Background:teen Mental Health First Aid (tMHFA) is a classroom-based training programme for students aged 15–18 years to improve supportive behaviours towards peers, increase mental health literacy and reduce stigma. This research evaluated tMHFA by comparing it to a matched emergency Physical First Aid (PFA) training programme.Methods:A cluster-randomised crossover trial matched four public schools in two pairs and then randomised each to first receive tMHFA or PFA for all Year 10 students. In the subsequent calendar year, the new Year 10 cohort received the opposite intervention, giving eight cohorts. Online surveys were administered at baseline and 1 week post-training, measuring quality of first aid intentions, mental health literacy, problem recognition and stigmatising beliefs, towards fictional adolescents with depression and suicidality (John) and social anxiety (Jeanie).Results:A total of 1942 students were randomised (979 received tMHFA, 948 received PFA), 1605 (84%) analysed for the John vignette at baseline and 1116 (69% of baseline) provided post-training data. The primary outcomes, ‘helpful first aid intentions’ towards John/Jeanie, showed significant group-by-time interactions with medium effect sizes favouring tMHFA (ds = 0.50–0.58). Compared to PFA, tMHFA students also reported significantly greater improvements in confidence supporting a peer (ds = 0.22–0.37) and number of adults rated as helpful (ds = 0.45–0.46) and greater reductions in stigmatising beliefs (ds = 0.12–0.40) and ‘harmful first aid intentions’ towards John/Jeanie (ds = 0.15–0.41).Conclusions:tMHFA is an effective and feasible programme for increasing supportive first aid intentions and mental health literacy in adolescents in the short term. tMHFA could be widely disseminated to positively impact on help seeking for adolescent mental illness.

Suicide prevention media campaigns are gaining traction as a means of combatting suicide. The current review set out to synthesize information about the effectiveness of these campaigns. We searched four electronic databases for studies that provided evidence on the effectiveness of media campaigns. We focused on studies that described an evaluation of the effectiveness of an entire campaign or a public service announcement explicitly aimed at suicide prevention. We identified 20 studies of varying quality. Studies that looked at whether campaign exposure leads to improved knowledge and awareness of suicide found support for this. Most studies that considered whether campaign materials can achieve improvements in attitudes toward suicide also found this to be the case, although there were some exceptions. Some studies found that media campaigns could boost help-seeking, whereas others suggested that they made no difference or only had an impact when particular sources of help or particular types of help-seeking were considered. Relatively few studies had sufficient statistical power to examine whether media campaigns had an impact on the ultimate behavioral outcome of suicides, but those that did demonstrated significant reductions. Our review indicates that media campaigns should be considered in the suite of interventions that might be used to prevent suicide. Evidence for their effectiveness is still amassing, but there are strong suggestions that they can achieve positive results in terms of certain suicide-related outcomes. Care should be taken to ensure that campaign developers get the messaging of campaigns right, and further work is needed to determine which messages work and which ones do not, and how effective messages should be disseminated. There is an onus on those developing and delivering campaigns to evaluate them carefully and to share the findings with others. There is a need for evaluations that employ rigorous designs assessing the most pertinent outcomes. These evaluations should explore the nature of given campaigns in detail - in particular the messaging contained within them - in order to tease out which messages work well and which do not. They should also take into account the reach of the campaign, in order to determine whether it would be reasonable to expect that they might have their desired effect.

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BackgroundCourses such as Mental Health First Aid equip members of the public to perform appropriate helping behaviours towards people experiencing a mental illness or mental health crisis. However, studies investigating the general public’s knowledge and skills in relation to assisting a person with a mental illness are rare. This study assesses the quality of mental health first aid responses by members of the Australian public using data from a national survey.MethodsParticipants in a national survey of mental health literacy were assigned one of six vignettes (depression, depression with suicidal thoughts, early schizophrenia, chronic schizophrenia, social phobia or post-traumatic stress disorder) and asked an open-ended question about how they would help the character in the vignette. The 6,019 respondents were also asked if and how they had helped a person in real life with a similar problem. Responses to these questions were scored using a system based on an action plan developed from expert consensus guidelines on mental health first aid.ResultsThe quality of responses overall was poor, with participants scoring an average of 2 out of 12. The most commonly reported actions for both questions were listening to the person, providing support and information and encouraging them to seek appropriate professional help. Actions such as assessing and assisting with crisis were rarely mentioned, even for the depression with suicidal thoughts vignette.ConclusionsThe quality of the Australian public’s mental health first aid knowledge and skills requires substantial improvement. Particular attention should be given to helping people recognise that anxiety disorders such as social phobia require professional help and to improving responses to a suicidal person.