The Human Aspect's First Publication
Updated: Aug 11
The Human Aspect is happy to share our first publication, published open access in Discovery Psychology, in collaboration with the Friendship Bench Zimbabwe. This collaboration has been years in the making, but how did it happen?
Where it started
The Human Aspect was introduced to Friendship Bench (FB) in 2021. They felt aligned on a vision and began to explore how the organizations could co-create together.
Friendship Bench is an organisation that provides low-threshold, community based mental-health support where trained community health workers sit on wooden park "friendship benches” and offer structured problem-solving talk therapy, based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Originally, the method was developed by training community grandmothers, but has since expanded to community health workers and students in training. Alongside this work, FB was looking to attract younger audiences and explore how digital lived experience could enrich their work.
Storytelling is deeply ingrained in human beings, especially in community based societies like Zimbabwe. Lived experiences can act as stories where people can hear similar experiences, and gain valuable knowledge and insight. Further, they can be used to raise awareness, impart knowledge, combat stigma and motivate recovery.
With a grant from The Inner Foundation, we partnered with Friendship Bench in 2021 to go to Zimbabwe on an interview tour and capture impactful stories of lived experiences. We wondered: what if our digitalised lived experiences (DLE’s) could be used directly in therapy, to strengthen the therapeutic process of the Friendship Bench?
During the interview tour, Marina, our Head of Research at THA, joined to gain a richer understanding of FB and its methodology. The tour resulted in 15 lived experiences from Zimbabwe.
Building Something Together
There was a clear gap in research on combining DLE’s with evidence-based interventions like the Friendship Bench, especially in low-resource settings. We continued to work together to explore how DLE’s could be woven into the existing Friendship Bench model, as a supplementary indirect social intervention for treating common mental disorders, that evolved into the research project we now published together.
Using the Theory of Change approach, a strategic planning and evaluation method for mapping how a program creates impact, we worked with counselors, service users, and Friendship Bench staff. Together, we set out with the idea that integrating DLEs into Friendship Bench’s model would create a space for people to learn vicariously and gain inspiration, while counseling could provide the tools and a safe space to process the experience.
As a Friendship Bench counselor shared during the Theory of Change workshops,
“So much teaching can be found in these videos that can be helpful to others, especially those with similar situations. Especially during difficult times, they help you realise you are not the only one who has encountered this.”
What We Learned, and the Way Forward
Together, we mapped out a pathway for integrating DLEs into an existing model and therapeutic process, one which shows how much lived experience has to offer for both research and practice. We were also able to determine challenges that necessitate careful integration in local settings such as language, internet access and the need for local stories, impacting further research.
And most importantly, this collaboration brought us closer to a common goal: helping more people start vulnerable conversations, and supporting their healing journey.
We’ve since completed a feasibility study and are currently analysing the data. We’re excited to keep building on what this collaboration made possible, and to keep showing what happens when lived experience and evidence-based care meet.
Read the full open access article here: Using a theory of change to integrate digitalised lived experiences into the Youth Friendship Bench as an adjunctive intervention for treating common mental disorders among young people in Zimbabwe | Discover Psychology | Springer Nature Link
