Helping Communities Deal With Mental Health Problems

Depression has grown by almost 20 per cent in the last decade with 800 000 people across the globe committing suicide per year, according to the South African Medical and Education Foundation. An estimated six per cent of people worldwide are struggling with depression today, and one-fifth of South Africans will experience a depressive disorder at least once in their lifetime.

Jonathan Morgan, a resources development manager at the Africa Psychosocial Support Institute (APSSI), says that mental health issues such as depression and anxiety are on the rise because the world has become a faster, more hectic and stressful place exacerbated by poverty, unemployment, climate change, inequitable distribution of resources and industrialisation. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the situation, making more families and communities more vulnerable to depression.

“Lockdowns and social distancing practices have impacted the mental health of the population, for example, by making meaningful human contact and psychosocial support more difficult, exacerbating domestic violence, and disrupting normal educational, extended family support and various social practices,” explains Morgan.

Resources and programmes 

According to Morgan, a plethora of guidelines on how to deal with mental health problems have been developed by the nongovernmental sector in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, APSSI, in partnership with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, developed a toolkit for teachers on how to support children when they return to school during the pandemic. The guide included a set of general group-building exercises, followed by themed activities that focused on 16 key life skills supporting the personal, cognitive and interpersonal development of children.

While there’s more conversation around mental health nowadays, the illness still carries a stigma that affects the way people view it. In addition, mental health is often overlooked and underfunded. To address this, APSSI
has taken the approach to mainstream psychosocial support (PSS) into various other disciplines such as education, health and economic empowerment.

“A few decades ago, there was a groundbreaking book entitled Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Healthcare Handbook which promoted the concept of barefoot paramedics working in hard-to-reach rural areas. APSSI works in the space where there is no psychologist, where there is no one-on-one therapy or counselling available,” says Morgan.

APSSI’s catalogue has over 100 publications developed for community workers, caregivers, parents and youth. One of its flagship interventions is the Hero Book, which invites children and young people to make an autobiographical book about their lives.

Children are encouraged to identify obstacles that stand in the way of their goals, such as bedwetting, anxiety, sadness, depression or domestic violence and to find the hero in them to help them overcome these obstacles. The Hero books are available in Afrikaans, Swahili and Portuguese and have been used to offer support to child ex-soldiers as far as Uganda. “The Hero Book has been instrumental in improving children’s mental health, academic and literacy output and showing just how resilient children can be,” says Morgan.

Morgan also highlights Flocking as one of its most notable guidelines. Developed in collaboration with the University of Pretoria, Flocking is about how communities can identify assets to use for psychosocial problems and how they can be mobilised to solve psychosocial problems. Through narrative and art therapy, communities engage in conversations on marriage, child marriage and child-headed households and come up with solutions to these problems.

“Flocking is a pathway to resilience and a form of social support to counter adversity,” adds Morgan. “This manual is designed to facilitate a workshop in which community actors can strengthen inclusion, communal mastery, solidarity and control of a harsh environment where chronic vulnerability prevails.”Other programmes include an 18-month teachers’ diploma focused on reducing bullying, corporal punishment and developing social and emotional competencies in learners.