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Therapy at the bench

Psychiatrist Dixon Chibanda trains teams of grandmothers to provide open-air counselling sessions in Zimbabwe.
  1. Chris Woolston

    1. Chris Woolston is a freelance writer in Billings, Montana.

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Dixon Chabanda sits on a Friendship Bench with a group of matriarchs outside a primary healthcare clinic in Mbara, Zimbabwe

Dixon Chibanda is a psychiatrist at the University of Zimbabwe and director of the African Mental Health Research Initiative. Credit: Rainer Kwiotek

The grandmothers of Zimbabwe are inspirational custodians of local culture and wisdom, with much to give. Here, I’m sitting with a group of matriarchs in Mbare, a township in Harare. All are trained therapists who welcome people in the community to the Friendship Bench, a nationwide mental-health project that I created as a psychiatrist in 2006.

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Nature 582, 452 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01752-4

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