National Scale Out of School Mental Health Literacy Resource

Summary

Good mental health literacy is particularly important for young people. Mental health literacy should be embedded into existing school curriculum in an integrated, pedagogically appropriate, and sustainable way that strengthens existing institutions and improves integration between existing systems of care. Doing so improves both health and education outcomes for young people. A program that embeds mental health literacy in this way has been developed, rigorously tested and proven, and is in place in more than 3,000 schools in Canada. The program requires training of teachers and, to date, that has been accomplished by taking a face-to-face approach. The face-to-face approach, however, is not a viable option for scaling this intervention more fully across the country.

The goal of this project is to contribute to significant, substantial, and sustained improvements in mental health knowledge, decreased stigma, and enhanced help-seeing efficacy among Canadian young people. It plans to do so by using web-based technology to broadly scale out, across Canada, a well established evidence based intervention so that it

• can be easily and freely accessed in every grade 9 or 10 class in Canada; and
• will require minimal ongoing financial support to sustain.