Each year, one in five adolescents experiences a mental disorder like depression or anxiety, and the rate is rising. Depression is a common mental disorder, one of the leading global causes of Disability Adjusted Life Years among adolescents, and can lead to learning, behavioural and social impairment, as well as comorbid cardiovascular disease and mental illness in adulthood. An intervention is needed that can protect adolescents from mental disorders, is accessible to all adolescents, and is cheap and easy to sustain. One such intervention is mental health promotion, which focuses on improving positive behaviors and characteristics that protect mental health. There is already a strong evidence base for treatment and indicated prevention approaches, but a lack of research on mental health promotion interventions. In low resourced settings like Nepal, interventions need to be short of duration, and be carried out by lay people in the communities to make them sustainable and feasible to implement on a broader scale. The aim of this study is to develop and test the feasibility and acceptability of an intervention that uses sports groups to engage and improve the mental health of adolescents in Nepal.
Any adolescent boy or girl aged 12-19 years
Adolescents in or out of school
Married or unmarried
Who lives in the study clusters
Participants who are unable to provide a written consent
People having severe mental illness or severe physical disability
Participants who are planning to move from the study sites during the study period
Parallel
sports based mental health promotion program
Other interventionsports related programs
Change in mental wellbeing of adolescents
Mental wellbeing is a marker of mental health promotion and defined as subjective evaluation of life satisfaction. This will be measured using the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale. The scale is scored by summing responses to each item answered on a 1 to 5 Likert scale where '1' indicates 'none of the time' and '5' indicates 'all of the time'. The minimum scale score is 14 and the maximum is 70 with with higher scores indicating a higher level of mental wellbeing.
Self-efficacy
Schwarzer General Self-Efficacy (GSE) Scale will be used to measure self-efficacy. For each item there is a four choice response scale where '1' indicates 'not at all true and '4' indicates 'exactly true'. The minimum scale score is 10 and the maximum is 40 with a higher score indicating a higher self-efficacy.
Self-esteem
Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) will be used to measure self-esteem. RSES is a 10-item scale that measure global self-worth by measuring both positive and negative feelings about the self. The scale is believed to be uni-dimensional. All items are answered using a 4-point rating scale format ranging from strongly agree '4' to strongly disagree '1'. The scale ranges from 0-30, with higher score indicating high self-esteem.
Emotion regulation
Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA) will be used to measure emotion regulation. It is a 10-item self-report measure consisting of two kinds of emotion regulation strategies, namely, cognitive reappraisal (CR) (6 items) and expressive suppression (ES) (4 items). It has a five points rating scale where '1' indicates 'strongly disagree', and '5' indicates 'strongly agree'. Higher scores on each scale indicate greater use of the corresponding emotional regulation strategy.
Depression
Depression Self-Rating Scale (DSRS) will be used to measure depression. DSRS has 18-items and the respondents are asked to score their experience of 18 common symptoms of depression in the past one week. It has a 3-point rating scale where '0' indicates 'not at all' and '2' indicates 'always'. The total score of DSRS ranges from 0 to 36 with higher score indicating severity of depression.
Click on the lead sponsor to view all of their trials.
Transcultural Psychosocial Organization Nepal
Lead sponsor
King's College London
Collaborator
