Phlourish Mental Health Initiative Inc. (Phlourish) is a duly registered nonprofit organization that aims to make evidence-based, cost-effective mental health interventions accessible to Filipino adolescents.
Phlourish is one of the recipients of Charity Entrepreneurship’s Mental Health Funding Circle’s Spring Grants Round.
<aside> ✅ Why work on mental health in the Philippines?
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**The problem is significant in scale**
In the Philippines, mental health disorders cause more than 2M DALYs (or healthy years of life lost) and 15M cases of compromised mental health. It is the second country with the highest number of DALYs lost to mental disorders, depressive disorders, conduct disorder and autism spectrum disorders in 5- to 24-year olds in Southeast Asia. Specifically for adolescents, the Philippines’ 2019 global school based health survey report indicates that among 13 to 15-year-old students, 24.4% had attempted suicide one or more times in the past 12 months prior to the survey. This number may be higher now due to the pandemic.
WHO’s 2021 report estimated that the burden of mental health conditions in the Philippines accounts for Php 68.9B per year (1.27B USD) or 0.4% of the country’s GDP.
**The problem remains neglected**
The Philippines ranked 93rd of 155 countries in terms of psychiatrists and 68th in terms of number of psychologists in the mental health sector.
<aside> ✅ What is our chosen intervention and why?
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Phlourish will test the viability of providing guided self-help workbooks to adolescents in the Philippines. This intervention came up as one of the four interventions identified by Effective Altruism Philippines’ Mental Health Charity Ideas Research Project as most likely to be impactful and cost-effective in improving child and adolescent mental health in low-and-middle-income countries.
In addition, a 2020 research by Charity Entrepreneurship found guided self-help to be a highly cost-effective intervention, having a cost-effectiveness of $20 per annual point increase on the SWLS scale and $1,203 estimated dollar cost per QALY for low income countries.
<aside> ✅ What has been our progress so far?
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