MHFA Response Paper

A suitable intervention for children with mental health complications includes a variety of approaches to guide the individuals, including their families and communities, to the best health outcome. The complexity of determining an actual diagnosis from a false positive may be difficult, but necessary if the intervention seeks accreditation. Although MHFA provides positive intentions, there is room for incremental improvements to ensure the intervention is working at optimal capacity. There have been and currently are research efforts that evaluate the efficacy of MHFA on numerous features including effectiveness of MHFA training, perceived impact on knowledge and attitudes about mental health, influences of stigma on first aid actions taken by young people for mental health problems, impact …show more content…
One of the ongoing studies embraces a general evaluation of Mental Health First Aid using “four different methods including pre-training questionnaire, post-training questionnaire, and two follow-up questionnaires, (3 and 6 months)” (Anthony, Banh, Goldman, & Yoon, 2015). “Preliminary results suggest significant increase in knowledge, increased participant self-efficacy and confidence in performing MHFA actions, and 17% - 58% reported using MHFA when encountering individuals with mental health problems” (Anthony, Banh, Goldman, & Yoon, 2015). However, after overlooking the 2014 MHFA State Policy Tracking Chart, there seems to be an imbalance in disbursement of funding, confined differences in the target audiences, and a few states do not specify MHFA as being apart of their specific state bill. It’s relatively costly to maintain a qualified staff to train hundreds of