Mindfulness in Schools: a Health Promotion Approach to Improving Adolescent Mental Health

Abstract

Between 10 and 20% of adolescents worldwide experience a mental health problem within a given 12-month period. Mental health problems impact on an adolescent's potential to live a fulfilling and productive life and lead to challenges such as stigma, isolation and discrimination. To address this need, in recent years, there has been growing interest into broad-based school-integrated health promotion interventions that seek to build resilience and augment protective factors in adolescents. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) reflect one such approach that have been administered to adolescent populations in both resilience building and treatment contexts. This paper discusses the utility of school-based MBIs as an adolescent health promotion approach and makes recommendations for intervention design, delivery and evaluation. Emerging evidence indicates that school-integrated MBIs may be a cost-effective means of not only meeting government objectives relating to adolescent mental health, but also for improving the wellbeing of teachers and parents. Furthermore, there is growing evidence indicating that mindfulness can elicit improvements in student learning performance and general classroom behaviour. However, notwithstanding these beneficial properties, there remains a need to conduct large-scale empirical investigations that seek to evaluate the effectiveness of school-integrated MBIs at a regional or national level. A further challenge is the need to ensure that mindfulness instructors are able to impart to adolescents an experiential understanding of this ancient contemplative technique.

Health School-based Mindfulness Interventions for Improving Mental Health: A Systematic Review and Thematic Synthesis of Qualitative Studies

“…The school-based MBIs included in the present review also appeared to augment students' capacity for coping with the challenges associated with child and adolescent transition (i.e., the third Master theme to emerge from the dataset). Indeed, elsewhere researchers have highlighted both the immediate and preventative applications associated with learning mindfulness prior to adulthood (e.g., Sapthiang et al 2018). In the present systematic review, improvements in coping skills were also reported to positively impact on social skills.…”

“…In addition to seeking to enhance mental illness treatment approaches for young people, there is growing awareness of the benefits of cultivating resiliency and protective traits (Sapthiang et al 2019b;Schonert-Reichl and Lawlor 2010;Windle 2011). Accordingly, the UK government has made mental health promotion a priority area and has emphasised the important role of schools for improving young people's mental health (Sapthiang et al 2018). Indeed, since most children spend a considerable amount of time at school, it is a viable setting for cultivating protective traits (e.g., emotional literacy, coping skills) (Van Gordon et al 2019).…”

“…A category of intervention known as mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) has recently shown promise in treatment and preventative contexts with school-aged young people (Sapthiang et al 2018). The practice of mindfulness derives from Buddhist meditation and involves maintaining an active awareness of experienced phenomena on a moment-by-moment basis (Van Gordon et al 2015).…”

Adolescent problem gambling requires community-level health promotion approaches

“…Another approach with potential for use as a communitylevel preventative interventional strategy for reducing adolescent gambling is mindfulness, which has been the subject of increased empirical attention in recent years (Sapthiang et al 2018). Mindfulness is a form of meditation that involves cultivating present moment awareness as a means of increasing perceptual distance from gambling urges, as well as from distressing emotions and maladaptive cognitive processes more generally (Griffiths et al 2016).…”

The mental health needs of child and adolescent refugees and asylum seekers entering Europe

“…[7] The socio-ecological model highlights the need for joint care pathways in receiving countries, whereby child and adolescent psychological health services actively collaborate with social care services, nongovernmental organizations, and also community-level stakeholders such as schools. [12] Effective joint care pathways help to foster knowledge and best practice sharing and can limit delays in young refugees gaining access to education, housing, and health-care support services. [7] Furthermore, such collaborative multiagency approaches are also in the interests of tailoring refugee mental health support provision to meet the specific needs of child and adolescent service users.…”