Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy for Medical Students

Medical students carry more depression, anxiety and burnout than their peers, and seek help less. This course was built to meet the priorities the AMA set for medical schools. Working directly with Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine over five years of research and collaboration, the course contains 26 modules and 131 documentary films featuring researchers, clinicians and medical students speaking from their own experience about mental health literacy, stigma, suicide prevention, disordered eating, trauma, and building resilience.

$125.00 · 5 hours

Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy

A Five-Hour Online Course for Medical Students

5 contact hours · Online ·

Description

Medical students carry increased mental health burden. Pooled prevalence estimates put depression at 28.0% and suicidal ideation at 11.1% among medical students (Rotenstein et al., 2016), anxiety at 33.8% (Quek et al., 2019) and burnout at 44.2% (Frajerman et al., 2019). A six-year longitudinal cohort of 1,595 students found that they report significantly more depression and anxiety symptoms than same-age peers, that suicidal ideation rises again in the final year, and that they use help-seeking coping strategies significantly less than the general population (Carrard et al., 2024). This five-hour online course is built for that gap.

Adapted from the core Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy framework, this version was adapted through five years of collaboration with Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine. The course carries 131 documentary films across 26 modules in four parts. Several modules were adapted specifically for medical students and cover impostor syndrome and stress that is specific to medical school. The content spans humanistic mental health literacy, stigma reduction, suicide prevention, disordered eating prevention, trauma and adverse childhood experiences, and strategies for building resilience and social-emotional skills. Featured in the modules are researchers, clinicians and medical students speaking from their own experience. The course addresses the priorities the American Medical Association set for medical schools: creating mental health awareness and suicide prevention programs, offering proactive interventions, and addressing mental health stigma (American Medical Association, 2016). It is available online through the Sharpen® platform as a 5-hour course.

Evidence base

Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy has been developed over 20 years and through 30 research studies and evaluations, 10 peer-reviewed publications and manuscripts, 44 national conference presentations, and through live prevention trainings. The curriculum was assembled from six years of platform data identifying the most requested and most used modules, on top of two decades of community-based participatory research, more than 50,000 post-program surveys and more than 100 documentary listening sessions, in collaboration with more than 25 researchers.

In an IRB-approved, grant-funded evaluation at a multi-campus osteopathic school in the Appalachian region during the 2024 to 2025 academic year, 54 medical students completed the course. Measured with the validated 35-item Mental Health Literacy Scale (O’Connor & Casey, 2015), scores rose from a pre-test mean of 135.30 (SD 10.85) to a post-test mean of 148.10 (SD 8.55), Cohen’s d = 1.41 (95% CI [1.03, 1.78]), p < .0001. Opening Minds stigma scores improved from 43 to 39.

Two further published evaluations cover the same platform in medical education. A process evaluation in Cureus found that medical students valued the experience, accessed the mental health screeners embedded in the program, used the platform to seek help and to learn more about mental health, and showed a decrease in stigma over the course of the study (Fadel et al., 2024). A RE-AIM analysis established the reach, adoption and implementation of the platform with undergraduate and medical students during COVID-19 (Berreta et al., 2023). The medical student program is supported by a three-year SAMHSA Garrett Lee Smith federal suicide prevention award, 2023 to 2026, at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, with Sharpen® founders as Co-Investigators.

Learning objectives

Summarize current research on mental health literacy and the four pillars it rests on
Describe the prevalence of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and burnout among medical students, and the barriers that keep this population from seeking help
Recognize how cultural and family stigma shapes whether a person seeks care, including the stigma specific to medical training and licensure
Explain how adverse childhood experiences and trauma affect the developing brain
Outline best practices in suicide prevention and disordered eating prevention
Apply coping, mindfulness and stress management strategies to the demands of medical school and clinical training
Identify strategies for starting the conversation with a struggling classmate or patient, and recent dissemination and implementation science best practices

References

American Medical Association. (2016). AMA adopts policies to support physician wellness and mental health [Press release]. https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-adopts-policies-support-physician-wellness-mental-health

Berreta, K., Nguyen, C., Stoner, A. M., Ridgeway, L., Wilson, A., Fadel, N., & Biber, D. (2023). A RE-AIM analysis of a mental health app for undergraduate and medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic: A retrospective cross-sectional study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(13), 6266. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20136266

Carrard, V., Berney, S., Bourquin, C., Ranjbar, S., Castelao, E., Schlegel, K., Gaume, J., Bart, P.-A., Schmid Mast, M., Preisig, M., & Berney, A. (2024). Mental health and burnout during medical school: Longitudinal evolution and covariates. PLOS ONE, 19(4), e0295100. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295100

Fadel, N., Stoner, A., Berreta, K., Wilson, A., Ridgeway, L., Biber, D. D., & Garner, H. (2024). A process evaluation of a mobile app for medical students aimed at increasing resilience and decreasing stigma in mental health. Cureus, 16(6), e63054. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.63054

Frajerman, A., Morvan, Y., Krebs, M.-O., Gorwood, P., & Chaumette, B. (2019). Burnout in medical students before residency: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Psychiatry, 55, 36-42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2018.08.006

Hussa Farrell, R., & Farrell, T. (2026). The Sharpen® system: Seamless multi-level prevention: Evidence-based logic model validated through server-side engagement data from 9 prevention toolkit implementations (2019-2026) [White paper]. Resiliency Technologies, Inc.

O’Connor, M., & Casey, L. (2015). The Mental Health Literacy Scale (MHLS): A new scale-based measure of mental health literacy. Psychiatry Research, 229(1-2), 511-516. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2015.05.064

Quek, T. T.-C., Tam, W. W.-S., Tran, B. X., Zhang, M., Zhang, Z., Ho, C. S.-H., & Ho, R. C.-M. (2019). The global prevalence of anxiety among medical students: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(15), 2735. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16152735

Rotenstein, L. S., Ramos, M. A., Torre, M., Segal, J. B., Peluso, M. J., Guille, C., Sen, S., & Mata, D. A. (2016). Prevalence of depression, depressive symptoms, and suicidal ideation among medical students: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA, 316(21), 2214-2236. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2016.17324

Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy for Medical Students