Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Programmes in Yemen: Measuring the Difference They Make to People’s Lives

Since 2018, UNFPA continues to provide specialized clinical mental health care services in addition to the already existing community-based and nonspecialized mental health services being provided as part of UNFPA’s overall women’s protection programme in Yemen.

To understand the impact of these specialized services, in 2021, UNFPA introduced technical evaluation tools (psychometric tools, psychological scales and indexes) to measure change in terms of general well-being and severity of psychiatric symptoms in people referred and treated at UNFPA-supported specialized mental health facilities.

Three globally validated and culturally standardized psychometric tools have been identified to collect baselines and follow up on general well-being and core psychiatric symptoms. These include: WHO Well-Being Index (WHO-5), for general well-being, the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ9), for depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), for anxiety.

From January to March 2021, 176 female survivors of violence, corresponding to the pilot criteria were screened with the identified psychometric tools. Following intervals of four and 12 psychotherapy sessions (either in person or through tele-system), the women will retake the tests to see significant change in performance/score against general well-being, depression and anxiety indexes. This will allow to answer whether access for survivors of specialized mental health services in Yemen significantly improve over time in terms of general well-being, severity of depression and generalized anxiety symptoms; and whether survivors that comply with a recommended specialized mental health treatment plan score significantly better compared to those survivors that drop-out of the full course of services.

In the long-term, this process will build a stronger evidence-based and thereby help to strengthen UNFPA’s mental health and psychosocial support programme in Yemen.