Addressing the college mental health crisis: Training students to become effective bystanders

This study examined the effects of three distinct interventions-self-efficacy, misperceptions, empathetic listening control-on college students' willingness to help a peer struggling with mental health issues. One hundred fifty college students (81 women, 67 men, 2 nonbinary) were randomly assigned to one of three intervention conditions. All three interventions contained information about the prevalence of mental health concerns among college students, symptoms of common mental health disorders, and exercises to increase participant engagement with the intervention content. Each intervention also contained a condition-specific component: self-efficacy, providing training in specific skills to intervene; misperceptions, correcting commonly held false beliefs about intervening; and empathetic listening control, providing steps for empathetic listening. All participants completed measures of attitudes and intentions toward bystander intervention immediately before the intervention and at a 3-month follow-up; they also completed measures assessing willingness to intervene at a posttest following the intervention. The results indicated that participants in the self-efficacy and misperceptions conditions reported less personal fear that intervening will hurt their relationship at follow-up than pretest. Moreover, groups of participants in the misperceptions condition reported a higher recognition of a need for action and higher moral courage at follow-up than at pretest. These findings suggest that brief online interventions focused on improving self-efficacy and correcting misperceptions about bystander intervention for mental health concerns can improve attitudes and characteristics that help college students intervene effectively. The discussion examines the implications of these findings for addressing the college mental health crisis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).