Building a New Channel for Delivering Alternative Mental Health Care Treatments to Filipino Children with Mood Disorders

The project tests the creation of a social enterprise that will enable the delivery of alternative mental health treatment to children in the Philippines with mood disorders. This enterprise, ultimately national in scope, will hire and train para-professional staff, and provide treatment on a sliding scale of payments in which poorer clients would pay very little for their care. As a first step, in a trial to be carried out by a team at the Bulatao Center for Psychology Services at Ateneo de Manila University, led by Dr. Mira Ofreneo, we will test the efficacy of para-professionals in delivering the primary proposed modality of care, mindfulness-based therapy. The project will focus initially on children whose backgrounds present severe challenges to their mental health, for example children in chronic poverty or difficult circumstances, or children who have experienced trauma, abuse and other forms of crisis.