Mental Health
Mental Health and Psychosocial Support
Dear friends, allies, partners and family in Myanmar and elsewhere,
thank you for reaching out and for visiting our website. Maybe you simply chose to explore our humble website or maybe you are feeling distressed. There is never any shame in that!
Since the pandemic began in 2020, mental health related issues have been widely discussed around the world, not least due to the fact that Covid-related measures, isolations and lockdowns were a psychological burden for many people. Studies show that the number of people seeking professional support for mental health problems has increased exponentially during Covid, particularly amongst youth worldwide.
In Myanmar it’s been even more challenging: the double disasters of Covid and Coup have brought tremendous suffering to the people, with ongoing conflict throughout the country and the daily risks of being detained, monitored, or simply shot on the street due to a Facebook post. These unspeakable acts of violence have caused trauma, survivor guilt and mental distress among many in the wider population, particularly among younger people, who are faced with an uncertain future.
However, this is also a chance. Now there is, maybe for the first time, room to talk about mental health, an issue that was somewhat of a taboo topic in Myanmar. Every crisis has a silver lining, and greater mental health awareness among the wider population may be one of the very few positives coming out of these difficult times.
The good news is: You are not alone! Many friends and allies in Myanmar reach out to us, share their grievances and problems, which can be manifold. Examples include:
- Fear of being detained for no reason
- Lack of sleep
- Violent abuse, torture
- Fear of having to hide or not being able to live freely
- Not being able to see friends and loved ones as usual
- Survivor guilt
- Exile, escape and loneliness
- Guilt of ‘not doing enough for the cause’
- Covid-related stress
- Unemployment, study problems or worries about the future
- Sexual violence
- Homophobia and discrimination
- Religious, ethnical, or gender-related persecution
These are just some reasons why people are reaching out to us. However, our team is small and does not include any professional psychologists – so far. Since we strictly follow the “Do No Harm” code, we are unable to offer professional help ourselves. But we don’t need to!
There is a growing number of fantastic CSOs, support groups, telephone support lines, community groups, INGOs and individuals who are specialised in mental health and are providing support to the people of Myanmar. Here on our website, we will try to list all the resources we know of. You will find some absolutely invaluable resources – for free, and in Burmese, Jingpho, Karen and other languages! Please take your time and check out these websites.
Feel free to ask us any questions or send us further resources about mental health that we may have overseen. We’re always happy to hear from you!
Mental Health Counselling
| Name | Details | Language | Link and contact |
| Serenity |
Highly recommended and with people working in Myanmar and Thailand. They offer various mental health services for low fees and also offer training. They stand out in contrast to others since all their professionals have higher degrees and advanced degrees in psychology and counselling. They have a mental health podcast on Spotify free group sessions, and on-on-one services. “We have Lay counselor training (can apply scholarship) Free services Suicidal Prevention Training and weekly sharing circle) Friday Night emotional support session & Let’s Get Relax podcast” |
English and languages from Myanmar |
facebook.com/serenitymentalhealthservice +95 9776884275 |
| Aung Clinic Mental Health Initiative | “Aung Clinic provides support to people of all ages with mild to severe mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, stress, trauma, PTSD, psychosis, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. We also support people with intellectual disabilities with behavioral problems, and those struggling with alcohol and drug abuse/ misuse. Our General Practitioner also provides general medical care.” | English and Burmese |
Call The Office |
| Counselling Corner Myanmar | “ You will need to take the first step and make an appointment for an intake session and your counsellor will then discuss a plan with you to work on in the following weeks. Usually, we recommend one session a week (50 minutes) and aim to achieve a positive results within 10 sessions. These sessions are yours and at any time you can decide to stop, take a break or even request for another counsellor; it’s your time and your effort that will lead to success.Counselling Corner also offers couple, family and group therapy.” Fees are charged depending on the country of services provided (if it’s online then the location of the client is considered the country of service provided). Counselling Corner offers discounts on a sliding scale for individuals and organisations who may be in need of financial assistance.” | Burmese and English |
https://www.facebook.com/counsellingcornermyanmar admin@counsellingcornermyanmar.com https://counsellingcornermyanmar.com/ |
| Exile Hub | GsM’s contact working for an NGO delivering mental health services reports: “Exile Hub is also one of the organization providing mental health support in Mae Sot, Chiang Mai, and Bangkok.” According to its website, EH has, among other things, “Provided 84 Individual Counseling Sessions to 17 Exile Hub Fellows” and “ Exile Hub was formed in the aftermath of the 2021 coup in Myanmar to support human rights defenders and media professionals facing immediate threats from the junta for their essential work. Since then, we have been a dedicated and reliable support system for media professionals and human rights defenders to safely carry on their professions.” | Burmese, English | https://www.exilehub.org/about-us https://eutrp.eu/entities/entities-79/ |
| Joy House Mae Sot | A Community Centre supported by one of our members. Trauma Healing through arts, dance, music, creative writing… “Cross-cultural exchange and understanding between Thai and Myanmar children and youth.” | Burmese | https://www.facebook.com/joyhousecenter/ |
| Jue Jue’s Safe Space | Mental Health Service which people in Myanmar and Thailand use for group counselling and other services. | Burmese | https://www.facebook.com/JueJuesSafeSpace?mibextid=ZbWKwL |
| Metanoia | “Metanoia is a Mental Health Services & Resource Center existed in Yangon, Myanmar. Metanoia offers a variety of services including psychiatric services, psychotherapy, counseling, skills training and employee assistance programs among others.” | Burmese, English | https://metanoiamhsrc.com/index.html metanoiamhsrc@gmail.com |
| MHPSSWORKING GROUPMYANMAR | MHPSS Working Group (MHPSS WG) is open to UN agencies, INGOs, Local NGOs, academic, and interested groups or individuals active in the Psychosocial and Mental Health domains in Myanmar. This includes but not limited to the Myanmar Psychological Association (MPA), Myanmar Mental Health Society (MMHS), Mental Health and Substance Use Unit, Psychology Department of the Yangon University, and the Psychiatric and Mental Health Hospitals and Care Centers, as well as stakeholders and service providers working on (or planning to work on) Mental Health and Psychosocial issues. You will find referral lists for different states in Myanmar. | English and Burmese | https://www.mhpssmyanmar.org/ Referral lists: https://www.mhpssmyanmar.org/referral-mhpss Resources in English and Burmese: https://www.mhpssmyanmar.org/resources Basic psychosocial support skills: https://app.mhpss.net/ & https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/ |
| Mind Myanmar | Supposedly also provides mental health counselling | Burmese | https://www.facebook.com/mindmyanmarproject/ |
| Samaritans International in Thailand | Free, emergency counselling by Samaritans in Thailand. “The Samaritans are a world wide organization that offer a 24-hour crisis hotline staffed by trained volunteers. In Thailand, you can call the Samaritans English language service 24 hours a day, 7 hours a week on (02) 713–6791. But THIS IS A CALLBACK SERVICE. You get a call back from them within 24 hours. There’s also a Thai language service on (02) 713–6793 that is LIVE from 12 noon to 10PM. The Samaritans are anonymous, which means you don’t even have to give your real name. 3 Emergency Tips Call the Samaritans. See a counselor this week. If your crisis is life threatening, go to an international hospital. Ask to see the psychiatrist on duty. ” | Thai & English | https://www.samaritansthai.com/ or https://www.expatden.com/ anyone who feels depressed, lonely or suicidal can call the following service numbers: The Samaritans of Thailand Bangkok Tel. (02) 713 6793 (Thai) 12:00 noon to 22:00 hours/day, 7 days a week Tel. (02) 713-6791 (English call back service within 24 hours) 24 hours/day, 7 days/weekChiang Mai Tel. (053) 225-977/8 (Thai) 19:00 - 22:00 hrs (Mon, Tues, Thurs, Sat)Department of Mental Health Hotline Tel. 1323 (Thai) |
Mental Health Resources, Self-help and Training Opportunities
| Name | Details | Language | Link |
| စိတ်လွင်ပြင် Podcast | “ The Sait Lwin Pyin (‘Mindfield’) podcast series of Lu Nge Khit News Agency aim to provide a form of therapy for Burmese youth – including women, minorities and LGBTQ+ that are mentally affected by the post-coup situation, to raise awareness of mental health issues and coping strategies in the form of a sharing of perspectives from one victim to another and to help online youth across the country share their feelings and feel heard and supported. Episodes are published weekly on the Lu Nge Khit Facebook Page, Han Htue Lwin official Facebook Page, Lu Nge Khit Spotify, and Lu Nge Khit YouTube.” အခုလို စစ်အာဏာရှင်လက်အောက်မှာ၊ စစ်အာဏာရှင်ရဲ့ စီမံခန့်ခွဲမှု တလွဲတွေကြားမှာ နေထိုင်အသက်ရှင်ကြရတဲ့အခါ နေ့စဉ်နဲ့အမျှ အခက်အခဲ အကျပ်အတည်းတွေ ပုံစံအမျိုးမျိုးနဲ့ ရင်ဆိုင် ဖြတ်သန်းနေကြရတာပါ။ ဒီလို အခြေအနေမျိုးမှာ ကိုယ့်ရဲ့ စိတ်ခံစားချက်တွေဟာလည်း ထွက်ပေါက်မဲ့နေမှာပဲနော်။ ဒါကြောင့် အကြောင်းအမျိုးမျိုးကြောင့် မျိုသိပ်ထားရတဲ့ စိတ်ခံစားချက်တွေကို ကိုယ်ယုံကြည်ရတဲ့ တစ်ယောက်ယောက်က နားထောင်ပေးမယ်၊ အဲ့ဒီသူက ကိုကျားဖြစ်မယ်ဆိုရင် ကိုကျားဆီ ရင်ဖွင့်ကြမယ် မဟုတ်လား ... စိတ်လွင်ပြင် ရင်ဖွင့်ကြမယ် အစီအစဉ် | Burmese | Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/ Example, season 3 on Facebook: https://fb.watch/s2SGmnuC3W/ |
| American Red Cross: Psychological First Aid course | It’s a free course to become more resilient. Originally developed during the pandemic, it is still useful. “Psychological First Aid: Supporting Yourself and Others During COVID-19 Online course during the pandemic. The course content is based on guidance from the American Red Cross Scientific Advisory Council, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). This online course is designed for anyone interested in learning techniques for supporting mental health during the COVID-19 crisis.” | English | Psychological first aid: https://www.redcross.org/ |
| Balance App | A (currently) free, personalised meditation app. “Enhance your mental health, reduce anxiety and stress, improve your sleep, and increase your focus with the Balance Meditation and Sleep app, now free for your entire first year. Balance is a personalized program, like having a personal meditation coach in your pocket.” | English | https://balanceapp.com/meditation-library https://play.google.com/ https://apps.apple.com/ |
| Disaster Ready | They offer a free online course and other help. “FREE ONLINE LEARNING Principles of Psychological First Aid Recommended for first responders and service providers who may interact with people affected by a crisis, this online course covers supportive listening, normal stress responses, positive coping mechanisms and the importance of linking people to support. | English | Free psychological first aid course: https://www.disasterready.org/ |
| Handbooks in Burmese | Various written resources | Burmese | https://app.mhpss.net/?get=148/pfa_burmese.pdf |
| Judith Beyer. Mental Health Resources for Myanmar | Judith Beyer has kindly collected resources, often as PDFs in several languages. | Kachin (Jingpo) and English | https://judithbeyer.com/ |
| Podcast: The Happiness Lab Podcast | Another favourite of ours. All the newest insights into mental health strategies squeezed into one Podcast. If it’s too long for you, skip to the endings: they usually end with giving practical advice on how to implement the mental health advice. “A winner of numerous awards both for her science and teaching, she was recently voted as one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” young minds, and was named in Time Magazine as a “Leading Campus Celebrity.” Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, is a top 10 Apple Podcast and has had over 20 million downloads. Sign up for updates on new well-being content for your school: https://www.drlauriesantos.com “ | English | https://www.youtube.com/@DrLaurieSantos/podcasts https://open.spotify.com/ |
| Opening Minds – Mental Health Commission of Canada | Many free mental health resources on their websites like articles, advice, trainings. “Opening Minds is a not-for-profit social enterprise that provides training and the tools to talk about mental health, change negative attitudes, and reduce stigma related to mental illness.” | English | https://openingminds.org/about/ https://openingminds.org/resources/ |
| Transcultural Mental Health Centre | Various booklets and guidelines in Burmese language directly to download. | Burmese | https://www.dhi.health.nsw.gov.au/ |
| “50 Ways to Take a break” | One of our favourite Swiss-knife resources. Print, put it on your wall, take a break! | English | https://www.chrhealth.org/ |