The majority of COVID-19 cases in sub-Saharan Africa are found in South Africa, where one third of young people are not in employment, education or training. As the world continues to fight the COVID-19 virus spread, an increasing volume of studies are analysing and trying to predict the consequences of the pandemic on the economy and on physical and mental health. This article describes the economic and psychological impact of COVID-19 in South Africa’s youth specifically, the efforts made to tackle these issues, and the opportunities to integrate mental health into the country’s social protection measures, such as the Child Support Grant.
To improve future life chances of young people from economically deprived backgrounds, we need policies and interventions which target key mechanisms underlying the pathways between poverty and future life chances-in particular ones which consider youth mental health, which plays a key role in this relationship. Mental health is inextricably linked to both poverty and future life chances, in a vicious cycle. Poverty can lead to poorer mental health, which reduces opportunities and increases the risk of lifetime poverty. Cash transfer programmes are one of the most common strategies to reduce poverty reaching substantial proportions of populations living in low-and middle-income countries. Because of their rapid expansion in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, they have recently gained even more importance. More recently, there have been suggestions that these cash transfers might improve youth mental health, disrupting the cycle of disadvantage at a critical period of life.Here, we present a conceptual framework describing potential mechanisms by which cash transfer programmes could improve the mental health and life chances of young people. Further, we explore how theories from behavioural economics and cognitive psychology could be used to more specifically target these mechanisms and optimise the impact of cash transfers on youth mental health and life chances. Based on this, we identify several lines of enquiry and action for future research and policy.
Today's clinical psychology advocates for empirically validated treatments. This supports the need for outcome-driven research, but may overlook the importance of process-driven research, which can respond to the question of why psychological treatments work. Functional analysis of behaviour has received a new boost with the emergence of the third wave of psychological therapies, which stress the importance of verbal behaviour in therapy as a way to access and modify client problems. The case presented in this work was analysed in order to make an approach to the strengthening processes that take place in therapy through verbal interaction. First, we developed and applied a categorization system of client's adaptive verbalizations. We found that this type of verbalizations increase significantly after the first few sessions, remain high in the middle sessions, and gradually decrease towards the end of the therapy. We subsequently developed and used a system of categorization of therapist's verbal behaviour. We found that agreeable verbalizations were concentrated in the middle sessions, being replaced by other verbalizations in the final sessions.
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