Abstract
Essential public-sector workers in low- and middle-income countries (teachers, health workers, police officers) operate under chronic stress, exposure to community violence, and institutional neglect of their mental health. Burnout, anxiety, and untreated trauma are pervasive among these frontline workers, yet rigorous evidence on scalable interventions to support their wellbeing remains nearly nonexistent. This gap matters not only to the workers themselves, but also to the quality of public services they deliver. We provide experimental evidence on whether socio-emotional resilience training can improve the mental health and professional effectiveness of essential workers, focusing on public school teachers in Guatemala. We evaluate SanaMente, a trauma-informed training program that builds skills in stress recognition, emotional regulation, and supportive workplace practices, using a school-level cluster-randomized trial across 120 schools targeting 600 teachers in three municipalities in Guatemala.