Publications by authors named "Jessica Schleider"

Objective: Loneliness is a global health issue, but current loneliness interventions are not scalable enough to reach many who might benefit from them. Brief online interventions could greatly expand access to evidence-based loneliness interventions.

Method: We conducted a preregistered three-armed trial ( = 908, ages 16-78) to compare three self-guided online interventions: a single-session intervention (SSI) for loneliness, a 3-week, three-session intervention for loneliness, and an active control supportive therapy SSI (https://ClinicalTrials.

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Objective: Self-guided digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) teaching empirically supported skills (e.g. behavioral activation) have demonstrated efficacy for improving youth mental health, but we lack evidence for the complex skill of cognitive restructuring (CR).

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This study investigated barriers and facilitators to mental health service use (e.g., interventions, educational programs) in caregivers of children with neurodevelopmental disorders and/or neurodevelopmental problems, as they experience high levels of distress and low help-seeking behaviour.

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Article Synopsis
  • Brief school-based mental health interventions show potential in improving access to support for youth, especially given rising mental health issues among young people.
  • A systematic review analyzed 81 studies involving 40,498 students, focusing on brief interventions (four sessions or less) conducted in school settings.
  • Results indicated statistically significant improvements in mental health and well-being outcomes at one month, six months, and one year after the interventions, suggesting a need for more research on optimizing these programs for practical use.
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Despite the well-known benefits of comprehensive sexual health education, the majority of school sexual health education curricula in the United States (U.S.) is non-comprehensive and excludes LGBTQ+ students.

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Autistic youth experience elevated rates of co-occurring internalizing symptoms. Interventions to treat internalizing symptoms in autistic youth are almost uniformly costly and time-intensive, blunting dissemination of intervention and highlighting the need for scalable solutions. One promising option is a relatively new class of evidence-based treatments, single-session interventions (SSIs), however, no study has examined SSIs for depression symptoms in autistic youth.

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Article Synopsis
  • A recent American Psychological Association Summit emphasized the need to shift psychological science and practice from focusing solely on individuals to addressing population-level impacts on mental health.
  • The transformation involves scaling effective individual-level interventions using modern delivery methods, innovating policy-driven community initiatives, and establishing a universal primary care system for mental health.
  • Key tasks include promoting scientific creativity, rigorous evaluation, and community accountability to develop a comprehensive strategy for public mental health.
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Depression is a major public health problem among adolescents and preadolescents in the United States. Clinical scientists have spent considerable resources designing and testing depression interventions. Some programs can prevent and reduce depression to a modest degree, while others show null or potentially adverse impacts on youth mental health.

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Objective: More than 200 million children and adolescents live in countries affected by violent conflict, are likely to have complex mental health needs, and struggle to access traditional mental health services. Digital mental health interventions have the potential to overcome some of the barriers in accessing mental health support. We performed a scoping review to map existing digital mental health interventions relevant for children and adolescents affected by war, to examine the strength of the evidence base, and to inform the development of future interventions.

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This commentary addresses the challenges in identifying consistent moderators and mediators of psychological treatments for eating disorders (EDs), as highlighted by McClure et al. (International Journal of Eating Disorders, 2023) in their systematic review. Specifically, we discuss the often-overlooked importance of temporal context (when an intervention is delivered), alongside sociodemographic and symptom type (for whom an intervention is delivered), in understanding and optimizing treatment engagement and effectiveness.

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Research on causal beliefs about mental illness-the beliefs people hold about what causes a particular mental illness, or mental illnesses in general-is split across a number of theories and disciplines. Although research on this subject has provided a number of insights and practical applications, the diversity of theories, terminology, and keywords makes it challenging for a new reader to gain a comprehensive understanding. We sought to address this by conducting a systematic scoping review of research on causal beliefs.

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Background: Research on mental illness labeling has demonstrated that self-labeling (identifying with a mental illness label, e.g., "I have depression") is associated with internalized stigma, maladaptive responses to that stigma, and lower quality of life.

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Purpose: What symptoms do people think constitute "depression"? In a mental health literacy framework, knowing more of depression's nine core symptoms (per formal psychiatric diagnostic criteria) is thought to help people identify and seek help for depression. However, the common-sense model of self-regulation suggests that more expansive beliefs about what symptoms constitute an illness may be maladaptive, whereby viewing symptoms as characterizing a disorder predicts greater functional impairment.

Methods: We collected data from = 281 U.

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Labelling specific psychiatric concerns as 'niche' topics relegated to specialty journals obstructs high-quality research and clinical care for these issues. Despite their severity, eating disorders are under-represented in high-impact journals, underfunded, and under-addressed in psychiatric training. We provide recommendations to stimulate broad knowledge dissemination for under-acknowledged, yet severe, psychiatric disorders.

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Background: Increasingly, college science courses are transitioning from a traditional lecture format to active learning because students learn more and fail less frequently when they engage in their learning through activities and discussions in class. Fear of negative evaluation (FNE), defined as a student's sense of dread associated with being unfavorably evaluated while participating in a social situation, discourages undergraduates from participating in small group discussions, whole class discussions, and conversing one-on-one with instructors.

Objective: This study aims to evaluate the acceptability of a novel digital single-session intervention and to assess the feasibility of implementing it in a large enrollment college science course taught in an active learning way.

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Background: Sleep problems are common in adolescents and have detrimental impacts on physical and mental health and daily functioning. Evidence-based treatment like cognitive behaviour therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is often hard to access, and adolescents may not engage in and adhere to longer, clinician-delivered interventions. Brief, self-guided, and accessible sleep interventions are needed.

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Background: Perceptions of personal attributes as less malleable are associated with more severe depression symptoms and less active coping in youth. Perceptions of depression itself as relatively fixed have been linked to more severe depression symptoms; however, it is not known how beliefs about depression relate to active and avoidant coping behaviors in particular.

Methods: We gathered information about beliefs about depression and activation and avoidance behaviors among 104 adolescents with high depression symptoms.

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The current project aims to identify individuals in urgent need of mental health care, using a machine learning algorithm (random forest). Comparison/contrast with conventional regression analyses is discussed. A total of 2,409 participants were recruited from an anonymous university, including undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff.

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Article Synopsis
  • Rural teens have less access to depression care compared to urban teens, but digital single-session interventions (SSIs) delivered via social media could help bridge this gap.
  • A study involving 2,322 adolescents found that while digital SSIs reached teens effectively, rural youths with minoritized racial/ethnic identities were underrepresented in social media advertisements.
  • Despite this, rural teens showed similar completion rates, acceptability, and depression symptom reductions from SSIs compared to urban teens, suggesting that social media dissemination of digital SSIs could improve mental health support access.
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Background: Mental health difficulties among university students have been rising rapidly over the last decade, and the demand for university mental health services commonly far exceeds available resources. Digital interventions are seen as one potential solution to these challenges. However, as in other mental health contexts, digital programs often face low engagement and uptake, and the field lacks usable, engaging, evidence-supported mental health interventions that may be used flexibly when students need them most.

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Purpose: Many adolescents struggle to access the mental healthcare they need. To increase access to mental health services, we must have a clear understanding of the barriers adolescents face from their own perspectives. This online mixed-methods study aimed to enhance understanding of access barriers by centering the perspectives of diverse adolescents who had recently tried and failed to access mental health support.

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