Effects of Mental Health Paraprofessional Training for Filipina Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore

Negotiating Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Performing Migrant Domestic Work in Contentious Conditions

“…A report by a local NGO in 2015 shared that 24% of domestic workers suffer poor mental health (Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics, 2015), indicating mental health as a health disparity faced by MDWs in Singapore. Wong et al's (2020) experimental study on a mental health training program with Filipina domestic workers in Singapore revealed improvements with mental health when culturally specific mental health interventions addressing workplace inhabited the disparities. While Wong et al's (2020) study remains a critical intervention for migrant workers, they remain marginal in terms of reach as MDWs continue to remain intentionally erased from mainstream health resources and interventions.…”

Peer Support and Mental Health of Migrant Domestic Workers: A Scoping Review

“…Two of the 12 included articles had a quantitative study design [44,45], four had a qualitative study design [46][47][48][49], and five had a mixed-methods study design [24,[50][51][52][53]. One article was a news report [54].…”

“…One article was a news report [54]. Four of the articles were conducted in Hong Kong SAR, China [45,[48][49][50]; three in Singapore [51,53,54]; two in Macao SAR, China [44,47]; another three from each of the three countries, including South Korea [52], Philippines [24], and Canada [46]. The number of participants of the included articles varied significantly from 5 [52] to 2017 [50], and the mean or median age ranged from 35.1 [24] to 42.9 years [47].…”

“…A majority of MDWs gave/received mutual aid to/from their informal social networks, particularly from their friends or fellow workers in host countries [24,46]. For example, the majority of MDWs in Singapore preferred to seek help from peers (43%) rather than from professionals (2%) when faced with emotional problems [51]. Another survey in Hong Kong also found that over half of MDWs reported daily contacts with their local friends [45].…”

“…Another type of peer support was para-professional trained peer support, which trained MDWs as peer supporters with some professional helping or counselling skills to provide peer support for other MDWs with supervision and support from healthcare professionals, such as psychologists [51,53,54]. Wong and colleagues [51,53,54] MDWs mainly sought support from peers through mutual aid for emotional support [24,45,[48][49][50]52], informational support [46,49,50,52], and instrumental support [49,50,52].…”