Women's reproductive health and depression: a community survey in the Gambia, West Africa.

Background: Depression is the commonest mental illness in developing countries and impoverished women are most at risk. Formal mental health services in these situations are rare. Depression commonly co-presents with physical symptoms or else is unspectacular, so the condition often goes unrecognised.

The impact of the quality of family planning services on safe and effective contraceptive use: a systematic literature review.

The aim of this review is to identify the features of family planning service provision that are influential in ensuring safe and appropriate contraceptive use and optimal effectiveness of user-dependent methods. A systematic search was carried out of the published and unpublished studies available up to December 1997 that examined the relationship between family planning service provision and contraceptive use. Articles that reported primary data on long-term outcomes were scored by at least two of the authors of the present study.

'Before we were sleeping, now we are awake': Preliminary evaluation of the Stepping Stones sexual health programme in The Gambia.

Community-based behavioural interventions aimed at reducing risky sexual behaviour have yet to be shown to be effective in the developing world. Stepping Stones is a participatory STI/HIV prevention workshop programme based on empowerment techniques, which has been adapted to an infertility prevention framework for The Gambia. This paper describes a preliminary evaluation in two villages where the intervention was carried out compared to two control villages.