PINTAR-UTAR’s research findings inspire mental-health programme for teens

The pandemic significantly affected young people’s mental health with symptoms like depression and anxiety becoming prevalent among them and remains higher than pre-crisis levels, even with the reopening of the economy. Developing resilience and building character strengths of Malaysian adolescents needs immediate attention, to give them the ability to ‘bounce back’ when things go wrong.

In an effort to understand the critical mental health issues that lie among our young adolescents post-COVID-19 in Malaysia, PINTAR Foundation partnered with Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Kampar Campus to conduct a study on the state of Malaysian teens’ mental health and psychological well-being in order to develop an effective Psychosocial Preventive Intervention (PPI) programme. The quantitative survey is supported by the Ministry of Education and its agencies, subject matter experts (mental health professionals in Malaysia), and schools (teachers, counsellors, parents, and students).

The study saw optimistic responses from 518 students from 11 states in a quantitative study, along with 60 stakeholders from mental health professionals, educators, parents, adolescents, students, and youth social workers participated in the qualitative study.

Following which, results from the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) show that the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress had increased overall, in comparison to the data reported by the 2017 NHMS – suggesting an increase to 35% of students displaying moderate to severe levels of depressive symptoms; 55% students displayed moderate to severe levels of anxiety, and about 28% of students experienced moderate to severe levels of stress.

Factors contributing to the teenagers’ increased levels of depression, anxiety, and stress include being physically attacked, bullied, or assaulted, and frequent worrying. However, the study also found that social connectedness is an essential factor in reducing mental health difficulties amongst Malaysian adolescents. The above findings proved it was essential for the preventive psychosocial programme to include modules in improving interpersonal effectiveness skills in adolescents to build their protective factors against mental health issues. Other qualities that would help include developing teens’ ability in decision-making, problem solving, personal growth by building their potential or talent.

From the study’s conclusions, the newly developed psychosocial programme underwent a pilot test to 116 students from three schools in Perak and Kuala Lumpur. The programme consists of four sessions looking into Distress Tolerance Skills, Emotional Regulation Skills, Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills, and Self-Care Plan – informed by several strong evidence-based psychotherapeutic approaches, including dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and Program for Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS).

Upon the successful completion of the PPI programme, the team examined whether the programme benefited students with different risk status (i.e., healthy vs high-risk) differently, as well as the magnitude of change in the outcome variables were computed by subtracting pretest scores from post-test scores for all outcome variables. It was found that there were statistically significant differences between the magnitude of change between the healthy group vs high-risk across all variables except for anxiety symptoms. The results from the test suggest students who were at risk of depression, stress and poor social connectedness benefitted more from the programme as compared to their peers who were considered healthy.

Although preliminary, the programme showed positive effects in reducing stress levels, depressive symptoms, and improving social connectedness, where high-risk participants reported about 25% reduction of stress levels at post-test, conducted two weeks after the programme. Considering the brevity of the programme, this finding is very encouraging. Given that stress is a universal risk factor for various physical and mental disorders, our findings may have important implications in deterring the onset of more complicated mental health problems among adolescents.

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