Expanding the Reach of Psychosocial Services for Youth: Untapped Potential of Mentor-Delivered Single Session Interventions

Abstract

At present, the mental healthcare system cannot meet the demand for services, and the need-to-access gap is widest among children and adolescents. Single session interventions (SSIs) or brief, intentional, and mechanism-targeted prevention and intervention programs have shown promise in increasing the reach of effective, evidence-based services, but a wide gap still remains due to other structural barriers (e.g., workforce shortages). The present paper calls for the coupling of SSIs and mentor-delivered programs as a promising future step to further overcome the inaccessibility of youth mental health services. Indeed, capitalizing on the advantages of mentoring relationships (e.g., the associated interpersonal benefits and mentors’ pre-existence in most community settings) has the power to complement and enhance the value of SSIs, and to expand the acceptability and reach of evidence-based mental health services. In this paper, we discuss the anticipated benefits of mentor-delivered SSIs from multiple perspectives, as well as cautionary considerations related to the proposed model. To conclude, we highlight necessary implementation considerations prior to deploying any systems change.

A meta‐analysis of the effects of after‐school programmes among youth with marginalized identities

“…Given the heightened rates of structural oppression (e.g., poverty, racism) as well as mental health, academic, and behavioural challenges among youth, recent research in the adjacent field of youth mentoring has been considering similar models in which mentoring programmes are re‐imagined as contexts for paraprofessionals (i.e., volunteer mentors) to apply evidence‐based care for youth (e.g., Christensen et al, 2020; Hart, Sung, McQuillin, & Schleider, 2021; Rhodes, 2020). It is noteworthy that ASPs yield almost identical overall effect sizes as mentoring programmes, but they serve more youth in a less expensive and more accessible way.…”