Description

Nearly 14% of adolescents experience mental health disorders, many of which remain unrecognized and untreated. Anxiety disorders, affecting approximately 5.5% of adolescents aged 15-19, commonly emerge during childhood or adolescence and are linked to anxiety persisting into adulthood, increased risk of other disorders such as substance abuse and major depressive disorder, and significant impairments across life domains, including reduced quality of life and lower educational attainment. Despite these risks, adolescents often show reluctance to seek help, particularly when symptoms are more severe. Barriers to help-seeking include lack of mental health literacy, which prevents from recognizing the severity of one's condition or from identifying it as a mental health issue, and mental health stigma, leading adolescents to conceal their struggles. Interventions often overlook additional barriers such as shame and low self-confidence. Promising facilitators for overcoming these barriers include fostering self-compassion, involving kindness and understanding towards oneself in difficult situations, and promoting well-being across emotional, psychological, and social dimensions. Additionally, enhancing readiness to change and utilizing motivational interviewing techniques, based on the transtheoretical model stages of change, may further facilitate adolescents' engagement in help-seeking behaviors by increasing motivation and managing ambivalence.

Interventions aimed at promoting adolescent help-seeking have typically been universal, potentially limiting their effectiveness for adolescents with clinical or subclinical symptoms who require more targeted support to recognize their need for professional help. Selective and indicated interventions, specifically tailored to these adolescents, have shown greater long-term efficacy but remain underexplored. Most existing programs primarily address barriers such as stigma and mental health literacy. Web-based interventions, particularly those that are multicomponent (e.g., psychoeducation, quizzes, vignettes) and involve minimal professional contact, have been suggested as effective in overcoming barriers such as stigma and low mental health literacy. However, key facilitators such as self-compassion, readiness for change and motivational interviewing techniques are largely absent from existing interventions, even though web-based interventions targeting self-compassion or integrating motivational interviewing appear to enhance their well-being and adolescents' engagement with mental health care.

TOUCHminds targets these gaps through a multicomponent web-based intervention, combined with synchronous psychologist-led sessions, addressing both help-seeking intentions and behaviors. The investigators will also assess changes in post-intervention and during follow-up, as the stability of change has been rarely explored in previous works targeting help-seeking. Additionally, the investigators aim to include adolescents with subclinical symptoms, often overlooked in existing programs. Finally, mechanisms of change remain unclear, particularly whether reduced stigma or improved mental health literacy drive help-seeking. Study I (feasibility) will assess recruitment procedures, dropout rates, usage patterns, therapist fidelity, acceptability, usability, satisfaction, and preliminary effects on help-seeking, in the precursors (mental health literacy, stigma, self-compassion, readiness for change) of help-seeking and in well-being. Study II (RCT) will compare intervention groups (clinical, subclinical) with control groups across three moments. Expected results include increases in help-seeking intentions (both intervention groups), behaviors (intervention group clinical), precursors, and well-being, and changes in those precursors will explain shifts in intentions/behaviors over time.

All procedures were approved by the Directorate-General for Education and the Ethics Committee for Clinical Research of the University of Aveiro; all aplicable General Data Protection Regulation procedures were also througougly considered and implemented. Adolescents will be recruited in portuguese schools; adolescents and their guardians will receive full study information, confidentiality assurances, and will provide parental consent and adolescent assent, with no incentives. Screening comprises the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC) and a sociodemographic form; participants scoring above the mean will be invited to a Mini-KID diagnostic interview via videoconference to confirm inclusion/exclusion (i.e., include primary anxiety disorder and no diagnosis; exclude psychotic symptoms and suicidal risk). After completing the Mini-KID interview, the psychologist will complete the Clinical Global Impression - Severity scale (CGI-S) to provide a baseline assessment of psychopathology severity. Eligible participants will then be emailed to register to the platform, while adolescents outside criteria (e.g., psychotic symptoms, suicidal risk, other primary disorders) will be referred to school psychology services.