The Mind Your Mate Study: A randomised controlled trial of an online peer intervention to prevent mental health and substance use problems in adolescents

Mind your Mate is a school-based intervention aimed at preventing mental health and substance use problems in adolescents. Participating secondary schools will be randomly allocated to one of two groups. One group will serve as the control group and receive their usual Year 9 health education and the other group with receive the Mind your Mate intervention. Schools allocated to the Mind your Mate intervention will introduce the intervention program in Term 3 or Term 4, 2020. The Mind Your Mate intervention will include one introductory classroom lesson, led by a teacher but delivered online, plus a downloadable mobile application (app). Teachers are not required to attend training to provide the lesson. This lesson provides teachers with evidence-based teaching material which requires minimal to no preparation, and curriculum-consistent content which maps onto the Australian Curriculum focus areas of alcohol and other drugs and mental health and wellbeing. The lesson will take approximately 30 minutes. The teacher will instruct students to watch a short introductory video through the study website. The introductory video is designed specifically for this study by CI Birrell and will be housed on the study website. This video will cover common mental health problems and introduce the concept of supporting peers and encouraging help-seeking. This may be viewed individually by students on their computers or shown to the class as a whole. The video will be followed by brief student activities such as, group discussions, quizzes and individual worksheets. All materials will be accessible on the study website. Students in the intervention condition will then be required to download the app onto their mobile device and use it over the following 12-month period. As the classroom lesson and app cover key educational content that maps onto existing NSW Personal Development Health and Physical Education Curriculum for Year 9 students, all students in participating schools that are randomised to the intervention group will receive the classroom lesson and be given the opportunity to voluntarily download the app if they choose to do so. This is to reduce the burden on teachers who would be required to teach additional PDHPE content to cover the material that would be withheld if students without research consent are not able to participate in the lesson or given the opportunity to download the app. The Mind your Mate app is a smartphone application ‘app’ grounded in and fostering the principal of peer support. The program facilitates discussions between friends and provides communication tools to engage in conversations about mental health and substance use so that young people can better support their friends and encourage them to seek professional support where appropriate for mental health and substance use issues. Participating students are expected to interact with the app through self-directed learning in online modules within the smartphone application, participation in suggested activities, and self-care tasks over a 12-month period. The online modules include; Mental Health, Stressful Times, Alcohol and Drugs, Listen Up, Keeping Friends Safe, Tricky Conversations, Checking In, What’s Next, Support Options and Looking After Yourself. The modules include information, videos and examples. Some suggested activities include scheduling future conversations with friends, sending messages to friends using templates, engaging in quizzes in the app, and entering their mood into a mood rating calendar. Self-care tasks are suggested such as drawing or painting, playing an instrument, and playing sport. Participants can add their own self-care activities. Participant engagement and adherence to the app will be monitored using app analytics, specifically, general tracking, time and date the app is accessed, length of time the app is accessed for, time spent on page, module start and complete dates, the number of conversations scheduled, the number of friends registered, and the number of activities accessed. A number of engagement strategies will be employed to encourage adherence to the app including push notifications, the ability to create avatars and personalise the app, the use videos, personal case studies and interactive elements to enhance engagement with the app. Participating students in the intervention condition will be asked to reflect upon their use of the Mind your Mate mobile app and to provide feedback at the 6- and 12-month follow-up occasions to assist with engagement assessment. The student surveys will take no longer than 30 minutes total to complete at each time point. In order to control for the effects of any additional wellbeing programs schools may implement over the course of the study, one teacher at each participating school will be asked to provide very brief details on any extra mental health or alcohol or drug programs delivered to the study cohort at school at the 12-month follow-up. Teachers will be given the option to complete this over the phone or via email to minimise burden. It is anticipated to take no longer than 5-10 minutes to complete.