This brief guidance note explains community-based approaches to Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in emergencies, and the importance of viewing emergency-affected people as active participants in improving individual and collective well-being. It highlights the importance of community-based approaches for encouraging recovery and resilience, and for contributing to restoring and/or strengthening collective structures and systems essential to daily life and well-being. It gives brief guidance on how to assess, plan, implement and evaluate community-based approaches to MHPSS. It highlights ethical dilemmas and practical difficulties and presents ethical guidelines for implementation.

Community-Based Approaches to MHPSS Programmes: A Guidance Note 

The MHPSS and EiE Toolkit offers access to key documents and resources of relevance to those working in the fields of Education in Emergencies (EiE) and of Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS). 

MHPSS and EIE

MHPSS

Community-Based MHPSS

This toolkit is a compilation of a range of several practice guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) in humanitarian contexts, to enable easy access to key multi-lingual resources.

Marcio Gagliato

Emergency

Ananda Galappatti

The IASC Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework for MHPSS Programmes was released for field test in 2017. In 2021, the Common Framework was updated to include qualitative and quantitative means of verification (MoV) for impact-level indicators in the framework. MHPSS.net developed the IASC MHPSS M&E Framework MoV toolkit to accompany the framework and serve as a resource to maintain and disseminate these tools in a single, easy to use format.

IASC MHPSS M&E FRAMEWORK MOV

The Children and Families MHPSS Resource Collection offers access to a wide range of key materials that are relevant to mental health and psychosocial support work with children and families across humanitarian and development settings.

The Children and Families Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Resource Collection

This collection offers access to key guidance, manuals, tools, case studies and other resources related to the use of Community-Based approaches to Mental Health and psychosocial Support (CB-MHPSS).