Meet the Visionary African Creator of Friendship Benches

Imagine this heartwarming scenario. A person going through a hard time in an underserved community, can visit a designated “friendship bench.” Here, an older stranger, volunteering their life experience, wisdom and empathy, will act as a listening ear, engaging in gentle conversation when needed.

This is the accessible talk therapy idea of global mental health visionary, Professor Dixon Chibanda, a South African professor of psychiatry, and director of the African Mental Health Research Initiative. Chibanda is saluting the power of human connection in boosting mental health outside primary healthcare settings, as the News Centre of King’s College London reports.

Chibanda’s Initiative is Boosting the Mental Health of Millions
Friendship benches are the brainchild of Chabanda, with his revolutionary mental healthcare delivery model reimagining mental health care.

Chabanda sought out a community-based, accessible route to helping get underserved people out of depression, or what South Africans, in the Shona language, call kufungisisa. This translates to overthinking, as the Centre For Global Mental Health (CGMH) explains.

Chabanda is on a mission to prove that support from older locals, who are rooted in their communities, as he explains in our video, can bridge the mental health treatment access gap.

As The Guardian reported in April 2025, in the past three years, the friendship bench initiative, with the support of the World Health Organization (WHO), has helped over half a million people worldwide.

The model involves a wooden park bench being put in a public space, and the offer of compassionate help of so-called “grandmothers” and “grandfathers” to anyone passing. CGMH reveals that these community caregivers, without prior medical or mental health experience, are trained to counsel patients, typically for six structured 45-minute sessions. The training represents a basic Cognitive Behavioral Intervention with an emphasis on Problem Solving Therapy, activity scheduling, and peer-led group support.

These lay counsellors receive just two weeks of training. Yet remarkably, analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, detailed in the Guardian piece, found that Chibanda’s model led to an 80 percent reduction in depression and suicidal ideation among those helped, and a 60 percent increase in quality of life. What’s more, six months later, 80 percent of the clients who had sat down for a chat with a lay counsellor were still symptom free.

The WHO explains that these beacons of mental health provide safe places in our communities for people to chat together, as talking therapy can help people experiencing conditions like anxiety and depression.

Chiabanda tells the Guardian that he was spurred to develop the model after he grasped that the answers to the global mental health crisis, seeing huge numbers of people living with depression, loneliness, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and suicidal ideation, do not lie in more diagnoses of disorders and medications.

Instead, he shares “I came to realise that while not everyone can see a mental health professional, most people have access to a vital untapped resource: the care, compassion, empathy, and wisdom of grandmothers – the unsung heroines of the world.”

Coming to a Bench Near You!
Founded in Zimbabwe by Chibanda in 2006, where mental health receives just 0.42 percent of the total healthcare budget, and based on years of research on the delivery of mental health, as the News Centre of King’s College London details, the friendship bench model has spread to countries as diverse as the Malawi, Zanzibar, the US, Jordan, and Qatar. The UK’s Prince and Princess of Wales were even photographed on a friendship bench at the Global Mental Health Summit in London, in 2018.

More recently, the Guardian reports that Dr. Nina Lockwood, a research fellow at the Brighton and Sussex medical school and the National Institute for Health and Care Research, is introducing the friendship bench model to Sussex. As Lockwood explains: “It is interesting to see a model founded in Africa travelling west but as with many countries across the globe, dedicated investment in mental health support provision in the UK is insufficient to satisfactorily address the mental health needs of our population. We urgently need to adopt agile, alternative ways of working.”

2023 saw the release of a “Friendship Bench in A Box” digital toolkit.  This DIY toolkit collates lessons learned over years of using this community mental health model. It offers a step-by-step guide to introducing the friendship bench in a new setting, and on maintaining its success as well. It is hoped that it will act as a blueprint for training all new delivering agents, bringing one of these benches within walking distance for everyone.

Professionals have hailed the mental health outreach muscle of the friendship bench model. As Professor Melanie Amna Abas, professor of global mental health at the University of Zimbabwe and  the UK’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, tells the King’s College News Center that “The Friendship Bench has brought mental health out of the shadows, showing that people in different countries want to access mental health care , and that lay workers can learn to deliver simple yet effective non-stigmatizing evidence-based therapies which can change lives.”