UNDP and partners enhance national capacity mental health and psychosocial support
Within the project “Building a national capacity on providing community-based Mental health and psycho-social support to vulnerable youth and women as preventive measures” funded by the UNDP-DPPA Joint Programme on Building National Capacities for Conflict Prevention, a five-day training for trainers on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) was conducted in Ashgabat on November 6-10, 2023.
The training, led by international UNDP expert Mr. Vitaliy Klymchuk, focused on equipping local representatives of helping professions with the skills and knowledge to deliver psychosocial support to vulnerable youth and women in their communities as a preventive measure. The event gathered frontline service providers like social workers, police officers, teachers, representatives of civil society organizations, women leaders, and youth leaders.
Participants gained the skills and knowledge they need to promote mental health and implement evidence-based scalable mental health and psychosocial interventions in their communities. In addition to important topics on mental health, such as mental health conditions, depression and anxiety disorder in youth and women, participants also mastered skills in delivering mental health and psychosocial support to prevent conflicts and strengthen social cohesion, tailoring mental health interventions, and organizing and delivering mental health promotion activities in local communities to raise awareness on importance of mental health.
“Acknowledging the psychological and social well-being of communities is fundamental to establishing enduring peace, as outlined in the UNDP Guide to Integrating Mental Health and Psychosocial Support into Peacebuilding,” – said Akmyrat Danatarov, UNDP Programme Analyst for Governance, Economic Diversification, and Inclusive Growth. “With growing recognition of mental health's significance in preventive measures, there has emerged a pressing need to develop a tailored training programme on mental health and psychosocial support for members of the helping professions. This programme will build their capacity to provide essential mental health and psychosocial support services and incorporate this work into the broader and long-term framework of youth empowerment and social cohesion.
The Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) initiative in Turkmenistan aims to build capacities of national partners on integrating MHPSS to conflict prevention initiatives and improve social cohesion via interventions at multiple levels through multi-sector collaboration.
ORIENT news
