Supporting Child Mental Health

Supporting child mental health is a program of research to co-design, implement and evaluate a comprehensive training intervention for adults to learn how to provide mental health first aid to support children aged 5-12 years.

The Supporting Child Mental Health program aims to:

1. Increase adults’ mental health literacy for supporting children

2. Increase adults’ confidence and skills in providing mental health first aid to support child mental health

3. Reduce the stigmatising attitudes that create barriers to adults accessing appropriate help and children receiving adequate support

4. Increase early and appropriate help seeking for mental health problems so that communities are empowered with better supportive strategies and better outcomes in child mental health.

The training intervention is informed by research on mental health literacy, mental health first aid, help seeking, stigma, suicide prevention, and child mental health. After evaluation, if found effective, it will be disseminated nationally and internationally by our industry partners.

Our evaluation of the Supporting Child Mental Health program forms a flagship trial of the Growing Minds Australia Clinical Trials Network funded by the Australian Government through the Medical Research Future Fund scheme (MRF2006438)

Current opportunities

Participate now: SCMH Evaluation program!

We are inviting adults who live or work with primary school aged children to participate in the Supporting Child Mental Health program.

Participants will be randomly allocated to either receive the SCMH training program straight away, or to receive SCMH after completing four online surveys. All participants receive SCMH for free (valued at approximately $500) and can be provided with a certificate of completion for seeking accredited professional development points.

Find out more or register your interest

Mental health literacy for supporting child mental health

The knowledge, attitudes and behaviours required of adults or adolescents to recognise or seek help for their own mental health are very different to the knowledge, attitudes or behaviours required of adults to recognise and seek help for mental health problems that are developing in pre-adolescent children (aged 5-12 years).

We have defined ‘mental health literacy for supporting children’ as adults’ knowledge and beliefs that support action to prevent or manage mental health problems in children, including:

a) ability to recognize when a child is developing a mental health problem (e.g., not coping, experiencing increasing distress, or difficulty functioning as expected);

b) knowledge and attitudes about how to seek and engage critically with information about child mental health, risk factors and causes of mental health problems in children, and sources of formal and informal help for both the child and caregivers; and

c) ability to communicate about child mental health and supportive strategies with the child in a developmentally appropriate manner, and with other adults who care for or are responsible for the child.

The training program development process

The program of research began in 2020 with the convening of a project advisory board consisting of a wide range of stakeholders and the completion of a needs assessment survey with 394 adults across Australia. This sought to understand what gaps in knowledge and skills adults who live or work with children wanted to fill with a new training program.

We also undertook a range of systematic literature reviews, to understand what knowledge and interventions parents, teachers and health professionals already had about common mental health problems in children. Members of our team collaborated with researchers at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Royal Children’s Hospital on a Delphi study to develop the National Children’s Wellbeing Continuum.

A program of Delphi studies were also conducted to understand what best practice mental health first aid strategies for supporting child mental health are. The resulting guidelines are based on systematic reviews and expert stakeholder consensus across people with lived experience of mental health problems in their childhood years, parents of children with mental health problems, educators working with primary school children, and research, health or mental health professionals who work with children.

Guidelines

• How to talk to a child about concerns for their mental health and seeking help

• How to talk to adults about your concerns for a child’s mental health and seeking help

• How to provide crisis mental health first aid to support a child displaying dangerous aggression

• How to provide crisis mental health first aid to support a child at risk of suicide or self-harm

• How to support a child who has experienced trauma or adverse events

Expert Advisory Group

The Supporting Child Mental Health Team have appointed an Advisory Board in accordance with best practice principles for Community Advisory Boards in health research. These principles outline the purpose of Advisory Boards as:

• Serving as a source of leadership to the project

• Providing a structure for partnerships between the research team and relevant members of the affected community

• Allowing community members to voice concerns and priorities that might otherwise not enter into the team’s agenda

• Advising on suitable processes that are respectful of and acceptable to the community affected (e.g., children, parents, teachers, health professionals and the communities or services in which they are located).

Advisory Board members are engaged in:

• Co-designing the translation of our research findings into program materials (Supporting Child Mental Health Program Development) which will then be evaluated in trial studies.

• Guiding the design of research protocols and procedures for conducting the evaluation studies (Supporting Child Mental Health Program Research).

Intervention evaluation

We are currently seeking adults who live or work with primary school children (ages 5-12 years) from across Australia to participate in our evaluation studies. As a participant you will receive free access to the new Supporting Child Mental Health program, including:

• 4-hours of self-paced online e-Learning,

• 4x 1hour live group learning sessions delivered by trained instructors,

• A comprehensive Guidebook,

• A Reflection Journal and participation certificate suitable for continuing professional development accreditation.

For more information, please contact: SCMH-Research@unimelb.edu.au or call 03 9035 6515.

Measuring mental health literacy and mental health first aid for supporting child mental health

Two new tools have been developed to accurately measure adult’s knowledge and abilities in supporting the mental health of children aged 5-12 years. These are

• the Test of Mental Health Literacy for Supporting Children

• the Mental Health Support Scale for Adults Helping Children

These two new tools will be used to evaluate the Supporting Child Mental Health program. They will also be used to evaluate other interventions across Australia and internationally, which are designed to impact mental health literacy for supporting children, or adults’ knowledge and intentions to provide mental health first aid for supporting children.

The tools are being validated by the following researchers

• Dr Shurong Lu is testing these tools with multicultural parents in Australia.

• A/Prof Ilaria Montagni at the University of Bordeaux is testing and translating the tools into French language for use with pre-service teachers in France

• Dr Kumiko Yoshioka at the University of Fukuoka, is testing and translating the tools into Japanese

We encourage researchers who are interested in using or adapting our measure to contact us about collaboration or support: SCMH-Research@unimelb.edu.au.