(PS5-B27) Facilitating Mental Health Treatment Seeking Among Distressed College Students: A Preliminary Randomized Control Trial of a Single-session Online Self-compassion Intervention

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a global mental health crisis amongst college students, a population already vulnerable to significant mental health problems (Blanco et al., 2008; Wang et al., 2020). Concerningly, only 18-36% of college students with significant mental health problems seek help in a year (Blanco et al., 2008; Eisenberg et al., 2011), leading campuses to develop initiatives to help students develop greater mental health literacy (Reavley et al., 2012). While informational, these initiatives fail to increase treatment-seeking desire (Reavley et al., 2014) which we suggest may be due to their failure to reduce a key barrier to treatment-seeking: shame (Eisenberg et al., 2009). Self-compassion involves orienting toward personal distress with care and a desire to alleviate it (Gilbert, 2005).  Self-compassion interventions reliably reduce shame by replacing inner-hostility with self-acceptance (Kelly et al., 2009). We therefore examined whether an intervention designed to promote self-compassion would be a more effective way to increase treatment-seeking intentions among distressed students. Participants (current N = 37; expected N = 90) were college students experiencing moderate to severe psychological distress who had not yet sought mental health treatment. While data collection is ongoing, the present sample was mostly first-year students (59.46%), women (78.38%), and racially diverse (i.e., 43.24% East Asian; 29.73% South Asian). Participants were randomly assigned to either a one-session control intervention (n = 13), self-compassion intervention (n = 12), or mental health literacy intervention (n = 12). All three interventions were delivered online and provided participants with basic information about mental health resources. The control intervention provided no additional content. The self-compassion intervention additionally instructed participants to reflect on a source of shame, connect with their suffering related to it, and then direct feelings of support and understanding toward their suffering. The mental health literacy intervention additionally provided students with didactic information about the symptoms and treatment of mental disorders. Participants completed measures pre-, post- and two-weeks after their intervention. ANCOVA analyses revealed no group differences in shame (p = .949) or in treatment-seeking intentions (p = .831) immediately post-intervention, controlling for pre-intervention levels. However, two weeks later, participants in the self-compassion intervention (M = 3.25, SD = 0.89) reported significantly higher intentions to seek treatment than those in the mental health literacy intervention (M = 2.00, SD = 0.94, p = .023). Treatment seeking-intentions did not differ between participants in the self-compassion intervention and those in the control intervention (p = .851). Similarly, there were no group differences in shame at the two-week follow-up (p = .949). Findings suggest that a brief self-compassion intervention may be more effective in promoting treatment-seeking intentions amongst distressed college students than a mental health literacy intervention. Further research is needed to elucidate the mechanisms underlying these observed effects.