Siridzayi Dzukwa, a grandmother, right, talks to a colleague while seated at a bench in Hatfcliffe on the outskirts of the capital Harare, Zimbabwe, Saturday, May 11,2024. In Zimbabwe, talk therapy involving park benches and a network of grandmothers has become a saving grace for people with mental health issues. Now the concept is being adopted in parts of the United States and elsewhere.
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.Tunisia sets elections for October. The increasingly authoritarian president hasn’t said he’ll run“Grandmothers are the custodians of local culture and wisdom.
In Washington, the organization HelpAge USA is piloting the concept under the DC Grandparents for Mental Health initiative, which started in 2022 as a COVID-19 support group of people 60 and above. Cox-Roman cited fear and distrust in the medical system, lack of social support and stigma as some of the factors limiting access to treatment.“We have so much wisdom in our older population and arms that can open. I reject ageism. Sometimes age brings wisdom that you don’t learn until you get old,” one of the grandmothers, 81-year-old Barbara Allen, said in a promotional video.
El-Mayoumi said the Zimbabwean concept provides people with “someone you can trust, open up your heart to, that you can tell your deepest secrets that requires trust, so that’s what’s so wonderful about the Friendship Bench.” He recruited 14 grandmothers in the neighborhood near the hospital where he worked in the capital, Harare, and trained them. In Zimbabwe, they get $25 a month to help with transport and phone bills.