Category: mental health literacy

Children’s Definitions of Mental Health: a Qualitative Content Analysis

ilariamontagniLeave a comment

How do school-age children define “mental health”? What are their beliefs and knowledge about mental diseases and psychological well-being?

Alix Joseph de Cazanove and I carried out a field study to address these questions.

📖 The results are published in the Child Indicators Research journal Springer Nature

🧠 The majority of children wrote that mental health is the health of the brain.
⁉️ The second most frequent response was that children merely do not know what mental health is.

Link of the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12187-025-10296-w

Vidéo interactive sur la Santé Mentale des Enfants

ilariamontagniLeave a comment

⭐ “Être bien ensemble” ⭐ est une vidéo interactive pour sensibiliser les enfants à la nécessaire lutte contre la stigmatisation.

Grâce à un financement de Santé publique France nous avons pu réaliser un outil de prévention et de promotion de la santé mentale qui a comme objectif de faire découvrir aux enfants l’importance de l’entraide face aux difficultés psychiques.

📹 La vidéo est en ligne, et disponible en 4 langues 🇫🇷 🇮🇹 🇬🇧 🇪🇸

Réalisation : The Ink Link / Emmanuelle Perez / Audrey Mussat

Illustrations : Edith Chambon

Montage vidéo : Claire Lageyre

Voix : Alix Joseph-de Cazanove

Avec les contributions de :

Rebecca Shankland

Reda Salamon

Annabelle Martin

Massimiliano Orri

Marc Laporta

Chelsea Cuffaro / Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health – Douglas Mental Health University Institute 

https://www.theinklink.org/fr/projets/etre-bien-ensemble

TEACH-MHE: School Teachers’ Mental Health Literacy

ilariamontagni1 Comment

School teacher candidates’ mental health literacy: an exploratory experimental study

Children’s mental health is a public health issue. Teachers play a key role in identifying children’s socio-emotional and/or cognitive difficulties as well as in promoting mental health at school. However, they are not equipped to (1) understand how to promote and maintain good mental health; (2) understand mental illnesses and their treatments; (3) reduce stigma against mental illness; and (4) encourage and facilitate seeking help among children. These four dimensions correspond to the theory of mental health literacy concerning children, which is at the interface between public health, information and communication sciences, educational sciences and psychology.

© Gautier Dufau – université de Bordeaux

The TEACH-MHE project has the dual objective of (1) developing and validating a scale that measures the mental health literacy of teacher candidates concerning children, and (2) cocreating and testing an intervention aimed at improving the mental health literacy of teacher candidates concerning children.

Based on existing measurement tools, we will develop the TEACH-MHE scale which will then be completed by students at the INSPÉ Nouvelle Aquitaine (Institute of Education, University of Bordeaux). A subgroup will answer the items twice according to the rules of psychometrics. Collected data will make it possible to statistically validate the scale. This will be the first scale in French on teachers’ mental health literacy concerning children. At the same time, through a qualitative survey (semi-structured interviews), we will collect the needs of teacher candidates with the aim to cocreate an intervention (an online course) that aims to improve their knowledge about children’s mental health. The intervention will be tested within the University of Bordeaux. This will also be the first online pilot intervention in the French-speaking world concerning teachers’ mental health literacy.

Partners: Marthe-Aline Jutand, Magali Boizumault, Stéphanie Constans, Emilie Poission, Amandine Baude

The project is funded by the University of Bordeaux (AAP RIE 2024)

Click HERE for more information in French on the website of the University of Bordeaux.