Exploring Complete Mental Health Screening Using Adolescent Self-Reports

This study comprises two separate papers that ultimately aim to create and support the use of a new school screening tool to identify student risk for a variety of school-based problems as well as identify their individual strengths. Complete mental health screening refers to a process by which the entire student body of a school is administered a screening tool in order to cast a wide net and increase the likelihood of identifying any student at risk for behavioral, social, emotional, or academic difficulties. By identifying student strengths as well as their risk for problems, schools are better aimed at leveraging the students' skills and informing their interventions in a way that can lead to better outcomes. Using a collection of pre-existing measures, a new measure was created and tested using a series of statistical analyses. The result of these analyses produced a 16-item complete mental health screening measure named the Total Wellbeing School Screening Tool (TWSST). Further study was conducted to support the use of this measure in a new sample with promising results. The TWSST is a promising research tool to explore further validation studies, and a useful option for schools to use as a school screening tool.