Please note this application is under active development. If you spot any errors or something isn't working, please contact us at evidence.service@wales.nhs.uk.
Review of reviews
The aim of this review is to identify which interventions improve college and university students’ mental health and well-being.
It will address the following review questions:
1. What is the current evidence on interventions to improve the general mental health and well-being of college and university students?
2. What does the evidence tell us about the effectiveness of current interventions, and what interventions are likely to be the most effective?
This review of reviews identified a range of interventions for student mental health and well-being, including mindfulness-based interventions, technology-delivered interventions, cognitivebehavioural interventions, psychoeducation interventions, recreation programmes, relaxation interventions, educational/personalised mail feedback interventions, acceptance and commitment training interventions, setting-based interventions, suicide-prevention interventions, and the Tomatis method. Mindfulness-based interventions, CBT, and technology-delivered interventions all appear to be effective when compared to a passive controls (receiving no intervention). There is some evidence to suggest that the effects of CBT-related interventions are sustained over time. Recreation programmes were also found to be effective. In one high quality review, while both CBT and MBIs were found to be effective, other interventions (i.e., art, exercise, and peer support) were found to be more effective. The review of reviews only located single reviews of evidence on acceptance and commitment training interventions (Howell & Passmore, 2018), setting-based interventions (Fernandez et al., 2016), and suicide prevention interventions (Harrod et al., 2014) where these interventions were all shown to be effective. However, it should be noted that some of the reviews (e.g., Howell & Passmore, 2018) only included a small number of studies with small sample sizes, meaning their findings should be viewed with some caution. The review-level evidence suggests that psychoeducation interventions are not as effective as other intervention forms such as mindfulness-based interventions, cognitive-behavioural interventions, relaxation interventions, and meditation. In addition, the effects of psychoeducation interventions do not appear to sustain over time.
The review-of-reviews located a large body of evidence on specific interventions such as mindfulness and cognitive-behavioural interventions. The evidence suggests that these interventions can effectively reduce common mental health difficulties in the higher education student body. Evidence on other types of intervention was, however, limited. Currently, it is not, therefore, possible to determine and rank which interventions work best, where and for whom, as this would require a larger body of evidence on certain intervention types, and comparative studies or reviews. The included reviews made no consideration of the distribution of the impacts of interventions (inequalities) for population sub-groups (e.g., by age, gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status); which is most probably a reflection of limitations in the current primary-level evidence. In addition, no evidence on upstream determinants of student mental health and well-being was located. A good quality primary evidence-base examining these areas needs to be developed and then systematically reviewed before confident conclusions can be drawn about what works best to sustain positive mental health and wellbeing in today’s diverse and growing post-secondary student population.