A study on mental health literacy and attitude towards help seeking behavior among pre-university college lecturers in Udupi taluka, Karnataka.

There is a great need for awareness regarding mental health in India as mental health issues are still considered taboo. Mental health issues among late adolescents need to be addressed carefully. Since less engagement is available to detect and help late adolescents struggling with mental health issues, it poses a more significant problem in adulthood. During adolescence, recognizing and intervening in mental health can prevent it from advancing into a mental health disorder in adulthood. Educators have both near and potentially valuable information on the students’ social interaction and academic performance changes. Therefore lecturers have unique and strategic opportunities to detect behavioral changes in students. Thus the attitude of lecturers towards mental health problems and their knowledge to help students with mental health becomes an essential tread in facilitating student mental health. Finding from this study can create a piece of evidence or information to assist a strategic plan addressing mental health.

This study will be conducted at pre-university colleges of Udupi taluka in Karnataka. The pre-university college comprises class eleven and class twelve of arts, science, and commerce streams. Preuniversity colleges are randomly selected for the study purpose. After obtaining the necessary permission from the pre-university college authorities and clearance, the study will proceed by getting the contact details of the participants from the respective college authorities. The mode of data collection will be face-to-face or online based on covid 19 pandemic situation at the time of data collection. Prior appointments will be obtained from the survey participant. On the scheduled appointment, after receiving consent validated self-administered questionnaire will be used to collect the participant’s response. In the telephonic survey, after attaining appointment and consent, the questions will be asked as per the validated questionnaire and the principal investigator will record the answer. . Data will be analyzed using jamovi 1.6.3 software and excel.

This study will assess the mental health literacy among pre-university college lecturers in Udupi taluka along with:

• The attitude towards mental disorders

• Help-seeking behavior of the participants

This study is an humble attempt to generate evidence on mental health literacy, help-seeking behavior, and attitude towards the mental illness of Pre-university College lecturers for future interventions.