The Friendship Bench: Bringing talk therapy into underserved communities

Dr. Dixon Chibanda remembers like yesterday the moment in 2005 that changed his life. "During my formative years working as a psychiatrist, I lost a patient of mine to suicide. Erica was her name. She had hanged herself from a mango tree in the family garden."

Erica was just 25 years old.

Chibanda, a psychiatrist based in Harare, Zimbabwe, says her family knew she needed help. "They lived some 200 miles away from where I worked," he said. "And they just didn't have the equivalent of US$15 to get onto a bus to come to the hospital."

At the time, there were only 10 psychiatrists serving 13 million people in Zimbabwe. So, Chibanda came up with an idea involving grandmothers: "These grandmas were actually, you know, the custodians of the local culture and the wisdom, and they were rooted in their communities. And I was like, what if we could train them to be the first port of call for anyone needing to talk in a community?"

So, in 2006, Chibanda introduced the "Friendship Bench," a talk therapy program that brings mental healthcare directly into underserved communities. The program is free, and the grandmothers were happy to donate their time.