MSF Offers Mental Health Services in Mozambique Crisis

In addition to being the poorest province in one of the poorest countries in the world, Mozambique's Cabo Delgado has been ravaged by conflict since 2017. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and are in dire need of humanitarian assistance.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been working in Cabo Delgado since 2019 and, their teams are providing mental health support and health promotion activities for the displaced people and the communities that host them. Community health workers go from door to door to explain who MSF is, what they are doing and the type of care they can provide. The teams talk through the signs and symptoms of conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and other common mental health problems.

As mental health is something that isn't often discussed in these communities, many of the people MSF teams speak to ask for headache tablets and medications for other ailments, not realising that they are experiencing the physical manifestations of the trauma they have been through.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international humanitarian non-governmental organisation that brings medical humanitarian assistance to victims of conflict, natural disasters, epidemics or healthcare exclusion.