Coetzee Bronwyne, Loades Maria
Department of Psychology, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Department of Psychology, University of Bath, Bath, UK.
Child Adolesc Ment Health. 2025 Feb;30(1):105-107. doi: 10.1111/camh.12752. Epub 2024 Dec 7.
In their paper, Birrell et al. (Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 2025) are rightly concerned about the future of universal school-based mental health interventions. They highlight the successes and failings of these interventions and demonstrate that there is still much to learn about their potential in preventing or mitigating the onset of common mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, trauma and substance use. But encouragingly, and thanks in part to the potential these interventions hold for addressing the mental health gap in low and middle-income countries (LMIC), the authors advise that we as researchers need to take a step back in order to take a better step forward. They suggest that instead of abandoning ship altogether, we should critically examine the shortcomings of these interventions in their current format and work more closely with young people themselves to design and deliver interventions, which have long-term benefits for their communities. In this paper, we want to emphasise the urgency with which these interventions, developed in this way, are needed in LMIC. We emphasise the need to co-develop, adapt, test and evaluate school-based interventions, and the potential they hold for reducing the burden of mental health care in resource-constrained settings.
在他们的论文中，比雷尔等人（《儿童与青少年心理健康》，2025年）对基于学校的普遍心理健康干预措施的未来表示了合理的担忧。他们强调了这些干预措施的成功与失败，并表明在预防或减轻焦虑、抑郁、创伤和药物使用等常见心理健康问题的发作方面，仍有许多需要了解的地方。但令人鼓舞的是，部分由于这些干预措施在解决低收入和中等收入国家（LMIC）心理健康差距方面的潜力，作者建议我们作为研究人员需要退后一步，以便更好地向前迈进。他们建议，与其完全放弃，我们应该批判性地审视这些干预措施当前形式的缺点，并与年轻人自身更密切地合作，设计和实施对他们的社区有长期益处的干预措施。在本文中，我们想强调低收入和中等收入国家迫切需要以这种方式开发的干预措施。我们强调共同开发、调整、测试和评估基于学校的干预措施的必要性，以及它们在资源有限的环境中减轻心理健康护理负担方面的潜力。
