The School-led Preventure study: preventing adolescent mental illness & substance use through personality-targeted intervention delivered by school staff.

Preventure (Conrod, 2016) is a school-based intervention designed to prevent drug and alcohol misuse. 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 8 health education and the other group will receive the Preventure intervention. Students will complete the Substance Use Risk Profile Scale (Woicik et al., 2009), a screening questionnaire previously validated in adolescents and showing good reliability and internal consistency, in Europe (Castellanos-Ryan et al., 2013), North America (Krank et al., 2011) and Australia (Newton et al., 2016). In schools allocated to the Preventure intervention, students scoring one or more standard deviations above the mean on one of four personality profiles (hopelessness, anxiety sensitivity, impulsivity and sensation seeking) as identified by the SURPS will be invited to participate in two 90-minute group workshops held at school. These workshops incorporate components of cognitive-behavioural therapy and motivational interviewing to promote coping skills in adolescents. The focus is on motivating teenagers to understand how their personality style leads to certain emotional and behavioural reactions. Four different workshops are run, each focused on developing specialised coping skills relevant to following personality styles: • Sensation seeking • Impulsivity • Anxiety sensitivity • Negative thinking. Student workbooks are provided to each participating student as part of the intervention. These workbooks were created by the Preventure developers and are only available to be used as part of the program. They are specific to each of the above personality types and contain exercises the group work through together during session time, which encourage students to recognise emotions and behaviours and better align these with their long-term goals. The workbooks also contain personal exercises students can complete during the session or at home, according to the facilitator and co-facilitator’s decision. The sessions incorporate real life example scenarios and include: i) psycho-education about the specific personality style and accompanying maladaptive coping behaviours (e.g., avoidance, aggression, alcohol use); ii) development of a personalised model of the physical, cognitive and behavioural components of standard responses; and iii) motivational enhancement, goal-setting and use of cognitive-behavioural strategies to adapt problematic reactions and behaviours. School staff delivering the intervention will receive 3 days of training by the lead CI, an approved Preventure trainer. The training will cover basic counselling skills, an understanding of the aims of the intervention, and how to implement the intervention with students. School staff will be supervised by the CI in facilitating the intervention with a separate group of students not included in the trial (in another grade), to ensure high-fidelity in delivery of the intervention. School staff will be guided through a facilitation manual during training, which they will keep and use in their implementation of the intervention. School staff will be required to complete session notes after each intervention session, to document their implementation fidelity and record any concerns. References: Conrod, P. J. (2016). Personality-Targeted Interventions for Substance Use and Misuse. Current addiction reports, 3(4), 426-436. Woicik PB, Conrod P, Stewart SH, Pihl RO. (2009). The substance use risk profile scale: A scale measuring traits linked to reinforcement-specific substance use profiles. Addictive Behaviours. 32:1042-55. Castellanos-Ryan N, O'Leary-Barrett M, Sully L, Conrod P. Sensitivity and specificity of a brief personality screening instrument in predicting future substance use, emotional, and behavioral problems: 18-month predictive validity of the substance use risk profile scale. Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research. 2013 Jan;37 Suppl 1:E281-90. PubMed PMID: 22974180. Epub 2012/09/15. eng. Krank M, Stewart SH, O'Connor R, Woicik PB, Wall A-M, Conrod PJ. Structural, concurrent, and predictive validity of the substance use risk profile scale in early adolescence. Addictive Behaviors. 2011 2011/01/01/;36(1):37-46. Newton NC, Barrett EL, Castellanos-Ryan N, Kelly E, Champion KE, Stapinski L, et al. (2016). The validity of the Substance Use Risk Profile Scale (SURPS) among Australian adolescents. Addictive Behaviors. 2016 2016/02/01/;53:23-30.