PRESENCE - Madhya Pradesh

Overview

This program will deploy a universal resilience focused intervention for adolescents to protect against future mental health adversity, a sports-based intervention for life skills and prevention of substance abuse and school-embedded mental health promotion program through series of workshops focused on students, teachers and parents.

Rationale

India faces rising adolescent mental health burden, including anxiety, depression, and substance abuse.

Schools offer a key setting for early intervention programs. Our proposed initiative promotes adolescent mental health & wellbeing by:

- Fostering psychological resilience, enabling the adolescents to acquire essential skills to cope with stress and thrive in face of challenges.

- Use of sports-based strategies to learn skills of dealing with peer pressure and prevent substance use.

Mental health promotion workshops focused on adolescents, teachers, parents and other stakeholders to increase awareness and reduce stigma.

Progress till date.

The grant has been received in September 2024. Over the next 6 months we will undertake work under following workstreams -

· Workstream 1- involves a universal resilience program, based on 10 in-depth interviews with key informants, 7 focus group discussions with adolescents across India, and a survey validating the qualitative findings. We also conducted a component analysis of resilience interventions in LMICs. We are now triangulating the data to develop the intervention.

· Workstream 2: features a sports-based intervention on substance use, already tested in Goa, with a training manual for coaches and facilitators.

Workstream 3: focuses on developing workshop materials for training teachers, parents, and students on mental health, with content already identified and under development.