JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Anxiety, mood and substance use disorders have significant social and economic impacts, largely attributable to their early age of onset and chronic disabling course. It is therefore critical to intervene early to prevent these chronic and debilitating trajectories.

Objective:

This paper describes the study protocol of a CONSORT compliant randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the effectiveness of the Mind your Mate program, a mobile health (mHealth) peer intervention that aims to prevent mental health (focusing on anxiety and depression) and substance use problems in adolescence.

Methods:

Participants will consist of approximately 840 students (n = 60 students per grade, per school) from 14 New South Wales (NSW) high schools in Sydney, Australia. The study will be conducted with all students in Year 9 at the participating schools. Schools will be recruited from a random selection of independent and public schools across the NSW Greater Sydney Area using publicly available contact details. The intervention consists of one introductory classroom lesson, plus a downloadable mobile app that will be available to use for 12 months. Schools will be randomly allocated to receive; 1) the mHealth peer intervention, or 2) waitlist control (health education as usual). All students will be given web-based self-assessments at baseline, and 6- and 12-month follow-ups. The primary outcomes of the trial will be student self-reported use of alcohol and drug use, anxiety symptoms and depression symptoms, knowledge about mental health and substance use, motives for not drinking, and willingness to seek help. Secondary outcomes include positive wellbeing, quality of life, and impact of COVID-19 (coronavirus). Analyses will be conducted using mixed effects linear regression analysis for normally distributed data, and mixed effects logistic regression analyses for categorical data.

Results:

Compared to students in the control condition, students who receive the Mind your Mate peer intervention are anticipated to show significantly delayed uptake of substance use and less symptoms of anxiety and depression. Intervention students are also expected to demonstrate increased knowledge of mental health and substance use issues and display an increased willingness to seek help for these problems.

Conclusions:

The Mind your Mate study will generate vital new knowledge about the effectiveness of a peer support prevention strategy in real-world settings for the most common mental disorders in youth. If effective, this intervention constitutes a scalable, low-cost prevention strategy that has significant potential to reduce the impact of mental and substance use disorders. Clinical Trial: This trial is registered with the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials registry, ACTRN12620000753954.