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Duke Researchers Scale Up Program
to Address Mental Health Gap Among African Orphans by Alyssa Zamora One third of the 50 million orphaned and abandoned children living in sub-Saharan Africa have lost one or both parents to HIV/ AIDS. Research by the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research (CHPIR) shows these vulnerable children have significant unmet psychosocial needs due to parental death and trauma, and faculty members are working to fill that mental health gap, using intervention studies designed to inform program development. With a new, five-year, $2.2-million award from the National Institute of Mental Health, CHPIR will expand a childhood traumatic stress and grief intervention, which has shown promise in helping orphans and their guardians cope with unresolved grief. Karen O’Donnell is leading the intervention at Duke, along with CHPIR Director Kathryn Whetten. “We have seen the intervention help with grief issues and also facilitate a deeper connection between the child and his or her guardian,” O’Donnell said. Children were found to have fewer trauma-related symptoms and overall improved behavioral health after the treatment, and these improvements hold up three and 12 months later. Guardians most commonly reported their children are calmer, more comfortable and no longer experiencing nightmares. They also said they learned skills to help their children, but also other children in the community. “What is exciting about this work is that lay counselors with no prior mental health training, under close supervision, delivered the intervention with very high fidelity,” said Shannon Dorsey, a faculty member at the University of Washington and former Duke faculty member who is involved in the study. “They learned the intervention quickly, and the intervention was welcomed by guardians who felt they learned skills to offer support to children.” Researchers are hopeful the intervention will inform other efforts to scale up mental health programs for orphaned and abandoned children in low- and middle-income settings around the world.
4 gist from the mill • spri ng 2012