It’s Time to Bring Mental Health Literacy Education into the Postsecondary Curriculum

Abstract

In the last twenty years, research on post-secondary students’ mental health and well-being has grown substantially, with a dramatic increase in publications over the past decade. Likewise, concerns about declining mental health on our campuses have risen; the mental well-being of postsecondary students is now widely recognized as a major public health issue. Over the last two decades, Canadian higher education has largely addressed these concerns by promoting mental health awareness through extracurricular means. Critically, a new movement towards mental health literacy has emerged across the nation: not just supplementary outreach, but education embedded into the curriculum. To put recommendations into practice, in 2020, one of the authors [CZ] developed and taught an undergraduate course on mental health literacy with a class of 106 students. In the first offering, we conducted a pre-post study to examine if this new course would be associated with changes in mental health knowledge, stigma, and help-seeking. Of the forty students who participated in the study, ten completed measures at both the start (T1) and the end of the course (T2). Within-subjects analyses showed that students made significant gains from T1 to T2, with a large effect size, in terms of attitudes toward seeking mental health services. Feedback on the course was very positive, both in students’ ratings and their comments. Looking ahead, student well-being will depend on how institutions approach and engage with mental health literacy. We recommend firmly integrating mental health literacy education into the post-secondary curriculum.