Effectiveness of School Based Intervention for Promoting Mental Health Literacy Among Teachers

Summary

Significantly higher prevalence of emotional and behavioural problems have been reported from Pakistan.This higher prevalence along with stigma of psychiatric problems and limited child \& adolescent mental health services in Pakistan means that it is important to consider alternate methods for promoting psychological and emotional well-being of our youth. Schools can thus act as a natural platform for mental health promotion as schools context has almost as much impact on students' emotional health as the family context.

Teachers' role in the school mental health initiatives cannot be overemphasized. Teachers own knowledge and beliefs regarding mental health influence the way they respond to students mental health crisis. Recognizing the need for wider implementation of evidence based school mental health interventions in the region and to help in addressing the mental health literacy of educators in resource constrained settings, World Health Organization, Eastern Mediterranean Region (WHO-EMRO) has developed a concise and practical manual of school mental health in December 2014. In the absence of any "whole school approach" study from Pakistan focusing on teachers training and addressing all the various evidence based components of promotion of positive mental health, Investigators aim to conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial to assess effectiveness of training based on WHO-EMRO manual, in addition to its feasibility \& acceptability in improving teachers' mental health literacy and self-efficacy in dealing with students mental health issues.

HYPOTHESIS:

For teachers:

* School mental health training intervention will significantly improve teacher's mental health literacy \& self-efficacy compared to wait list control group.
* At 3 months follow-up, control group teachers' mental health literacy will also improve compared to baseline due to contamination of information provided, across groups within the same school.

All hypothesis pertains to individual level.

For students:

Mental health training of teachers would lead to an overall improvement in student's outcome measure (student's emotional and behavioural difficulties) at 3 months follow-up.

Conditions

• School Mental Health Training of Teachers

Interventions

OTHER

School Mental Health training

School based intervention (Teacher training intervention) is the teachers training program based on World Health Organization, Eastern Mediterranean Region (WHO-EMRO) School mental health manual draft (December 2014). Topics to be covered in training workshop include normal childhood development, behaviour management strategies for schools, life skills training, essential components for healthy schools, recognizing warning signs for common psychiatric and developmental disorders common to children and adolescents \& school based interventions for various psychiatric problems

Sponsors & Collaborators

• King Edward Medical University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Nazish Imran, MRCPsych · King Edward Medical University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2017-09-10

Primary Completion

2018-11-30

Completion

2018-11-30

Countries

• Pakistan

Study Locations