in places like the United States.
The approach involves installing benches in quiet, discreet corners of community clinics and in some churches, poor neighborhoods and a university. An elderly woman with basic training in problem-solving therapy sits patiently there, ready to listen and engage in a one-on-one conversation.
The therapy is inspired by traditional Zimbabwean practice, in which grandmothers were the people looked to for wisdom in difficult times. It was abandoned with urbanization, the breakdown of extended, joint families, and modern technology. Now it is proving useful again as mental health needs increase.
“Grandmothers are the guardians of local culture and wisdom. They are rooted in their communities,” said Dixon Chibanda, professor of psychiatry and founder of the initiative. “They don’t go away, and what’s more, they have an incredible ability to use what we call ‘express empathy’… to make people feel respected and understood.”
Last year, Chibanda was named winner of a $150,000 award from the US-based McNulty Foundation for revolutionizing mental health. Chibanda said the concept has taken root in parts of Vietnam, Botswana, Malawi, Kenya and Tanzania and is in “preliminary formative work” in London.
In New York, the city’s new mental health plan, launched last year, says it is “taking inspiration” from what it calls the Friendship Bank to help address risk factors like social isolation. Orange benches are now in areas like Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
In Washington, the organization HelpAge USA is testing the concept under the DC Grandparents for Mental Health initiative, which began in 2022 as a COVID-19 support group for people ages 60 and older.
So far, 20 grandmothers determined to “end the stigma around mental health and make it normal to talk about feelings” have been trained by a Friendship Bench Zimbabwe team to listen, empathize and empower others to solve their problems , said Cindy Cox-Roman. , the president and chief executive of HelpAge USA.
Benches will be set up in places of worship, schools and wellness centers in Washington’s low-income communities with people who “have been historically marginalized and more likely to suffer from mental health issues,” she said.
Cox-Roman cited fear and distrust in the medical system, lack of social support and stigma as some of the factors limiting access to treatment.
“People are hurting and a grandmother can always make you feel better,” she said.
“We have a lot of wisdom in our elderly population and arms that can open. I reject ageism. Sometimes age brings wisdom that you don’t learn until you get older,” said one of the grandmothers, 81-year-old Barbara Allen, in a promotional video.
More than one in five adults in the U.S. lives with a mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
“The mental health crisis is real. The real crisis in the wake of the pandemic is that many doctors have dropped out of the workforce,” said Dr. Jehan El-Mayoumi, who works as an expert at HelpAge USA and is the founding director of the Health Equity Rodham Institute at Georgetown University. . She has struggled to get psychiatrists for acutely suicidal patients.
El-Mayoumi said the Zimbabwe concept provides people with “someone you can trust, someone you can open your heart to, someone you can tell your deepest secrets (and) that requires trust, so that’s what’s in it.” so wonderful at Banco da Amizade.”
The idea was born out of tragedy. Chibanda was a young psychiatrist and one of just over 10 in Zimbabwe in 2005. One of his patients desperately wanted to see him but couldn’t afford the $15 bus ticket. Chibanda later learned that she had killed herself.
“I realized I needed to have a stronger presence in the community,” Chibanda said. “I realized that, in fact, one of the most valuable resources are these grandmothers, the guardians of local culture.”
He recruited 14 grandmothers from the neighborhood near the hospital where he worked in the capital, Harare, and trained them. In Zimbabwe, they receive 25 dollars a month to help with transport and telephone expenses.
The network, which is now partnered with the Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization, has grown to more than 2,000 grandparents across the country. More than 200,000 Zimbabweans sat on a bench receiving therapy from a trained grandmother in 2023, according to the network.
Siridzayi Dzukwa, the grandmother who dissuaded Tembo from suicide, made a home follow-up visit recently. Using a written questionnaire, she checked Tembo’s progress. She heard Tembo talk about how he found a new lease on life and now sells vegetables to survive.
Dzukwa became a recognized figure in the region. People stop to greet her and thank her for helping them. Some ask for a home visit or write down her number.
“People are no longer ashamed or afraid to openly stop us on the streets and ask us to talk,” she said. “Mental health is no longer something to be ashamed of.”
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