Teen Mental Health First Aid

teen Mental Health First Aid (tMHFA) is a classroom-based training program for high school students developed by Dr Laura Hart, Dr Claire Kelly, Professor Tony Jorm and Betty Kitchener AM. The program is designed to teach adolescents how to recognise and appropriately support a peer who is experiencing a mental health problem (e.g. depression, anxiety) or a mental health crisis (such as thinking about suicide or engaging in self-injury). The program is provided in schools by Instructors who are trained and accredited by Mental Health First Aid International, often with funding from State or Local Governments.

For more information on how to access teen Mental Health First Aid for your school, please see  https://www.mhfa.com.au/our-courses/teen-peer-to-peer-support/teen-mental-health-first-aid/

Dr Laura Hart has been leading development and evaluation research for the tMHFA program since 2012. This has included:

• A large Delphi expert consensus study was conducted on what key messages adolescents should be taught in a basic mental health first aid training program.

• Literature reviews were completed on adolescent help-seeking, barriers to treatment, stigmatising attitudes to mental illness, mental health literacy deficits, supportive first aid behaviour deficits, and effective health education techniques for the classroom environment.

• Translating results into course content for two teen Mental Health First Aid programs; one for students in Years 10-12, another for students in Years 7-9, in collaboration with young people with lived experience of mental health problems in their high-school years, school staff and youth workers.

• Engaged youth advocacy organisations to collaborate with adolescents with lived experience of mental illness, to develop materials for the Years 10-12 program, using seeding funding from the Jack Brockhoff Foundation.

• Piloted all materials with students from the Live4Life initiative.

• Conducted the first evaluation of teenMHFA in four secondary schools (n=988 students) using funding from an Early Career Researcher Grant from beyondblue Victorian Centre of Excellence in 2013.

• Results of that first pilot trial were used to apply for a project grant funded by Australian Rotary Health, resulting in the 2014-2017 pilot cluster, cross-over RCT with four schools including in outer-metropolitan areas (n=1,942 students).

• Assisted Mental Health First Aid Australia (MHFA) to launch the national dissemination of the program via Instructor Training commencing in 2014.

• Used the outcomes from the first two pilot trials to successfully apply for a NHMRC Project Grant to conduct a large cluster cross-over RCT with 10 Victorian Secondary Schools (2017-2021). With mentoring from Prof Tony Jorm, leading the teenAID research Cluster Crossover Randomised Controlled trial evaluating the Years 10-12 program.

• Engaged a pedagogical expert in early 2017, to conduct a materials review for the Years 10-12 program, in response to student feedback gathered in the 2014-2017 trial. A third edition was launched by MHFA Australia in mid-2017 integrating evidence-based updates.

• In 2017 teen MHFA for Years 7-9 was launched with an uncontrolled pilot evaluation funded by a seed grant from the William Buckland Foundation.

• In Australia, as of 1 July 2018, 46,317 students had received the teen MHFA Years 10-12 program; an additional 6,181 students had received the Years 7-9 program, bringing the total to 52,498 students (source: MHFA Australia training database).

• In 2020, engaged a series of pedagogical, mental health and teaching professionals to conduct a curriculum review of the Years 7-9 program. This involved a complete re-structure of the program into 4x 50 minute sessions and brand new materials and class activities, which now form the Third Edition.

• In 2021-2023 conducted a pilot evaluation of the Third Edition Years 7-9 program across schools in Victoria and Western Australia.

International programs with teen MHFA

• MHFA Australia

• MHFA USA

• MHFA England

• MHFA Canada

• The Lighthouse Centre for Wellbeing, United Arab Emirates

Awards

• 2024 Suicide Prevention Australia Award for Outstanding Achievement in Suicide Prevention – awarded to Dr Laura Hart and Dr Claire Kelly for their work developing, evaluating and disseminating the teen Mental Health First Aid Program across Australia

• 2024 Suicide Prevention Victoria Award for Outstanding Achievement in Suicide Prevention – awarded to Dr Laura Hart and Dr Claire Kelly for their work developing, evaluating and disseminating the teen Mental Health First Aid Program across Australia

• 2019 Society for Mental Health Research/Australian Rotary Health Research Impact Award 2021