Journal of Mental Health最新文献

Background: Children affected by war and political violence deploy agentic competencies to cope with trauma symptoms and psychological difficulties. However, it does not always act as a protective factor to help them adjust to potentially traumatic events.

Aims: We expected to explore the association between agency, trauma symptoms and psychological difficulties and the mediating role of hope and life satisfaction in a group of child victims of military violence in Palestine.

Methods: 965 children aged 8 to 14 were assessed with self-reported measures, War Child Agency Assessment Scale, Children Revised Impact of events scale, Strengths and difficulties scale, Child Hope Scale and Brief Multidimensional Students Life Satisfaction Scale. Structural Equation Modelling was performed having Agency as a predictor, trauma symptoms, psychological difficulties as an outcome variable and life satisfaction and hope as a mediator.

Results: We found a direct and positive effect of agency on trauma symptoms, psychological difficulties, and life satisfaction and hope on the two dependent variables. Life satisfaction and hope mediated the association between agency and the outcome variables.

Conclusion: Agency can help defend children from trauma and psychological maladaptation when it acts on life satisfaction and hope. At the same time, it might worsen psychological dysfunctions when working directly on trauma symptoms and difficulties. Clinical interventions must help children to foster agentic resources in activating hope and life satisfaction.

Introduction: Workplace trauma in mental health settings is defined as exposure to verbal and physical aggression, witnessing self-harm or hearing about patients' histories of abuse. Support for workplace trauma is important for staff well-being, staff retention and ultimately patient care. Assessing the extent and adequacy of staff support for workplace trauma in mental health settings is important in identifying areas of need and good practice.

Aim: To determine what staff support systems are in place for workplace trauma in mental health services across England.

Methods: Freedom of Information Act requests were sent to all 57 National Health Service Trusts providing mental health care in England to identify policies on the support to mental health staff after traumatic incidents that they have experienced in the course of their clinical duties.

Results: Fifty-five Trusts provided usable data. Only half provided evidence of a psychologically informed incident response that went beyond a fact-finding exercise and only a fifth of Trusts used an established model for the response process. A small proportion of policies acknowledged workplace traumas related to staff discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics.

Conclusion: There is insufficient attention to supporting mental health staff with the effects of workplace trauma.

Background: Previous research has observed positive associations between perceived quality of social support and mental well-being. Having access to functional social support that provides sources of care, compassion and helpful information have shown to be beneficial for mental health. However, there is a need to identify the psychological processes through which functional social support can elicit therapeutic outcomes on mental well-being.

Aims: The present cross-sectional study aimed to examine the extent to which self-efficacy and self-esteem mediated the association between functional social support and mental well-being.

Method: Seventy-three people with a mental health diagnosis, who attended group-based activities as facilitated by a third sector community mental health organisation, took part in the present study. Participants were required to complete measures that assessed perceived quality of functional social support, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and subjective mental well-being.

Results: A multiple mediation analysis revealed that self-efficacy and self-esteem fully mediated the positive association between perceived functional social support and mental well-being.

Conclusions: The implications of these results are that social interventions, which aim to facilitate the delivery of functional social support, could enhance mental well-being via their positive effects on self-efficacy and self-esteem.

Background: Adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health have been well-documented, but only a few studies have characterized distinct trajectories of anxiety over time. Further, whether specific emotion regulation and coping efforts to manage pandemic distress predict these distinct trajectories remains unexamined.

Aims: The study characterized anxiety trajectories across the first year of the pandemic and identified emotion regulation and coping strategies that predict these classes of anxiety trajectories. A national sample of 1108 U.S. adults completed online surveys six times in the first year of the pandemic. Five emotion regulation and coping strategies were assessed (substance use, active, behavioral disengagement, positive reappraisal, and catastrophizing). Latent Growth Mixture Modeling (LGGM) analyses were performed to identify anxiety trajectory classes.

Results: LGMM revealed five latent classes: Resilience (consistently very low anxiety; 79.9%), Moderate Anxiety (8.8%), Chronic High Anxiety (4.6%), Improving-Worsening Anxiety (3.2%), and Worsening-Improving Anxiety (3.5%). Using substances, disengagement, and catastrophizing to deal with COVID-19 stress consistently predicted trajectories higher in anxiety as did active coping, while positive reappraisal was unrelated to trajectory class membership.

Conclusions: These results identify emotion regulation and coping strategies that appeared to exacerbate anxiety during the course of the pandemic.

Background: Service providers are experiencing mental health decline as they work to meet the needs of persons experiencing homelessness in a system that constrains their ability to help. Although moral distress is widely recognized in health care, the experience of moral distress in service providers working with people experiencing homelessness has not been explored in a scoping review.

Aim: To identify the range and nature of literature on moral distress among service providers working with persons experiencing homelessness.

Methods: We conducted a scoping review using Arksey and O'Malley five-stage framework.

Results: From the 2219 records yielded from our search, 40 studies were included in this review. Our narrative synthesis generated three distinct themes: 1) helping is part of our identity, it's who we are, 2) we are doing the best we can, but there are so many barriers, 3) it's more than we can take, we're not okay.

Conclusion: Service providers across studies were described as experiencing a high degree of moral distress in relation to constraints that impeded their ability to fulfil their moral value of helping.

Background: Despite increasing global awareness of mental health and illness, individuals with mental illnesses still experience stigma in many African countries. This stigma can be pervasive and evolving, which can negatively impact care and quality of life.

Aims: This study aims to present a comprehensive overview of the prevalence, experiences, and consequences of mental illness stigmatisation in African countries, and offer recommendations for addressing this issue.

Methods: A systematic review of qualitative studies investigating mental health stigma was conducted, involving a thorough search of seven databases-APA PsycINFO, CINAHL, MEDLINE, APA PsycArticles, African Index Medicus (AIM), ScienceDirect, and Embase-for studies published between 2013 and 2023.

Results: Thematic analysis of 28 studies identified five main themes (prevalence of stigma, types of stigma, causes of stigma, experiences of stigma, and impacts of stigma) and seven subthemes.

Conclusion: Providing support to mental health service users and their families, as well as implementing policies and strategies to reduce mental health stigma, is crucial to minimising the prevalence and impact of mental health stigma.

Background: Depression is a very common disorder and comorbidity. Primary care providers are the first medical contacts to diagnose and treat depression. Video calls are emerging communication tools to deliver psychological interventions.

Aims: To examine the effectiveness of videocall delivered psychological interventions to treat depressive symptoms in adult patients in primary care, as well as a systematic assessment of implementation factors.

Methods: We conducted a systematic literature search in PubMed Central, Embase, PsycInfo, Cochrane Library and the WHO COVID-19 database and included randomized controlled trials only. Two authors screened the studies and assessed the risk of bias independently (Cochrane RoB tool). We followed the PRISMA guidelines. The study protocol was published in PROSPERO (CRD42022295238). The results were synthesized narratively.

Results: Of 6.971 identified studies, we included six publications. Studies powered to detect clinically significant changes in primary outcomes, identified video calls to be effective for delivering complex psychological interventions in an integrated primary care setting.

Conclusion: Further research is needed to consolidate the findings on a larger scale and evaluate the effectiveness in comparison with alternatives such as telephone-delivered care. Results are promising and indicate the need for replication in larger studies as well as different health care settings.

Background: Adolescent mental health problems have increased in prevalence. Teachers' Mental Health Literacy (MHL) may play an important role in public mental health prevention approaches. This systematic review and narrative synthesis aimed to identify what is known globally about the extent of secondary school teachers' MHL and the types and effectiveness of MHL interventions for secondary school teachers.

Methods: PsycINFO, PubMed, ERIC, EBSCO-Psychological and behavioural sciences collection, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were searched to identify studies until 29/04/2024. Two independent reviewers screened the returns.

Results: Twenty eligible studies were reviewed. Most intervention studies were from high-income countries and used a psycho-educative approach. Pre-intervention, teachers' levels of MHL were mixed across MHL domains. Post-intervention, increases in mental health knowledge and attitudes and decreases in mental health stigma were reported. Low use of standardised MHL measures, lack of randomised controlled trials, and lack of follow-up data affect evidence quality.

Conclusion: Interventions to improve secondary school teachers' MHL can be effective, at least in the short term. Evidence quality needs to be improved to inform recommendations on whether they should be part of a public mental health approach for adolescents.