OUR MODEL AT WORK

Group interventions are well suited for the African culture, given the strong presence of groups throughout its society. The StrongMinds talk therapy model is based on a 12-week period of 60-90 minute sessions. StrongMinds’ Mental Health Facilitators are not mental health experts, but local professionals who are trained and certified in StrongMinds’ psychotherapy model.  Every 12 weeks a new cycle of StrongMinds Therapy Groups begin, each Mental Health Facilitator leads 10-12 groups per week, with an average of 12 women per group, treating 300-400 women per year.

In addition, StrongMinds is working to empower women who have successfully completed a StrongMinds Therapy Group to run their own Peer Therapy Group. These women are selected and trained in an adapted StongMinds curriculum to become Peer Facilitators.  Volunteers go on to lead their own Peer Therapy Groups within their communities. This model is an extremely low-cost way for StrongMinds to reach potentially millions of depressed African women in the years ahead.

Once fully implemented on a large scale, StrongMinds will significantly impact the depression epidemic in Uganda and Africa because of the building capacity of local women to treat other for depression.

In addition, StrongMinds is scaling by working with large International Non-Government Organizations. In the beginning of 2016, StrongMinds worked with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to treat female refugees in Uganda. Later in 2016, StrongMinds began working with BRAC-Uganda to treat adolescent girls with depression. By leveraging partnerships, StrongMinds is able to reach more women with depression while making the work of the other organizations more effective because the women are able to function better.

The goal of StrongMinds’ intervention is for the women treated to be Depression Free. Women who qualify for inclusion in our groups are evaluated via the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), a depression diagnostic tool which contains a series of nine questions used for screening, diagnosing, monitoring and measuring the severity of depression.

The PHQ-9 is administered again immediately following treatment, and again six months later, to determine the success of the intervention. If the woman’s evaluation indicates a score under a 5 on PHQ-9 after treatment, we have been successful. Scoring 1-4 is evaluated as Minimal Depression, and in lay terms this means that the individual is not able to be diagnosed with any significant level of depression, and is thus, Depression Free.

Since StrongMinds’ talk therapy both reduces current symptoms and prevents future episodes of depression, we remain in contact with the women in order to measure the degree to which our intervention prevents future depressive episodes.

In addition, StrongMinds measures the impact of our intervention on the overall well-being of the women and their families. During our pilot in 2014, we initially measured how the reduction of depressive symptoms impacted these women’s lives in such areas as employment status, savings and nutrition. We found strong evidence that reducing depression has a wide-ranging impact for the women and their families. Presently, StrongMinds monitors and evaluates the overall well-being of the women it treats, and their families, on a regular basis to further its understanding of how managing depression for African women impacts them and their families.

StrongMinds uses monitoring and evaluation to ensure that our method is the most effective intervention at treating women with depression and to improve its scalability so we can reach our goal of treating 2 million women with depression by 2025.