Dental Industry Insights

Particularly, developmental aspects of children and young people, including, for instance, the ability to manage thoughts, emotions, as well as to build social relationships, and the aptitude to learn, are emphasized in the plan as critical facets to be tackled in mental health interventions. The effects of the mental health interventions reported on children and adolescents’ problems include a decrease in disruptive behaviors and affective symptoms such as depression and anxiety, together with an increase in social skills, as well as an improvement in personal well-being. Since the majority of clinicians and supervisors in community mental health agencies that provide services in schools have not received adequate training on EBPs and paying external consultants is not financially feasible for many agencies, efforts must be focused on preparing their own supervisors to become effective supervisors of EBPs. School districts that have not had the benefit of grant funding for establishing a sustainable in-school service delivery system, such as the system developed by Capella and colleagues, may consider contracting with mental health agencies or university-based programs with expertise in building such capacity. Given this, team training interventions that have demonstrated efficacy in health care settings https://www.thecommunityguide.org/findings/mental-health-multi-tiered-trauma-informed-school-programs-improve-mental-health-among-youth.html (e.g., TeamSTEPPS; Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; 2007), may prove useful in improving important teamwork constructs such as communication, leadership, support, and role clarity in school mental health teams. A significant challenge for community mental health agencies and schools in under-resourced settings is how to create infrastructure to support the development of clinicians and coaches who can then oversee the delivery of EBPs by individuals with less mental health training, such as teachers and paraprofessionals.

Interventions to help behaviour management with whole-school or classroom-based programmes have increasing empirical support. In some countries, schools can partner with psychologists and psychiatrists to provide consultation and intervention for specific students with complex challenges, but this model is unlikely to be scalable in view of the global scarcity of child and adolescent psychiatrists. However, staff employed at schools are limited by school policies that restrict the type of services that they can provide, reducing their ability to meet specific needs or serve specific students. In the USA, for example, introduction of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act29 placed much of the responsibility for student mental health on the education system, at least for students whose mental health could be linked to educational success. Substantial differences exist between mental health services and educational services including professional qualifications gained, funding mechanisms, and the criteria by which a child’s eligibility for access to services and outcomes are judged. We conclude by emphasising the need to reconfigure both health and education services to better promote children’s learning and development.

Policies and Practices to Support School Mental Health

It was endorsed as the second most frequent implementation barrier by successful implementers, and is consistent with prior research (Forman et al., 2009). Rather, the major barriers to successful implementation appeared to at the systems and organizational levels. In addition, it makes sense that clinicians who have implemented an intervention and have more practice with the components of an intervention would report being more likely to use such components in the future, versus those who have not yet been able to implement, since they have established experience and comfort level with the materials. All successful implementers were from sites that had grant funding or some funds set aside by the management or administration for CBITS implementation. Among the successful implementers of CBITS, all reported knowing someone else who was conducting CBITS groups, either within their own school, or within their organization or region.

• While the article provides some important insights into the association between mental health and academic performance in adolescents, some limitations were noted.
• Professional characteristics include training, experience, and attitudes toward interventions (Domitrovich et al., 2008).
• Establish a school mental health implementation team.

Professional development

Anxiety brought on by poor grades, for example, might be better resolved through literacy programs. Mental health treatment or programming should not be a catch-all solution to wide-ranging adversity just because it is inaccurately perceived as easy to facilitate. Consider the differences between mental health treatment and treatment for a child with poor eyesight. Even if it makes sense to “provide a sprawling array of services to students,” writes Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, it’s “a lot to ask. The committee encourages States to clarify agency financial obligations and responsibilities in these situations, and to make information about those obligations and responsibilities available to school districts and parents of children with disabilities. If promoting mental health is meant to reduce rates of diagnoses—which it may or may not—then taxpayers should not expect that goal to be met by making more providers available to diagnose.

School counselors could and should still be available across all school levels to facilitate academic counseling, provide targeted interventions, and coordinate community-based service access where appropriate. Universal programs do not have clear evidence of success, they crowd out time spent on academic learning, and they misallocate limited resources away from targeted interventions to those with known need—a high proportion of whom already do not have access to appropriate treatment. School-based mental health professionals tasked with doing more than just initial interventions report that what they can or should provide is often inadequate for students with severe disruptive behavior or impairment. If need dissipates with economic expansions, schools that have hired mental health professionals will face artificial resource constraint from staff salaries for mental health providers, which could have been put toward longer-term investments such as developing cross-system partnerships with community-based providers. Some of these therapeutic interventions are promoted as “evidence-based,” but academic impact is not evaluated whatsoever, and an emphasis on emotions might make it more difficult for students to focus on the task at hand. School-based mental health interventions replace time spent on academic learning, class prep, and instruction.

1. Study 1 Results—Program Effectiveness: Mental Health Literacy

Tall and Biel (2023) recently reviewed the effects of social determinants of health on child and family mental health, emphasizing their role in exacerbating mental health disparities. Regarding intervention delivery, they recommended that qualified mental health providers provide culturally relevant sessions in person during school hours and that we consider flexible format offerings and an extended intervention delivery window. They noted the importance of providing teachers and staff with training on identifying and referring to mental health services and basic psychoeducation as well as building trust and reducing stigma.