Randomized Trial of a Brief, Transdiagnostic, Guided Self-help Intervention for University Students Who Are Behind on Their Coursework and Experience Distress

The university period usually overlaps with a particularly challenging developmental period of transition to adulthood, and a suite of significant and durable stressors, such as independent living, financial problems, interpersonal relationships with family or peers and academic pressure. Consequently, it represents a critical high-risk period for the onset of mental disorders, including anxiety, depression, substance abuse, self-harm and suicidal behavior. In the World Mental Health Surveys, a set of large-scale cross-national community epidemiological surveys, the 12-month prevalence of any mental disorder among university students was around 20%. Further compounding the problem, a large survey on first year university students in high-income countries showed that approximately 36% of students with any lifetime mental disorder or with suicidal thoughts or behaviors had received any treatment for emotional problems in the past year. Lack of awareness of the problem and fear of stigma might account for the low treatment uptake in university students.

Furthermore, university psychological counseling services, when available, have limited impact, due to their isolation from the general health care system and to the heterogeneity of the interventions offered. An alternative, innovative framework to promote access to mental health interventions while minimizing the risk of stigmatization is "indirect prevention". This approach includes interventions that address vulnerability factors increasing the risk of mental disorders while at the same time representing salient, everyday problems that students are motivated to change. In a diathesis-stress model, mental disorders are triggered by the interaction between individual vulnerability factors and stressors such as academic challenges.

A promising candidate intervention is Self-Help Plus (SH+), developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and intended to help individuals cope with distress stemming from a diversity of stressors. In its individual online version called Doing What Matters in Times of Stress, SH+ might be particularly suitable for university students given its easily implementable structure (5 sessions of guided self-help), its contents (focused on self-compassion, coping with stress and personal values), and delivery format (not requiring specialized training). Only two randomized trials so far employed SH+ as a preventive intervention, targeting refugees in Western Europe and Turkey. This is the first attempt to test SH+ as a preventive intervention on university students.