The grandmothers have everyone who comes to the bench fill out a questionaire so they can get a better sense of what kinds of symptoms the person is experiencing and their degree of severity. Grandmothers are trained in a form of behavior therapy called problem solving therapy, which focuses on identifying concrete problems like unemployment. The actual treatment is often not only on the bench, but it also occurs in the community. So you can get a grandmother meeting a client, for instance, at church.
Dr. Dixon Chibanda, a psychiatrist in Zimbabwe, has been on a mission for years to help people gain access to mental healthcare in his community, where there's only one psychiatrist for every 1.5 million people. To bridge the gap and provide people with the help they need, Dixon turned to a rather unorthodox group for help: grandmothers.
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