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A whole of school intervention for personality disorder and self-harm in youth: a pilot study of changes in teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills

BACKGROUND: The school environment offers an ideal opportunity for early identification and intervention for youth with self-harm and complex mental health issues, such as borderline personality disorder (BPD). Yet, class teachers often report minimal knowledge, feeling ill-equipped to respond, and...

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Autores principales: Townsend, Michelle L., Gray, Annaleise S., Lancaster, Tanya M., Grenyer, Brin F. S.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6167835/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30305905
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40479-018-0094-8
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author Townsend, Michelle L.
Gray, Annaleise S.
Lancaster, Tanya M.
Grenyer, Brin F. S.
author_facet Townsend, Michelle L.
Gray, Annaleise S.
Lancaster, Tanya M.
Grenyer, Brin F. S.
author_sort Townsend, Michelle L.
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The school environment offers an ideal opportunity for early identification and intervention for youth with self-harm and complex mental health issues, such as borderline personality disorder (BPD). Yet, class teachers often report minimal knowledge, feeling ill-equipped to respond, and experience high levels of stress when exposed to such challenges. Research is required to understand how training and development activities led by school counsellors may enhance teacher attitudes, confidence and knowledge of self-harm and complex mental health issues, such as BPD. We aimed to explore the extent that a whole of school initiative might enhance capacity for early identification and intervention. METHOD: 18 secondary schools implemented a manualised program, Project Air Strategy for Schools. N = 400 class teachers (71.3% female, mean age 42 years) across city and rural locations were evaluated before and after program implementation on attitudes, knowledge and skills. RESULTS: Providing class teachers with additional training on complex mental health issues and associated behaviours such as self-harm was well received. Participants reported post-program improvements in their optimism (d = .35), confidence (d = .63), knowledge (d = .73) and skills (d = 0.67) in working with young people with complex mental health issues, such as BPD. CONCLUSIONS: Providing school counsellor led structured approaches, to help class teachers identify and respond to youth in distress, closed identified gaps. Results indicated improvements in class teachers’ knowledge and attitudes towards self-harm and BPD. The intervention also improved the capacity of schools to plan and implement strategies to reduce the impact of mental health problems on the young person and their peers. A stay-at-school psychological care approach was fostered by enhancing partnerships between class teachers and school counsellors.
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spelling pubmed-61678352018-10-10 A whole of school intervention for personality disorder and self-harm in youth: a pilot study of changes in teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills Townsend, Michelle L. Gray, Annaleise S. Lancaster, Tanya M. Grenyer, Brin F. S. Borderline Personal Disord Emot Dysregul Research Article BACKGROUND: The school environment offers an ideal opportunity for early identification and intervention for youth with self-harm and complex mental health issues, such as borderline personality disorder (BPD). Yet, class teachers often report minimal knowledge, feeling ill-equipped to respond, and experience high levels of stress when exposed to such challenges. Research is required to understand how training and development activities led by school counsellors may enhance teacher attitudes, confidence and knowledge of self-harm and complex mental health issues, such as BPD. We aimed to explore the extent that a whole of school initiative might enhance capacity for early identification and intervention. METHOD: 18 secondary schools implemented a manualised program, Project Air Strategy for Schools. N = 400 class teachers (71.3% female, mean age 42 years) across city and rural locations were evaluated before and after program implementation on attitudes, knowledge and skills. RESULTS: Providing class teachers with additional training on complex mental health issues and associated behaviours such as self-harm was well received. Participants reported post-program improvements in their optimism (d = .35), confidence (d = .63), knowledge (d = .73) and skills (d = 0.67) in working with young people with complex mental health issues, such as BPD. CONCLUSIONS: Providing school counsellor led structured approaches, to help class teachers identify and respond to youth in distress, closed identified gaps. Results indicated improvements in class teachers’ knowledge and attitudes towards self-harm and BPD. The intervention also improved the capacity of schools to plan and implement strategies to reduce the impact of mental health problems on the young person and their peers. A stay-at-school psychological care approach was fostered by enhancing partnerships between class teachers and school counsellors. BioMed Central 2018-10-02 /pmc/articles/PMC6167835/ /pubmed/30305905 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40479-018-0094-8 Text en © The Author(s). 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Townsend, Michelle L.
Gray, Annaleise S.
Lancaster, Tanya M.
Grenyer, Brin F. S.
A whole of school intervention for personality disorder and self-harm in youth: a pilot study of changes in teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills
title A whole of school intervention for personality disorder and self-harm in youth: a pilot study of changes in teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills
title_full A whole of school intervention for personality disorder and self-harm in youth: a pilot study of changes in teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills
title_fullStr A whole of school intervention for personality disorder and self-harm in youth: a pilot study of changes in teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills
title_full_unstemmed A whole of school intervention for personality disorder and self-harm in youth: a pilot study of changes in teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills
title_short A whole of school intervention for personality disorder and self-harm in youth: a pilot study of changes in teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills
title_sort whole of school intervention for personality disorder and self-harm in youth: a pilot study of changes in teachers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6167835/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30305905
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40479-018-0094-8
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