Abstract
BackgroundSchool teachers are well-positioned to recognize mental health problems in their students and to help them seek appropriate help. Therefore, teachers need to have high levels of mental health literacy (MHL). In East Asia, however, few studies have examined MHL levels in teachers. In this study, MHL levels were investigated in Japanese teachers.MethodsTeachers (n = 665) from 27 Japanese high schools answered a self-administered questionnaire which assessed (a) knowledge about mental health/illnesses, (b) correct recognition of specific illnesses (depression, schizophrenia and panic disorder), (c) confidence in helping students with depressive symptoms, and (d) confidence in teaching mental health knowledge to students.ResultsThe average proportion of correct answers to the knowledge questions (n = 20) was 58.1%. The proportion of those who correctly answered about the presence of a sharp increase of mental illnesses in adolescence was 51.7%. Few teachers correctly answered about the life-time prevalences of major mental illness in general (21.9%), depression (37.8%) and schizophrenia (19.8%). Depression, schizophrenia and panic disorder in vignette were correctly recognized by 54.1, 35.3 and 78.0% of teachers, respectively. Correct recognition was significantly lower in male than in female teachers. Only a small proportion of teachers had confidence in helping depressed students (19.9%) and in teaching mental health knowledge to students (11.1%).ConclusionsMHL in Japanese high school teachers appears to be low. Education programs should be developed and implemented to improve teacher MHL with the aim of helping them to support students suffering from mental health problems.
Highlights
School teachers are well-positioned to recognize mental health problems in their students and to help them seek appropriate help
Knowledge and beliefs which aid in the recognition, management or prevention of mental health problems are defined as mental health literacy (MHL) [9]
A number of studies have observed that teacher-led MHL programs had positive impacts on MHL in adolescents [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17], and schools are thought to be the best setting for sustainably delivering MHL programs to all students [18]
Summary
School teachers are well-positioned to recognize mental health problems in their students and to help them seek appropriate help. A number of studies have examined teacher MHL in several countries and areas including Europe [19,20,21,22], the US [23,24,25] and Africa [26,27,28,29] According to these studies, the majority of teachers had limited knowledge about mental health problems [25, 26, 29] and were not confident in helping students who were suffering from those problems [24]. Recognition was very low in several areas or countries (for instance, 33% for schizophrenia in certain regions in Italy [20] and 16% for depression in Nigeria [28])
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