National strategies to manage COVID-19, including lockdown, have caused significant disruption to student learning and to the ways that students engage with staff and peers. The transition to online learning, alongside common anxieties associated with the disease itself, was likely to have affected student mental health. This study explored psychology student mental health experiences during Lockdown Phase 3 at the University of the Witwatersrand. A convenience sample of 160 first- and second-year psychology students completed a questionnaire consisting of the General Mental Health Scale, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the Burnout Measure, the Brief Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced, the Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale, and the Generalised Self Efficacy Scale. In addition, six open-ended questions asking students about their experiences and support during this time were included. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse quantitative data, whereas content and thematic analysis was used for the open-ended responses. Results indicated that students’ scores were not elevated on the mental health scales. However, the thematic analysis of responses revealed significant concerns with regard to psychological wellbeing, online learning, and home dynamics. These are discussed with a view to providing recommendations for supporting students in circumstances that may require emergency remote teaching.

The New Beginnings program was developed at the Anna Freud Centre and originally piloted in Her Majesty Prisons in the United Kingdom. This study aimed to explore the use of this manualized parent-infant psychotherapy group model in an African setting with high-risk mother-infant dyads, and describes the implementation and investigation of this 12-week group psychotherapy intervention in two Johannesburg shelters for homeless women. The measures used to investigate treatment efficacy were the Parent Development Interview (A. Slade, J.L. Aber, I. Bresgi, B. Berger, & M. Kaplan,), the Emotional Availability Scales (Z. Biringen, J.L. Robinson, & R.N. Emde,), the Kessler-10 (R.C. Kessler et al.,), and the Griffiths Scales of Mental Development (D. Luiz et al., . At pretesting, infants exhibited delays in a number of developmental areas, and mothers showed high levels of depression and generally low capacities for reflective function. While significant shifts in the mothers' capacities for reflective function were not found in the treatment condition, significant shifts were found in the infants' speech abilities and in the mothers' abilities to structure their interactions with their infants. This suggests that the program enabled mothers to become more sensitized to their infants' needs in interaction and that communication between mother and infant increased. The number of sessions attended by the dyads correlated with improvements made by the mothers and their infants.

Recent scholarly insights show that nonverbal and subtle forms of sensitive responsiveness are more applicable to describing and assessing non-Western parent-infant interactions than the more extraverted Western varieties of responsiveness. This paper examines whether the original Ainsworth scale (that does not specify particular manifestations of sensitivity) reveals different patterns of results in 50 South African mothers when compared to the Maternal Behavior Q-sort mini that assesses a more specified array of behaviors that may vary in their goodness of fit regarding the cultural context. The analysis reveals that there are key differences in the way the two measures operationalize maternal sensitivity, as seen in the incongruence of sensitivity ratings. The two measures are also shown to relate differently to maternal education and reflective functioning in this sample. The paper concludes that the Ainsworth sensitivity scale is better suited for use in the context of Alexandra Township, Johannesburg.

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This article is part of a project investigating the interfacing of clinically and research-generated knowledge in the field of infant mental health (IMH) with local cultural models of child care and development. The article explores the experiences and challenges reported by psychology-trained supervisors in supervision with local, lay, trained home visitors. Supervisors and supervisees were drawn from two early intervention programs which apply relational IMH mental health models in socioeconomically deprived townships in South Africa. Literature that considers supervisors' experiences of conducting supervision with lay counselors has been limited, and even more so in settings where there are marked cultural and contextual differences between supervisors and supervisees. These differences pose particular challenges regarding the finding of a shared theoretical understanding of the work as well as to the establishment of a secure working alliance. While it was found that psychoanalytic and attachment-informed theories of infant development are applicable in these South African settings, differences in race, language, education, socioeconomic status, and culture between supervisors and supervisees challenge the supervisor-supervisee relationship and require psychological processing and creative solutions to ensure integrity in the application of the model.