February 13, 2025, Thursday
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Mental Health and Psycho-social Support training at Lalitpur

The Nepal Weekly
June 11, 2024

In today’s fast-changing world, individuals encounter a multitude of stressors in their daily lives. Moreover, pervasive social issues like domestic violence, sexual violence, homicide, and suicide often exacerbate these mental health concerns, creating a vicious cycle. This gives rise to various mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, anger management, post-traumatic stress disorder, and low self-esteem.

Aakar Mental Health Counselling from Satdobato, Lalitpur, and Ward No. 9 in Chyasal has recently organized a three-day training program designed to equip frontline workers with the necessary skills to address these pressing social issues and serve as the first line of psycho-social support. Through this training, participants gained proficiency in basic psychological counselling techniques, enabling them to identify and address problems and stressors both in individuals and within themselves.

The training organized by Akar was aimed at enhancing the capabilities of female health and social workers, “Mental Health and Psycho-social Support”. This initiative comes as a response to the escalating mental health challenges within our community.

The training included communication skills (both verbal and non-verbal), ethical principles of counselling, problem Management, stress management, trauma counselling, and psychological first aid. Equipped with these tools, frontline workers have now developed skills to identify issues promptly and provide immediate support and counselling to those in need. This proactive approach aims to ensure that individuals experiencing mental health challenges receive timely assistance, starting from the local level thereby mitigating the risk of long-term consequences such as severe mental illness or suicide. Such initiatives underscore the importance of ongoing training and support for frontline workers in every community.