Spring has sprung in California’s Pomona Valley. Along with the field greens and new herbs CBT, too, is sprouting from the grass roots. Vigorously sprouting! Our low-intensity CBT project with Latinx immigrant women in the Valley took two big steps forward in the last weeks.
Low-intensity CBT is a global movement aimed at increasing access to mental health care by means of training laypeople to deliver quality care for pennies on the dollar that such care usually costs.
In January we launched the first-ever LICBT training program in the United States. A partnership between Uncommon Good and All Things CBT, the program is providing 40 hours of online training to 20 Latinx immigrant women. In the first 20 hours, our future community mental health workers, or promotoras, learned evidence-based cognitive and behavioral tools to address anxiety and depression. In the second 20 hours they’re learning to deliver CBT to others in their communities.
At the start of the program we measured our promotoras mood using the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale, a common measure of emotional wellness. This week we again administered the Warwick and found massive improvement in mood at a very high level of statistical significance (p = .005). In other words our promotoras went from feeling “very poorly” to feeling “very well” in the course of 10 weeks training.
In other good news, our project was recently awarded it’s first grant. This success makes it more likely other foundations will follow suit and we’re already well along in the work-intensive process of applying for a second grant. Finally, our project team itself is growing; it now includes eight paid and volunteer members.
Adelante!
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