Mental Health Screening and Follow-up Care in Public High Schools

Half Full or Half Empty: The Measurement of Mental Health and Mental Illness in Emerging Australian Adults

“…looking to remove cases of depression and anxiety from a sample). Indeed, single dimension measures and short-form screening tools are known to be highly advantageous for providing brief, standardised, easily administered and cost-effective methods of identifying, and prompting referrals to further services for, untreated mental health problems (Annells et al, 2010;Cappelli et al, 2012;Husky, Sheridan, McGuire, & Olfson, 2011). Rather, the authors intend to emphasise the need to exercise caution in the administration and interpretation of mental health measures and to always consider the risk of using mental health measures interchangeably to assess general mental health or mental illness, without due consideration to the possible consequences of misinterpretation of scores or categories for such groups and individuals.…”

“…However, given that brief, single dimensions measures may be widely used as initial screening tools, for ease, convenience or speed of assessment, or to gain a brief snapshot of psychological health in combination with other measures (e.g. demographics, physical health) and across settings (Annells et al, 2010;Cappelli et al, 2012;Husky, Sheridan, McGuire, & Olfson, 2011), this limitation also draws attention to problems and concerns associated with this practice. While previous research on the GHQ has confirmed the measure as an appropriate tool for its original purpose, to detect "psychiatric morbidity", it is clear that as a popular and well-validated instrument, it may be employed for purposes beyond this (Winzer et al, 2014).…”

“…Given that it is uncommon for young people to spontaneously disclose psychological distress, new developments in mental health promotion have leaned towards incorporating broader mental health screening approaches (e.g. in school settings) to indicate those at risk and direct them to follow-up services (Husky, Sheridan, McGuire, & Olfson, 2011).…”

Utilization of Professional Mental Health Services Related to Population-Level Screening for Anxiety, Depression, and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Among Public High School Students

“…While such screenings are typically offered in clinical settings, most adolescents currently receive care in school-based settings (Burns, et al, 1995; Cheung & Dewa, 2007; Merikangas, et al, 2011), which has been shown to be the preferred venue for this age group. (Brown & Grumet, 2009; Burns, et al, 1995; Huskey, Sheridan, McGuire, & Olfson, 2011) Previous work has shown that screening in public schools, when coupled with systematic enhancements to the overall mental health system, may be an effective means of identifying at-risk adolescents and connecting them with professional mental health services. (Essex, et al, 2009)…”

Neighborhood Sociodemographic Predictors of Serious Emotional Disturbance (SED) in Schools: Demonstrating a Small Area Estimation Method in the National Comorbidity Survey (NCS-A) Adolescent Supplement

“…Screening individuals’ mental health can be costly (Kuo et al 2009) and have high non-response rates (Husky et al 2011), possibly because of perceptions that data might be used to stigmatize or over-identify students. Further, a number of neighborhood characteristics have been found consistently to predict resident mental health in community epidemiological studies of child-adolescent mental disorders (Dupéré et al 2009; Mair et al 2008; Pickett and Pearl 2001; Xue et al 2005).…”