Riebschleger Joanne, Grové Christine, Kelly Kimberly, Cavanaugh Daniel
School of Social Work, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States.
Department of Educational Psychology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Front Psychiatry. 2022 Jul 15;13:817208. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.817208. eCollection 2022.
Despite rising rates of youth mental health disorders and suicides, most youth lack access to accurate, non-stigmatized mental health information. Instead, many describe people with mental illness as violent and incompetent. Mental health literacy aligns with resilience theory. It assumes that youth that have accurate mental health information will have less stigmatized views of mental illness and will be more likely to seek help earlier should mental health symptoms arise. Accurate, non-stigmatized mental health information is especially needed for Children of a Parent or other Family Member that has a mental illness (COPFMI) since they are more likely to acquire a mental illness than children who do not have a family member with a mental illness. COPFMI youth are in need of the same mental health information as general population youth but they can also benefit from knowing how to deal with a family member's mental health disorder. Based on many foundation studies and key stakeholder input from parents, educators, mental health providers, child welfare providers, and especially youth, an emerging Youth Mental Health Literacy (YMHL) scale was developed and validated for measuring the mental health literacy levels of youth ages 11-14. The scale provides a full scale score of youth mental health literacy. It has subscales of knowledge of mental illness and recovery; stigma, help seeking for self/others; coping with stress; and dealing with family mental health challenges. The validation study indicated support for a unidimensional structure for each of the refined subscales. The subscales showed suitable reliability as evaluated by several measures of internal consistency. While the scale needs further study with larger samples of youth, it is hoped that the scale can yield mental health literacy outcome data that can help mental health literacy programs to build evidence-based programs that may, in turn, help prevent, delay, or ameliorate mental health disorders among youth.
尽管青少年心理健康障碍和自杀率不断上升，但大多数青少年无法获得准确、无污名化的心理健康信息。相反，许多人将患有精神疾病的人描述为暴力和无能的。心理健康素养与复原力理论相一致。它假定，拥有准确心理健康信息的青少年对精神疾病的污名化看法会更少，并且在出现心理健康症状时更有可能更早地寻求帮助。患有精神疾病的父母或其他家庭成员的子女（COPFMI）尤其需要准确、无污名化的心理健康信息，因为他们比没有家庭成员患有精神疾病的儿童更有可能患上精神疾病。COPFMI青少年需要与普通青少年相同的心理健康信息，但他们也可以从了解如何应对家庭成员的心理健康障碍中受益。基于许多基础研究以及来自父母、教育工作者、心理健康提供者、儿童福利提供者，尤其是青少年等关键利益相关者的意见，开发并验证了一种新出现的青少年心理健康素养（YMHL）量表，用于测量11至14岁青少年的心理健康素养水平。该量表提供了青少年心理健康素养的全面得分。它有关于精神疾病和康复知识；污名化、自我/他人寻求帮助；应对压力；以及应对家庭心理健康挑战等子量表。验证研究表明，对每个细化子量表的单维结构提供了支持。通过几种内部一致性测量方法评估，这些子量表显示出合适的信度。虽然该量表需要用更大规模的青少年样本进行进一步研究，但希望该量表能够产生心理健康素养结果数据，有助于心理健康素养项目建立基于证据的项目，进而可能有助于预防、延缓或改善青少年的心理健康障碍。
