Skip to main content

Untapped Resource



I have reached the time in my life when some of my women friends are becoming grandmothers. I find it odd that our culture seems to look on this as a life achievement when, in fact, there is absolutely no personal effort involved. Other people do all the work. It is not a goal one can work toward, now, is it?

 Yesterday I heard a piece on the TED Radio Hour on WAMU which gave me a completely new take on the status of being a grandmother. Entitled “How Can a Team of Grandmothers Make Therapy Accessible to All?” it tells the story of a mental health initiative in Zimbabwe. Mental health professionals are in extremely short supply. Dr. Dixon Chibanda, one of only fifteen psychiatrists in the country, created a new and rather unexpected model for bringing mental health care right to where people needed it most.
So in very simple terms, the Friendship Bench is really - literally a bench which is used to create space for healing. So I work with grandmothers - community grandmothers, who are trained in basics of cognitive behavioral therapy. That's just a form of therapy which is often delivered by highly-skilled professionals such as clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.


So what I did in 2005 was I trained a whole lot of grandmothers to deliver this intervention. And when you looked to this part of the world, grandmothers are considered to be the custodians of local culture and wisdom. And they are rooted in their communities. And they have this amazing ability to listen in a very empathic way. They have this amazing ability to be attentive. And I think they are such an amazing resource.

This initiative has been so successful that they are beginning trials in other countries. 

As I listened I suddenly remembered something I had seen from the Horizon Foundation.

 Emotional Support Humans Wanted

 The top five reasons why you should be an Emotional Support Human for the people in your life are…
  1. You care, but you may not know how to show support. Don’t let that stop you from 
  2. reaching out. The only way to learn what they need is to ask.
  3. Telling someone to “get help” isn’t always enough – sometimes they need help getting help.
  4. The only guaranteed way to let them know you care is to tell them.
  5. They might need to talk – And they could be waiting for you to show that you’re willing to listen. Don’t be afraid of bothering them; they don’t have to talk to you if they don’t want to.
  6. Doing nothing can make things worse – when we don’t talk about mental health, we allow the stigma around it to continue.
You can learn more about the Emotional Support Human concept by going to their website. Unlike Dr. Chidaya’s program, there’s no formal training involved. And you don’t need to be a grandmother. (Although I suspect it wouldn’t hurt.)

While the two programs have very different purposes, they do share a vision of enlisting ordinary people in a community to be valuable resources for those in crisis. Think about it. We are an untapped resource. We could be the one person that helps someone in a hard time.

Interested?  Take the pledge.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...
2 comments
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more