Improving women's mental health during a pandemic

Vlassopoulos, Michael, Siddique, Abu, Rahman, Tabassum, Pakrashi, Debayan, Islam, Asad and Ahmed, Firoz (2023) Improving women's mental health during a pandemic. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. (In Press)

Record type: Article

Abstract

This paper evaluates a randomized over-the-phone counseling intervention aimed at mitigating the mental health impact ofCOVID-19 on a sample of 2,402 women across 357 villages in Bangladesh. We find that the provision of 2 hours of mental support plus information on COVID-19 improves mental health ten months post-intervention, leading to reductions of 20% in the prevalence of moderate and severe stress and 33% in depression.Our results suggest that this type of low-cost intervention ($14 per person) can be effective in providing rapid psychological support to vulnerable groups in times of crises.

Text

Manuscript_Telecounseling - Accepted Manuscript

Available under License Other.

Download (1MB)

More information

Accepted/In Press date: 12 July 2023

Additional Information: Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of American Economic Association publications for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation, including the name of the author. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than AEA must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. The author has the right to republish, post on servers, redistribute to lists and use any component of this work in other works. For others to do so requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from the American Economic Association Administrative Office by going to the Contact Us form and choosing "Copyright/Permissions Request" from the menu. Copyright © 2023 AEA

Related URLs: