Detecting mental health problems or examining full mental health: Towards a new way to promote mental health in the school setting

Traditionally, psychology has focused on the presence of psychopathology and/or associated risk factors to justify early detection and intervention programs in the school setting. This approach to mental health is limited and reductionist, since mental health is more than the only presence of symptoms or related problems. In this applied session we review pre-existing programs that have used broader and more comprehensive approaches to examining mental health in the community setting par excellence that is the school. Below, we present our experience accumulated over the past 8 years in both primary and secondary school with children and adolescents. This approach is characterized by examining both the presence of symptoms related to psychological distress and psychological well-being, as well as including transdiagnostic risk factors such as perfectionism and rumination, among others and protective factors or personal resources such as emotional intelligence or socio-emotional competencies from the model of Covitality. Finally, we present our recommendation to configure a comprehensive evaluation protocol and recommendations for intervention based on social-emotional strengths, as well as some data that have been clinically, socially and educationally useful for guidance teams, policy makers, and the families and children evaluated.

Juan Carlos Marzo Campos is the Director of the Department of Health Psychology at the Miguel Hernández University of Elche and Full Professor in the Social Psychology Area. He is the Principal Investigator of the Covitality project. He is the author of 40 articles published in high impact journals and his research work has focused on the field of Organizational Psychology, Psychological Assessment -especially on socio-emotional aspects- and the Validation of Questionnaires.

José Antonio Piqueras obtained his degree in Psychology in 2000 from the University of Murcia, where he received a scholarship to university teacher education. In his predoctoral phase he studied at Montclair State University and the Maryland Center for Anxiety Disorders at the University of Maryland. In 2005 he defended his doctoral thesis, which evaluates a treatment for social phobia in adolescents, obtaining the extraordinary doctoral prize. In 2006 he joined the University of Alicante and one year later the Department of Health Psychology at the Miguel Hernández University. At the research level, his interest is focused on the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the infantile-juvenile population and on the application of new technologies for the evaluation and intervention of adolescent problems. Within the framework of this last line of research, he is carryied out a training stay in 2010 at the Virje University in Amsterdam with Professor Cujpers. He teaches Psychological Evaluation in the Psychology Degree and he is teacher of the Master in Psychological Therapy with children and adolescents, receiving the Outstanding Teacher Award in 2011. He has been Professor of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment at the University since 2012.