Psychological interventions implementation manual (in eng)

Description

In all countries, mental health conditions are highly prevalent and cause immense suffering.Most people who experience mental health conditions, including common conditionssuch as depression and anxiety, cannot access effective care and go untreated. To reduce the vast care gap and progress towards universal health coverage, health and social care planners and practitioners increasingly deploy evidence-based psychological interventions to scale up options for care. The emphasis here is not conventional psychotherapy delivered by specialists but rather manualized psychological interventions that can be delivered by trained and supervisednon-specialists and are more likely to be scalable.

The number of psychological intervention manuals that are proven to work in low-, middle and high-income settings has grown rapidly in the last two decades. A next step is to increase their actual availability, reach and impact so that more people can benefit from them. Psychological intervention manuals give instructions on how to deliver the intervention but do not typically include guidance on how to design and deliver services that offer psychological interventions. This implementation manual aims to fill that gap. It offers planners and service managers practical guidance on how to make available and implement psychological interventions by integrating them within existing health, social, protection or education services.