Abstract
Adolescence is a critical life phase for mental health and anxiety an emerging challenge for adolescents. Psychoeducational interventions to promote mental health literacy (MHL) on anxiety in adolescents are needed. This study aimed to test the primary outcome of a future full-scale trial: improvement of adolescents’ anxiety MHL components on recognition, prevention strategies, and self-help strategies. A sample of 38 adolescents, 24 (63.2%) females and 14 (36.8%) males, with an average age of 14.50 years (SD = 0.89) participated in this study. Each class was allocated to the intervention group (IG, n = 21) or the waiting list control group (WLCG, n = 17) with single-blinded randomization. MHL was assessed using the QuALiSMental. The ProLiSMental psychoeducational intervention consists of four or eight weekly sessions of 90 or 45 min for adolescents, using different active pedagogical methods and techniques. There also are initial and final sessions with adolescents, legal guardians, and teachers. There was a significant improvement with a small to relatively strong effect size in many dimensions of anxiety MHL components. This study suggests the progression to the full-scale trial and values the important role of mental health and psychiatric nurses in the adolescents’ empowerment for MHL in schools.
Highlights
The results regarding the sociodemographic characteristics of the participants in the intervention group (IG) (n = 21) and the waiting list control group (WLCG) (n = 17)
In the WLCG after the intervention, differently from the IG, there were significant improvements in the “therapy with a specialized professional” dimension (Q = 9.556; p < 0.01; R = 0.110), with a significant association between the moments a-c and b-c (p < 0.05). This pilot study of the ProLiSMental psychoeducational intervention assessed the primary outcome of the future full-scale trial: improvement of adolescents’ knowledge, skills, and behavioral intentions in the following components of anxiety mental health literacy at a school context: (a) anxiety recognition; (b) anxiety prevention strategies; (c) anxiety self-help strategies
The results of the dimension “do not avoid stressful situations” as an emotion regulation strategy [70,71] decreased instead of increasing, throughout the three assessments, which suggest attention in the future fullscale trial. We wonder if this is due to any lack of clarification by facilitators or difficulty understanding by adolescents during the ProLiSMental psychoeducational intervention or when filling out the QuALiSMental questionnaire since this dimension appeared inverted
Summary
The COVID 19 pandemic had implications for many dimensions of population health, including the mental health of people throughout the life cycle. Several articles report the effects of the pandemic on their mental health [1,2,3,4,5,6], with approximately. 38% of children and adolescents experiencing anxiety in the studies found in the systematic review carried out by Octavius et al (2020) [5]. Some qualitative [7] and quantitative studies carried out in Portugal report this reality [8,9]. Orgilés et al (2021) [9] refer that the prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms was higher than usual and in the Portuguese sample, a prevalence of 26.5% was found, slightly higher than the prevalence (11.5%) informed by Gaspar de Matos, Barrett, Dadds, and Shortt (2003) [10]
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