Nicola Sarah Hawkins
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Nicola Sarah Hawkins
@nic-s-h.bsky.social
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lucyfoulkes.bsky.social
For me, these new findings are exceptionally useful for suggesting we should stop universal MH interventions in schools, and focus on one-to-one, targeted and directed interventions instead. @jackandrews.bsky.social and I argue this is more detail below

doi.org/10.1111/camh...
Debate: Where to next for universal school-basedmental health interventions? Time to move towardsmore effective alternativesJack L. Andrews & Lucy FoulkesDepartment of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UKThere is an urgent need to improve mental health outcomes among young people. One approach taken toaddress this problem has been the design and delivery of universal school-based prevention, based on thera-peutic models such as CBT and mindfulness. Such interventions are delivered to groups of young people, irre-spective of risk or need. However, in this commentary, we argue that the initial appeal of universalinterventions has not been supported by the evidence: universal school-based prevention is less effective thantargeted approaches, often leads to null or unsustained positive effects, has the potential to elicit negativeeffects and is not well liked by young people themselves. In addition, many young people in each classroomalready meet the criteria for a mental disorder, meaning that prevention approaches may not be appropriateor effective for this group. In this commentary, we respond to Birrell et al.’s (2025) paper by arguing that thefield should move away from universal prevention and instead invest our limited resources in the refinementand dissemination of interventions with a stronger evidence base, such as one-to-one, targeted and indirectapproaches.
April 25, 2025 at 8:30 AM