Abstract
Mentalhealth literacy is an essential part of preventing mental illnesses. However,the quality of mental health literacy measures remain unknown, as does itsuniversality across various settings and populations.
Few studies focus onmeasures aimed at assessing mental health literacy of children and adolescentsthat covers knowledge about mental health and mental disorders, strategies todecrease stigma, and enhancement of help-seeking efficacy. The present study aimedto conduct a systematic search to find available measures of mental healthliteracy of children and adolescents under the age of 19 years.
The followingdatabases were searched: Web of Science, PubMed, PsycINFO, MEDLINE, ERIC andCINAHL Plus. COSMIN checklist was applied to assess the methodological qualityof each study.
Twenty-one mental health literacy measures were identified in 18studies. The quality of the studies ranged between very good and inadequate.Sixteen measures were universal, implying that they were not diagnosticspecific.
Two measures scored a full score of four on mental health literacycomprehensiveness. This review revealed that the overall quality of themeasurement properties was mixed, that there are limited measures available toevaluate non-diagnostic-specific mental health literacy in universalpopulations of children and adolescents, and that measures fail to cover keymental health literacy components of knowledge of mental health, illness,stigma, and help-seeking.
New measures should be developed to cover this gap inthe field of child and adolescent mental health.