Abstract
Although the need for early intervention for mental health difficulties is widely acknowledged, few studies have attempted to explicitly increase actual help seeking behavior for mental health difficulties. Students in intervention classrooms received two one-hour, in-class workshops on distress and help seeking and were compared to students in non-intervention classrooms in a 2-level hierarchical model. More frequent help seeking behavior and more mental health referrals were observed among students in the intervention group than among students in the comparison group. Effects were moderated by the level of distress experienced by students, but not by help seeking attitudes, and could not be accounted for by school staff referrals or website utilization. Results showed that help seeking behavior for mental health difficulties and mental health referrals can be increased with only a moderate investment in time, but that benefits of school-based intervention may be greatest among students with specific needs, such as high levels of distress.
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Notes
Supplementary analyses, not reported here, also showed that relative to the number of visits in the two years prior to the introduction of the program, visits to teen health centers increased four fold even though teen health center hours were only increased two fold.
We also examined the impact of modeling covariance among participants at different levels, namely at the classroom, grade and school level. Exploratory analyses revealed a greater degree of covariance among measures and a better degree of fit when modeled at the classroom level than at other level. Therefore, we modeled covariance among students within classrooms, rather than among schools as did Aseltine and DeMartino (2004).
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported through a Strategic Themes Grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to D. A. Santor, Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, B3H 4J1. Email can be sent to dsantor@dal.ca.
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Santor, D.A., Poulin, C., LeBlanc, J.C. et al. Facilitating Help Seeking Behavior and Referrals for Mental Health Difficulties in School Aged Boys and Girls: A School-Based Intervention. J Youth Adolescence 36, 741–752 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-006-9092-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-006-9092-z