Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

Publication Title

Advances in Social Work

Volume

18

Issue

4

Publisher Name

Advances in Social Work

Abstract

Major depression is a treatable and common mental health disorder for youth. Untreated depression is a major risk factor for youth who become suicidal and die by suicide. Recent focus in the school-based literature on creating universal mental health promotion programs have recognized the need for effective depression awareness education programs to assist youth in identifying symptoms of depression in themselves and their peers, and to encourage those youth to seek trusted adults for help. A quasiexperimental design (QED) was employed in two suburban Chicago high schools (n=652) to evaluate the intervention, Real Teenagers Talking About Adolescent Depression (RTTAAD), a video-based universal classroom discussion intervention created by clinical social workers, parents, and youth. The analysis showed that RTTAAD led to statistically significant changes in adolescent knowledge about depression and their stated willingness to seek help from trusted adults at 6-week follow-up compared to a control classroom condition. This study supports the notion that school social workers and other school mental health professionals need to allocate more time to primary prevention work to help build mental health awareness in their school communities and to help prevent depression and suicidal behavior.

Identifier

1527-8565

Comments

Author Posting © The Authors, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of the Authors for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Advances in Social Work, Volume 18, Issue 4, 2019, https://doi.org/10.18060/22305

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Download

Included in

Social Work Commons

Share

COinS