| Abstrakt: |
Background: Schools are a prime setting for the delivery of universal and targeted mental health interventions. Current school-based mental health interventions may not be developed to fully meet student mental health needs and co-production is needed to understand what young people really want. Despite this, research on school-based mental health interventions does not consistently engage in co-production, involving stakeholders, such as young people and schools, in the decision-making, development, evaluation and/or implementation stages. This highlights that transforming the development of school-based mental health interventions is crucial to meeting all stakeholders' needs. In this paper, we aim to briefly review an approach to co-production that can be used when conducting research on school-based mental health interventions that centre stakeholder voices to drive meaningful change. We describe a case study to showcase this approach. Main body: We highlight recommendations and important elements to consider for each stakeholder when engaging in different levels of co-production, including young people, teachers, and schools. We provide practical examples of how this may look like in practice, theoretical underpinnings, and impact on outcomes. Our case study of co-producing a talk to improve mental health literacy in secondary school students is highlighted to demonstrate how a group of young people, teachers, epidemiologist, psychiatrist, and researchers can work together to develop school-based mental health interventions. Conclusion: Co-production can be successfully conducted amongst researchers and stakeholders to develop school-based mental health interventions. Changes made to the talk were guided by synthesis of feedback that aligned with the balanced needs, perspectives, and opinions of all stakeholders. The use of this co-production approach in research on school-based mental health interventions with young people, teachers, and schools has important implications for research, service provision, and stakeholder empowerment. Plain English Summary: The aim of our project is to improve knowledge and awareness of mental health problems among young people by developing an interactive workshop and talk, which will be delivered in secondary schools. Our focus is on depression, anxiety and self-harm. These are the most common mental health problems experienced by young people, rates are rising, and they are leading causes of suicide. Evidence suggests that co-production needs to be at the core of the development of school-based mental health interventions. We recommend how and why we should work together with young people, teachers, and schools to co-produce school-based mental health interventions. For our project, we worked together with groups of young people, teachers, schools, clinicians, and researchers to develop the interactive talk. We met with them regularly to discuss what they think is important to include in the talk, how we present it in the talk, and any ways to improve it. Our experience was a successful one but as a field, we need to consider critically how we can carefully and productively engage in co-production to improve mental health research and young people's mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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