Development of a Mental Health Literacy Scale of Depression
Poster B14, Tuesday, October%209, 11:30%20am%20-%201:00%20pm, Essex%20Ballroom
Soshi Kodama1, Koichi Shido1, Nozomu Ikeda2; 1Health Sciences University of Hokkaido, 2Sapporo Medical University
Mental health literacy (MHL) is defined as “knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders, which aid their recognition, management, or prevention” by Jorm. MHL includes six components currently not considered in the MHL scale of depression. The aim of this study was to develop a MHL scale of depression based on the aforementioned definition. We conducted 1) a literature review and 2) interviews of depressed patients and extracted 78 questions satisfying all MHL components. A questionnaire survey was conducted on 966 undergraduate students. Both exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were applied for validation and provided two goodness models. Model 1 consisted of two factors (recognition of depression symptoms and onset and suicide possibility) with 8 questions (goodness-of-fit index [GFI]=0.974, adjusted GFI [AGFI]=0.951, confirmatory fit index [CFI]=0.963, root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA]=0.064, Akaike's information criterion [AIC]=127.904). Model 2 consisted of three factors (recognition of depression symptoms, etiology of depression and onset and suicide possibility) with 12 questions (GFI=0.953, AGFI=0.929, CFI=0.938, RMSEA=0.064, AIC=308.272). Based on the AIC value, we estimated that Model 1 was better. Adequate Cronbach’s alpha (α=0.73) and test-retest (intraclass correlation coefficient=0.77) levels attested the reliability of this model. However, the health locus of the control scale used to validate the criterion and the validity were not correlated (r=-0.11, P<0.01). In the future, we will investigate the relationship between the MHL of depression and actual help-seeking behavior using this new scale.
Topic Area: Mood Disorders