Background: Mental disorders are common in childhood, but many young people do not receive adequate professional support. Help-seeking interventions may bridge this treatment gap, however, there is limited research on interventions for primary-school children. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of an emotion literacy program at increasing literacy, reducing stigma, and promoting help-seeking in children aged 8-10 years.
Methods and analysis: A two-arm pragmatic cluster-controlled trial will compare Thriving Minds, an emotion literacy program for middle primary school children, to a wait-list control condition. Children aged 8-10 years will be recruited from approximately 12 schools (6 intervention schools/6 wait-list control) to participate in Thriving Minds via direct invitation by the program delivery service. Allocation to the intervention condition will be pragmatically, by school. Children will receive the intervention over two 50-minute sessions, across two weeks. Using story books and interactive discussion, the program aims to develop children's knowledge of their own and other's emotional experiences and emotion regulation strategies (self-care and help-seeking). The primary outcome is help-seeking intentions. Secondary outcomes include help-seeking knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours, emotion knowledge and attitudes, and stigma. Children will complete surveys at pre-intervention, post-intervention (one week after the program) and 12-week follow-up. Additional satisfaction data will be collected from teachers in intervention schools via surveys (post-intervention and 3-month follow-up) and semi-structured interviews (after follow-up), and selected children via focus groups (12-week follow-up). Analyses will compare changes in help-seeking intentions relative to the waitlist control condition using mixed-model repeated-measures analyses to account for clustering within schools.
Discussion: With demonstrated effectiveness, this universal emotion literacy program for promoting help-seeking for mental health could be more widely delivered in Australian primary schools, providing a valuable new resource, contributing to the mental health of young people by improving help-seeking for early mental health difficulties.
Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12623000910606 Registered on 24 August 2023.
• This will be one of the first controlled trials of an emotion literacy program addressing mental health literacy, stigma, and help-seeking for mental health difficulties with primary school children aged 8 to 10 years. • Quantitative measures, including predictors and mediators, are included in the study to enable statistical changes in outcomes to be assessed, as well as qualitative measures to explore participant experiences of using the intervention in greater depth. • Limitations include the narrow age band, as further work may be needed to developmentally tailor the intervention for broader age groups. • Parent feedback was not included due to study constraints (outside the intended focus of this research). • Longer-term retention of knowledge and skills will not be assessed beyond 12-week follow-up and it is not the intention to assess impact on child mental health symptom outcomes.
Keywords: Child & adolescent psychiatry; Health education; Health literacy; Mental health; Schools.
© 2024. The Author(s).