Centre for Mental Health & Counselling-Nepal (CMC-Nepal)

CMC-Nepal works closely with the government and non-government agencies, at national, provincial and local level to improve access to mental health and psychosocial services. In doing so, CMC-Nepal enhances the capacity of health professionals, teachers and development workers and creates awareness through improved public understanding of mental health and psychosocial disabilities. CMC-Nepal has increased its efforts to protect, respect and fulfill the basic human rights of people with psychosocial disabilities through closely working with people with psychosocial disabilities, their families, community people and duty bearers. It also works to create safer and more protective environments at school and home for the psychosocial wellbeing of school-going children and adolescents.

From its inception, CMC-Nepal has been extensively working to develop human resources in mental health and psychosocial counselling services. Furthermore, CMC-Nepal has also worked with people affected by armed conflict, disasters (earthquake, flood, landslide, and storm), migrant workers, brick kiln workers, Verified Minors Late Recruited (VMLR) and bonded labors. It has also contributed to empowerment of the poor and marginalized through discussions with government officials and elected representatives on the needs of mental health and psychosocial services in government programs. in development projects and addressing the mental health and psychosocial needs in all tiers of government. It has not only worked with government agencies for enhancing these services but also with international non-government organizations in addressing psychosocial disabilities, especially focused on children, women, people with HIV/AIDS, survivors of gender-based violence and persons with psychosocial disability as part of our intervention.

CMC-Nepal has developed, tested and scaled-up an effective innovation called the Community Mental Health Program to address the mental health and psychosocial needs at community level. In 17 years, CMC-Nepal has trained over 1000 government health professionals, including over 200 medical officers in mental health in order to develop access to mental health services. Over 50,000 people have received mental health services and over 5300 people received psychosocial counselling service from government health facilities. Furthermore, the Government of Nepal has been accepting and implementing the best practices developed by CMC-Nepal. Furthermore, CMC-Nepal developed and implemented a School Mental Health Program to address the emotional and behavioral problems and learning difficulties of the school children. Over 1,700 teachers have been trained in a ‘Classroom based Psychosocial Intervention’ and 470 teachers in ‘School Counselling’. Altogether, 41,000 children from 202 schools  benefitted from the classroom based psychosocial intervention and 4,300 received the individual cCounselling by the trained psychosocial focal teachers in 17 years period.

CMC-Nepal has rich experience in providing psychosocial counselling support to migrant workers and their families as it has been directly involved in providing such services since November 2013. A training curriculum for six months of psychosocial counselling has been developed, tested and widely used by professional teams. This training course is extensively based on supervised practicum on live cases situation in-between the theory sessions. CMC-Nepal has been also addressing psychosocial needs of gender-based violence survivors, conflict-affected populations and COVID-19 affected people and families.