Developing and evaluating a peer-based mental health literacy intervention with adolescent athletes

Michael Panza; Grace Redman; Matthew Vierimaa; Stewart A Vella; Melissa Bopp; M Blair Evans

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0274761

Developing and evaluating a peer-based mental health literacy intervention with adolescent athletes

PLoS One. 2022 Dec 15;17(12):e0274761. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0274761. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Michael Panza¹, Grace Redman¹, Matthew Vierimaa², Stewart A Vella³, Melissa Bopp¹, M Blair Evans⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Kinesiology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States of America.
² School of Kinesiology, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, CAN.
³ School of Psychology, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, AUS.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Western University, London, ON, CAN.

Abstract

Widespread adolescent involvement in organized sport means that sport contexts are well-suited to 'actively' integrate prevention programs that may promote population-level change. This mixed methods study aimed to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of a peer-based mental health literacy intervention. The intervention (i.e., Team Talk) was presented to eleven adolescent sport teams in the United States, with a total of 174 participants. Athlete participants completed surveys immediately before and after the intervention-including measures of workshop acceptability, social identity, and help-seeking behaviors. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with a subset of five athletes, nine parents, and two coaches. With respect to recruitment as an indicator of feasibility, club-level adoption of the intervention was low, with difficulty recruiting clubs for intervention delivery. This signals that feasibility of the intervention-as it is currently designed and implemented by the research team-is low when considering similar competitive adolescent sport clubs and delivered as team-level workshops. Meanwhile, participants reported high acceptability of the intervention, and acceptability levels across participants was predicted by contextual factors related to implementation such as session duration. Regarding limited efficacy testing with measures completed before and after the intervention session: (a) social identity scores increased following the intervention, and (b) significant differences were not identified regarding efficacy to recognize symptoms of mental disorders. Athlete, coach, and parent interview responses also described potential adaptations to mental health programs. This research demonstrates the potential utility of peer-based mental health literacy interventions, while also revealing that further implementation research is necessary to adapt mental health literacy interventions to suit diverse adolescent sport contexts.

Copyright: © 2022 Panza et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adolescent
Athletes
Health Literacy*
Humans
Mental Disorders* / prevention & control
Mental Health
Sports*

Grants and funding

The authors acknowledge that this research was funded in part by a grant from the US Lacrosse Center for Sport Science. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of US Lacrosse. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.