Evidence for the effectiveness of a national school-based mental health program in Chile.

Objective: Skills for Life (SFL) is the largest school-based mental health program in the world, screening and providing services to more than 1,000,000 students in Chile over the past decade. This is the first external evaluation of the program.

Method: Of the 8,372 primary schools in Chile in 2010 that received public funding, one-fifth (1,637) elected to participate in SFL.

[Influence of bullying on the quality of life perception of Chilean students].

Background: Bullying has a negative impact on the perception of adolescents of their quality of life.

Aim: To analyze the association between being bullied and health related quality of life in Chilean adolescents.

Material And Methods: The bullying module of the KIDSCREEN 52 survey and the KIDSCREEN 10 survey to assess health related quality of life were applied to 7737 students aged 10 to 18 years.

Mental health predicts better academic outcomes: a longitudinal study of elementary school students in Chile.

The world's largest school-based mental health program, Habilidades para la Vida [Skills for Life (SFL)], has been operating on a national scale in Chile for 15 years. SFL's activities include using standardized measures to screen elementary school students and providing preventive workshops to students at risk for mental health problems. This paper used SFL's data on 37,397 students who were in first grade in 2009 and third grade in 2011 to ascertain whether first grade mental health predicted subsequent academic achievement and whether remission of mental health problems predicted improved academic outcomes.

Mental health matters in elementary school: first-grade screening predicts fourth grade achievement test scores.

The objective of the study was to evaluate whether mental health problems identified through screens administered in first grade are related to poorer academic achievement test scores in the fourth grade. The government of Chile uses brief teacher- and parent-completed measures [Teacher Observation of Classroom Adaptation-Revised (TOCA-RR) and Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC-Cl)] to screen for mental health problems in about one-fifth of the country's elementary schools. In fourth grade, students take the national achievement tests (SIMCE) of language, mathematics and science.