Evaluation of a school-based mental health literacy program for youth aged 12 to 16 years

Youth Education and Support (YES) is a mental health literacy program developed by Professor Joanne Riebschleger over a span of 12 years based on relevant literature, recommendations from mental health professionals and the perspectives of young people. The program has been adapted to suit an Australian context based on feedback from health care professionals, youth, researchers and educators. The group intervention includes 10 weekly sessions of 50 minutes duration each. It is designed to be delivered within a school setting by trained facilitators with expertise of working with young people. This trial will evaluate the program's effectiveness in Australian school settings for youth aged 12 to 16 years old. The Australian adapted YES program includes activities and discussions related to specific mental health and wellbeing topics for each session. The topics are as follows: - Understanding mental illness, including risks/causes and specific mental health disorders - The effects of mental illness on families - The recovery process from mental illness - Stress management and coping strategies - Promoting emotionally healthy behaviours - Responding to stigma and stereotypes (related to mental illness) - How to seek help for mental health difficulties and what the process of therapy can look like The intervention will be delivered by provisional psychologists completing the Masters of Psychology program at Monash University. The facilitators will receive training from the researchers prior to the program consisting of an approximately 4 hour workshop. Three facilitators will deliver the program to groups, in which two will deliver the program and the other will observe and complete a fidelity measure each session. Outcomes of the program will be measured using standardised scales, such as Youth Mental Health Literacy (YMHL) scale, the 14 item Resilience Scale, the Actual Help Seeking Questionnaire (AHSQ) and the General Help Seeking Questionnaire (GHSQ) before, immediately after, 3 months after and 1 year after the program. As well as qualitative, open-ended feedback forms for participants to complete after each session.