UC Santa Barbara

As supporting youths’ mental health increasingly becomes a priority for school-based professionals, methods for identifying youth who may benefit from additional mental health supports are needed. Mental health has traditionally been defined from a deficit-based perspective, wherein mental health was assumed if youth were not experiencing psychopathology. Contemporary scholarship, however, increasingly asserts that the absence of mental illness is insufficient for mental health. Dual-factor models describe mental health as consisting of two separate yet interrelated constructs of well-being and psychopathology. Research using a dual-factor approach to examine youths’ mental health has most often used rationally determined cut points to define mental health groups differing along each of the well-being and psychopathology dimensions. In two studies, a dual-factor approach to mental health in adolescents was investigated. In Study 1, an alternate approach to classification, latent profile analysis (LPA), was used to empirically identify mental health subtypes of high school students as well as to examine the relation of mental health profiles identified in Grades 9 through 11 with Grade 12 indicators of academic and social-emotional well-being. Results yielded four mental health subtypes: complete mental health, moderately mentally healthy, symptomatic but content, and troubled. Students with profiles characteristic of higher levels of well-being and lower levels of distress reported higher grades, prosocial contribution to community, and life satisfaction, and less frequent symptoms of anxiety and depression, illustrating the validity of the LPA approach. In Study 2, the longitudinal stability of empirically-identified dual-factor mental health profiles was examined across Grades 9 to 12 using two cohorts of students. Similar to Study 1, LPA was used to empirically identify mental health profiles. Latent transition analysis (LTA) was then used to examine the stability of emerging profiles over the four academic years. An LTA model assuming full measurement invariance, non-stationary transitions, and controlling for cohort indicated that the complete mental health profile exhibited the greatest average stability followed by moderately mentally healthy and symptomatic but content profiles. The troubled profile exhibited the least stability. Taken together, the findings from both studies support further investigation of methods used to classify students mental health in school settings as well as regular monitoring of students’ dual-factor mental health (e.g., through universal screening) so as to accurately inform mental health promotion, prevention, and intervention efforts.