After her son, the family's shining light and only breadwinner, was arrested last year, Tambudzai Tembo went into meltdown. In Zimbabwe, where clinical mental health services are scarce, her chances of getting professional help were next to zero. She contemplated suicide. "I didn't want to live anymore. People who saw me would think everything was okay. But inside, my head was spinning," the 57-year-old said. "I was on my own." A wooden bench and an empathetic grandmother saved her. Older people are at the center of a homegrown form of mental health therapy in Zimbabwe that is now being adopted in places like the United States, the AP reports.
The approach involves setting up benches in quiet, discreet corners of community clinics and in some churches, poor neighborhoods, and at a university. An older woman with basic training in problem-solving therapy patiently sits there, ready to listen and engage in a one-on-one conversation. The therapy is inspired by traditional practice in Zimbabwe in which grandmothers were the go-to people for wisdom in rough times. It had been abandoned with urbanization, the breakdown of tight-knit extended families and modern technology. Now it is proving useful again as mental health needs grow.
"Grandmothers are the custodians of local culture and wisdom. They are rooted in their communities," said Dixon Chibanda, a psychiatry professor and founder of the initiative. "They don't leave, and in addition, they have an amazing ability to use what we call 'expressed empathy'… to make people feel respected and understood." The network, which now partners with the health ministry and the World Health Organization, has grown to more than 2,000 grandmothers across the country. Over 200,000 Zimbabweans sat on a bench to get therapy from a trained grandmother in 2023, according to the network. (Read more about the similar initiatives being launched in the US and elsewhere here.)
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