NCJ Number
219311
Journal
Journal of Youth and Adolescence Volume: 36 Issue: 6 Dated: August 2007 Pages: 741-752
Date Published
August 2007
Length
12 pages
Annotation
The purpose of this study was to design and implement a school-based help seeking program for mental health difficulties in school aged children and to evaluate that program by tracking actual visits to the school-based health center.
Abstract
Results of the study showed that with a modest investment of time, help seeking for mental health difficulties could be increased substantially and the number of individuals who were referred for mental health services could be increased. The results indicate that help seeking behavior could be facilitated with a modest investment of resources and that the intervention increases the identification of the number of individuals with difficulties that warrant referral for treatment. An added finding was the consistency with previous studies showing that help seeking was greater in girls than in boys. Although the need for early intervention for mental health difficulties was widely acknowledged, few studies had attempted to explicitly increase actual help seeking behavior for mental health difficulties. In this study, students in intervention classrooms received two, 1 hour, in class workshops on distress and help seeking and were compared to students in non-intervention classrooms in a two-level hierarchical model. Tables, references