Four years on, a youth mental health course still helped. Slightly.
People say: “Do youth mental health programs still help years later?” We read the study.
Randomised controlled trial (RCT). 584 people. baseline 2019 (intervention 2018-2019); follow-up interviews May-October 2023, about 4 years after the intervention.
A trial. Chance decided who did what.
Who: youth aged 18-30 in three rural districts of Sierra Leone (Kailahun, Koinadugu, Kono), out of school, not working full time, with elevated emotion-regulation/functioning problems at entry; mean age 24.8, 47.4% women, 74.4% ever attended school
- Depression symptomslowervs no program
- Better daily functionno clear4 years on
- Beat business-only?unclearno clear gap
More to know, from our read of the paper:
- Effects are small (depression d = -0.11, combined anxiety/depression d = -0.10); anxiety alone was borderline (CI -0.07 to 0.00)
- No sustained effect on daily functioning (WHODAS) or emotion regulation (DERS): 'no clear change', not 'no effect'
- Rural, older, lower-education youth in Sierra Leone; may not generalise to urban youth or other countries
- Follow-up is a random subsample (584 of 1,151); COVID-19 stressors were asked retrospectively at the follow-up
- Symptoms measured with interview questionnaires (HSCL-25, WHODAS-12, adapted DERS), i.e. self-reported
A small benefit lasted. Which part helped is unclear.
In a cluster-randomized trial in three rural districts of Sierra Leone, young adults aged 18 to 30 got a 12-session group mental health course plus business training, business training only, or nothing. Four years later, 584 randomly chosen participants were interviewed again. The course-plus-business group still had slightly fewer depression symptoms than the no-program group, a small effect. Daily functioning and emotion regulation showed no clear change, and the combined group was not clearly different from the business-only group.
Van Den Boom W, Noon K, Yang S, Menart R, Momoh F, Bah AJ, Placencio-Castro M, Betancourt TS (2026). Sustained mental health outcomes from the youth readiness intervention: A four-year effectiveness follow-up of a hybrid type II trial in Sierra Leone. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
Design: Randomised controlled trial (RCT) · four-year follow-up of a cluster-randomized trial (hybrid type II implementation-effectiveness; matched geographic clusters randomized to 3 arms), randomly selected subsample; symptoms measured by interview questionnaires
DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.70158
Goals:
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