The Friendship Bench
by Dixon Chibanda, MDSetting: Zimbabwe
Genres: Biography & Autobiography / Social Scientists & Psychologists, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African Studies
Published on April 22, 2025
Pages: 208
Format: Paperback Source: Library
A simple, human solution for loneliness and depression
When Dr. Dixon Chibanda lost a patient to suicide, he began a soul-searching journey that eventually led to a mental healthcare revolution. As one of only six psychiatrists in all of Zimbabwe, a country traumatized by decades of conflict, Chibanda quickly realized that millions there were suffering from mental illness with no hope of receiving care. He saw that the only way to narrow this care gap was to leverage existing resources in the community, and one such resource was the compassion and understanding of grandmothers. With fourteen of these wise elders as partners, Chibanda pioneered the Friendship Bench program, a community-driven initiative addressing loneliness, depression, substance abuse, and suicide by fostering intergenerational connectedness. Since then, more than 500,000 people worldwide have sat on a park bench to share their personal stories with an empathetic grandmother.
A primer on how human connection forms the bedrock of our resilience, The Friendship Bench gives readers the tools to facilitate transformative healing by reaching out to those who are struggling and isolated from the world around them. It’s a case study of how interventions supported by robust scientific evidence can be made accessible for all. Ultimately, it’s a celebration of the collective wisdom and knowledge of those rooted in their communities and their profound ability to foster belonging, purpose, and healing.
Dr. Chibanda was devastated when a patient who he thought was doing well killed herself. When he talked to her mother afterwards he found out that they didn’t seek care in the week immediately proceeding her death because they didn’t have the bus fare to come see him. His clinic was several hours from their house. He was the closest mental health professional.
Her death led to him finding a way to leverage the wisdom of older women to help be a sort of triage system in their neighborhoods. These women can listen with empathy to people’s stories. They can help focus people to be able to find the most important problem that needs to be fixed first. They can be an information source to point people to support groups and other community resources that they may not have known existed.
“As the global population, especially of elderly people increases, I believe that our world’s grandmothers constitute one of our most vital resources. They hold vast wisdom and light, but these can remain sorely underutilized and even unacknowledged in the rush toward progress and in the mechanization of the world. What are at risk of loss are our Indigenous and cultural traditions that center love, care, and the wisdom of our elders.”
Over time, the people who were helped by the grandmothers started to form their own support groups. These groups also branched out into raising money for the members to help in emergencies for anyone in the group.
The Friendship Bench now operates in many countries. There are resources online to teach people how to set up a program for free in their own community.
This is a short book that talks about the story behind the group. It covers Dr. Chibanda’s personal issues with realizing that he needed to let go of his need to see everyone’s issues as distinct diseases and embrace the wisdom of the women. He also discusses his internalized racism and imposter syndrome in trying to teach a very African system of dealing with mental illness to the rest of the world.
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“On a warm August morning in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two named Farai walked up to a park bench where an eighty-two-year-old woman known to the community as Grandmother Jack sat.”
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“…I’d always been trained to keep interaction with patients clean and simple — just the facts, ma’am.
‘It’s also about the power of the human voice. You need to understand how to use it as a tool, ‘ said Grandmother Jack. ‘The voice can be medicine.'”
