
Student mental health & performance requires resilience
Student mental health & performance requires a platform of resilience to be truly preventative & that means a different approach to mental health in school.
Anxiety and stress highlight the earliest forms of poor mental health in our community. Economically, 12.8 million working days are lost every year, resulting in essential challenges around mental health, productivity and wellbeing. At The Resilience Development Company, we believe that we have the ability and an obligation to help.
As we continue to contribute our time, capabilities and unique approach to make the world a better place, we are proud to share this look at how our programme is tackling pressing challenges and has created change that matters.
In a sample size of 900 people experiencing our resilience training:
900 working adults, parents and young people completed a 7-item validated questionnaire (GAD-7) routinely used across Primary Care and Mental Health settings to measure symptoms of excessive, exaggerated anxiety and worry. All participants were unaware of the significance of the questionnaire and were accessing our programme in the workplace or school.
Using the GAD-7 questionnaire the group were segmented into:
As a direct result of the programme this changed to:
Resilience As A Platform For Success Without Sacrificing Wellbeing
The Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD–7) questionnaire is a seven-item, self-report anxiety questionnaire designed to assess anxiety levels during the previous 2 weeks. It’s used for screening and monitoring symptom severity but does not replace a clinical assessment and diagnosis.
Our results highlight the everyday existence of these symptoms in a random sample of the population. Anxiety and stress are arguably the earliest forms of poor mental health in our community. We use GAD-7 to demonstrate a reduction in the indicators. It’s used as part of our on-line anonymised programme evaluation and all data is provided for observation only.
Everyday people experiencing our programme. That ranges from students, professionals and parents. We work with a diverse range of organisations and so the data includes people such as Prison officers, Emergency Services, Government, senior executives, teachers and office workers.
We measure many outcomes in our programmes such as stress, resilience, productivity, adaption to change, optimism and self-efficacy. GAD-7 is just one aspect of wellbeing and performance in which we make a measurable and significant difference.
Whilst an oversimplification, we find segmenting health at a population level into thriving, surviving and suffering is useful for discussion. To do this, GAD-7 scores are converted into:
Based on the GAD-7 existing framework, cut off points of 5,10 and 15 interpreted as representing mild, moderate and severe levels of anxiety.
Student mental health & performance requires a platform of resilience to be truly preventative & that means a different approach to mental health in school.
Do your boardroom discussions typically focus on targets, shareholder value, margins, five-year plans, quarterly results, headcount and competition and marketing plans? And ignore the elephant in the boardroom – stress?
The message that we can work harder and be better at everything can leave us feeling like work controls us rather than we control work. And that’s not good for your resilience.