Mental health promotion programming in schools and community settings is an important part of a comprehensive mental health strategy. The goal of this study was to identify and explore meaningful classes of youth based on their pre- and post-intervention depression symptoms scores with 722 youth involved in a 15-week healthy relationships and mental health promotion program. We utilized latent class growth analysis to identify depression class trajectories, controlling for group clustering effects. A three-class solution identified high decreasing, moderate stable, and low stable trajectories. Gender, age, and reported experience of bullying victimization predicted trajectory class membership. The low stable class trajectory was associated with the highest positive mental health, followed by the moderate stable and the high decreasing trajectories. These results suggest that youth with the highest depression scores showed significant improvement in symptomatology over the course of the program.
Background: Approximately 40-70% of justice-involved youth have untreated mental health problems. There is no current research that directly compares the mental health profiles of youth involved in the justice system to that of inpatients and outpatients. The research reported is significant because it directly compares the needs of these population by use of the same suite of standardized assessment tools.
TweetPolicies can address the underutilization of immigrants' skills by targeting discrimination against ethnic and religious minority immigrants.
AbstractThe underutilization of immigrants' skills, particularly the skills of ethnic and religious minorities, is of considerable concern to policy makers because of its economic and social costs. Recent research suggests that discrimination may be contributing to this well-documented unemployment and underemployment of skilled minority immigrants. In particular, the ambiguity of immigrants' foreign-acquired skills and personal characteristics may provide a cover for the expression of bias toward immigrants who are religious and ethnic minorities. Experiments controlling for all other variables show that discrimination may influence both the hiring of minority immigrants and reactions to claims of employment discrimination by minority immigrants. Also, factors that reduce the ambiguity of minority immigrants' credentials and factors that suppress the expression of bias reduce these effects. These findings point to policy interventions that have the potential to improve the labor-market outcomes of skilled immigrants and contribute to host nations' economic and social outlooks. Interventions should focus not only on skilled minority immigrants and reducing the ambiguity of their credentials and skills but also on members of the host society and their motivation to control prejudiced reactions to minorities.
Objectives: Research has shown that children who experience abuse and neglect are at much higher risk of experiencing negative outcomes such as physical and mental health problems, social skill deficits, and poor quality of life. The goal of this paper was to examine the relationship between polyvictimization and risk of harm to self and others, taking into account both age and sex differences.
Methods: A total of 8980 participants (4156 with maltreatment history) were recruited from over 50 mental health facilities in Ontario, Canada. Group comparisons were completed to examine types of trauma experienced, and risk of harm to self and others.
Results: Among our sample, we found that 29% of children and youth had experienced multiple types of interpersonal trauma. We also found that while female children and youth who had experienced trauma were at greater risk of harm to themselves, males were at greater risk of harming others. Further, our results highlight that children and youth who had experienced multiple types of maltreatment, regardless of age or sex, were at the greatest risk of harm to self and others.
Implications: Findings from this research highlight that interpersonal trauma is multifaceted and add to existing evidence that there is a cumulative relationship between experiencing multiple types of maltreatment and risk in relation to harming oneself or others. Our findings underscore the importance of a background assessment that takes into account all forms of maltreatment in order to properly understand risk of harm and inform intervention.
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