A Monash University study evaluating a program promoting mental health and wellbeing introduced to over 100 schools and more than 40,000 Australian high school students has found it results in improved mental health outcomes, including reduced depression and anxiety, if adopted over the six years of a student's journey through secondary school.
The study, done in collaboration with the Resilience Project and Resilient Youth Australia, was conducted by PhD candidate Dr Roshini Balasooriya Lekamge and published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Depression and anxiety are rife in our students, with a 2023 State of the Nation Report finding that 27.4 per cent of Australian primary school students and 35.9 per cent of secondary school students report high levels of anxiety, depression, or both.
According to Dr Balasooriya Lekamge, adolescence is a peak time for mental health issues to arise. "Adolescence is a time of particular vulnerability to poor mental health, with a recent meta-analysis identifying the peak age at onset for mental illness to be 14.5 years. What's more, an Australian-based national study found that 32.4 per cent of Australian males and 45.5 per cent of Australian females aged 16–24 years had experienced a mental illness in the preceding 12 months, which was the highest prevalence in any age category," she said.
"Given that adolescents spend a significant portion of their time at school, the need for effective, school-based mental health and wellbeing programs is paramount".
Dr Balasooriya Lekamge said she chose to study the impact of the Resilience Project School Partnership Program because "it's a whole-school program promoting mental health and wellbeing, through the teaching and practice of four core elements: gratitude, empathy, emotional literacy and mindfulness. It involves not only students, but also their teachers and parents, and has been used widely in an Australian context".
This year, the program is being used in 1150 primary and secondary schools across Australia.
Research evidence evaluating whole-school programs, like the Resilience Project School Partnership Program, has historically been based on programs that have only been implemented for two to three years. Little is therefore known about the optimal time duration that these programs should be implemented for to reap the maximum benefit.
The Monash study evaluated The Resilience Project School Partnership Program against a control group who did not receive the program. The study involved 40,149 students across 102 schools in 2023. Participants were in Grades 7 to 12 in 2023, and the Resilience Project had to have been running in the participating school for at least two years.
"A unique feature of this study is that schools had implemented the program anywhere from 2-8 years, allowing us to explore whether schools with longer implementation showed better mental health outcomes," Dr Balasooriya Lekamge said.
The study found that "students at schools in at least their sixth year of implementing the program demonstrated significantly better mental health outcomes than the control group, with this pattern consistent across all outcomes, including life satisfaction, hope, coping skills, anxiety and depression. A significant difference in outcomes emerged for participants at schools implementing the program for four to five years, who demonstrated significantly lower odds for depression than the control group. By contrast, participants at schools implementing the program for two to three years demonstrated no significant difference in outcomes compared with the control group".
"Our study highlights implementation duration as an important consideration for future evaluations of whole-school programs," Dr Balasooriya Lekamge said. "It also provides insights for stakeholders, such as public health and policy makers, that whole-school programs promoting mental health and wellbeing in adolescence may require long-term investment for their potential to be realised".
