Youth suicide rates have consistently risen over the past decade, and stigma related to mental health may create a barrier to young people seeking help. Schools are a common intercept point for mental health and suicide prevention programming. Hope Squad, a school-based, peer-to-peer, suicide prevention program, uses trained and mentored students…

Clinics and community-based organizations (CBOs) are priority settings for implementing the evidence-based National Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP). Both program settings present theoretical advantages and disadvantages for engaging and helping populations most at risk for diabetes achieve lifestyle change goals. To date, few studies have…

Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among adolescents, globally. Though post-primary, school-based suicide prevention (PSSP) has the potential to be a key strategy for preventing adolescent suicidal thoughts and behaviours (STBs), there are persisting challenges to translating PSSP research to practice. Intervention and contextual factors…

In 2019, Native youth had the highest rate of teen pregnancy of all racial/ethnic groups. "Respecting the Circle of Life" (RCL) is one of the first evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs for Native teens and there is interest in replicating the program across tribal communities. To inform replication, it is important to…

Youth in foster care are more likely than their peers to require mental health supports to promote their well-being, and this level of need has likely been heightened by individual, familial, system-level, and societal factors arising during the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes have simultaneously produced a shortage in the supply of available…

Background: Most suicide prevention programs focus on increasing knowledge regarding the problem of suicide, yet many fail to include information on the science and application of means reduction approaches. In an attempt to address this gap in practice, the Counseling on Access to Lethal Means (CALM) program was developed to educate clinicians on…

Emerging literature has highlighted the importance of discerning general and strategic organizational context (OC) factors (e.g., leadership and climate) and their interaction effect on individual implementation behaviors (e.g., attitudes toward evidence-based practices; EBPs) in youth mental healthcare. This study aimed to examine how leadership…

The School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS), a nationally representative survey of U.S. K-12 public schools, is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. SSOCS collects detailed information from public schools on the incidence, frequency, seriousness,…

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic elevated mental health needs among students. As such, in 2022 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) introduced the Comprehensive Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Policy to deliver mental health awareness and services to all pK-12th grade students. While transitioning back to in-person learning, an evaluation was…

This pilot study investigated the effectiveness of Healthy Minds, Healthy Schools (HMHS), a universal school cognitive-behavioral therapy program aimed at improving anxiety and emotion regulation. Using a quasi-experimental design with open assignment to groups, elementary students were assigned to either the intervention (n = 186) or comparison…

Background: There is a well-documented need for more responsive promotion and prevention programming for young immigrants and refugees in the context of mental health and healthy development. Incorporating the voice of newcomers in the development of promotion and prevention efforts could assist in producing culturally-relevant materials and…

Background: Addressing school violence is an important public health goal. To assess the role of school mental health curricula in violence prevention, we evaluated effects of an anti-stigma curriculum on violence victimization/perpetration. Methods: An ethnically/socioeconomically diverse sample of 751 sixth-graders (mean age 11.5 years) across…

Background: Children within historically disadvantaged non-Western South African communities are considered as particularly vulnerable to the development of anxiety problems. Although the need for accessible mental health interventions is evident, this need has remained unmet in a country with extreme socio-economic disparities and a lack of…

With the beginning of the Corona pandemic at the beginning of 2019 and its rapid spread, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was among the countries that moved very quickly to address this matter. All state institutions played the role related to them. Saudi Ministry of Health launched an intensive package of warning, awareness, and guidance in the form…

Objective: In this paper, we describe an approach to engage young children in evaluating the impact of "La Vida Buena," a community health worker-led childhood obesity intervention for Latino children aged 5-8 years. Design: This paper describes the collaborative process used to pilot, refine, implement and evaluate evaluation…