iheart Evidence & Impact Report
Evidence & impact of iheart programmes
There is a mental health crisis enveloping our young people.
Depression is a leading cause of illness and disability among adolescents, while suicide is the second leading cause of death in 15-29-year olds (WHO, 2020). Clearly, increasing access to mental health support for adolescents worldwide is a priority, yet barriers to accessing treatment include a lack of existing mental health services, disjointed dissemination of information and lack of scalable programmes. Significantly, the prevailing focus regarding young people’s mental health is on raising awareness and crisis intervention, as opposed to prevention and education. Research focusing on resilience-promoting interventions in young people indicates a dramatic shift from solely focusing on the child to a multilevel approach which takes into account the fact that the child’s main environments are between home and school (Matsopoulos and Luthar, 2020). Adopting a holistic approach to the wellbeing of
young people is based on understanding the importance of creating a multisystemic
resilience framework that includes parents, family, teachers and school leaders (TwumAntwi et al., 2019).
Teacher wellbeing is also a priority in the current environment as teachers are reporting high levels of stress, anxiety and depression. This is the leading cause of teacher sickness in England, contributing to over two million days of sickness absence a year in pre-Covid conditions (Department of Education, 2019). Moreover, teacher wellbeing is essential to support students and is an interchangeable dependency that mental wellness programmes need to encompass in their strategy implementation (Brady and Wilson, 2020). Existing research indicates that school-family partnerships offer a more consistent integration of wellbeing strategies which influence and improve the wellbeing of our children (MacArthur et al., 2018).
Read more in the attached report.
iheart_EvidenceImpact-Sept2020
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