NUBE 2024

Teen Mental Health Literacy: One School District’s Post-Pandemic Response
Mental health challenges are becoming a significant public health issue for adolescents, and primary interventions are focused on mental health education. Because adolescents spend most of their time in school, primary mental health interventions should be prioritized in this setting. An Arizona suburban school district of 45,000 students struggles with increased social/emotional referrals and seeks solutions. A PICO question was developed to determine if mental health literacy (MHL) in adolescents would improve while decreasing stigma and improving help-seeking behaviors after a program of enhanced mental health education. Partnering with the school district’s social work department, a teen Mental Health First Aid (tMHFA) pilot program was implemented for a class of nine (n = 9) adolescent students (aged 17-18 years) old during the school day. tMHFA was delivered in three 90-minute class days. Using the Mental Health Literacy questionnaire (MHLq), a pre and post-test design revealed a significant (p value=less than 0.05) increase in the students’ MHL, help-seeking behaviors, and decreased stigma after delivery. This quality improvement project was IRB approved, and all human subjects’ rights were protected. The project showed that enhanced mental health programming, such as tMHFA, effectively educates adolescents about mental health challenges and, perhaps, could promote behavioral changes in future generations. Subsequently, after the pilot project, the school district successfully expanded the project to all junior-level students in one high school (800 students) and expanded again to 1300 students in the 2023-2024 school year. The school district has decided to implement tMHFA curriculum to all juniors in the school district for the 2024-2025 school year (4,300 students) making it the first school district in the state of Arizona to integrate tMHFA into its curriculum.
 
 
*This research/quality improvement project won the annual “Advancing Nursing Excellence Award” from the American Academy of the Colleges of Nursing in 2023 and is also currently being considered for publication.

Learning Objectives:

Discuss how a mental health professional can collaborate with a school district to improve the quality of mental health education.

Appraise teen Mental Health First Aid (National Council of Mental Wellbeing) as quality mental health education for teenagers.

Demonstrate the statistical impact of this programming on teens.