Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy

Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy

A Six-Hour Online Course for Adults.

CEs provided to Counselors / Mental Health Professionals.

6 contact hours · Online · Asynchronous · Continuing education available

Resiliency Technologies, Inc. has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7243. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Resiliency Technologies, Inc. is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.

Earning credit: to receive 6.0 NBCC contact hours, complete the module text in all 24 modules and all 100 films, pass the course quiz with a score of 80% or higher (28 of 35 correct), and submit the course evaluation. You may retake the quiz as many times as needed. The downloadable handouts in each module are optional.

Description

Mental health literacy is the knowledge and fluency needed to recognize, manage and prevent mental health difficulties. This six-hour online course covers what mental health literacy is, why stigma has to be addressed directly, how to start a conversation with someone who is struggling, and what to expect from therapy. It then carries those skills into trauma and stress, suicide prevention and disordered eating prevention, so that a learner leaves with the protective factors that run through all four.

The course is built around 100 documentary films, nearly five hours in all. Learners hear directly from people describing their own experience of anxiety, depression, ADHD, grief, suicidal thoughts and eating disorders, from the families who supported them, and from the researchers and clinicians who treat them. Therapists who take the course consistently point to these films as its greatest value: an in-depth, personal look at patient voices and experiences that no textbook can offer, and one that every learner, clinician or not, can learn from.

Designed for any adult and available to counselors and other mental health professionals for NBCC continuing education credit for those who meet the requirements above.

Evidence base

Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy has evolved over twenty years of development and more than 30 research studies across more than 20 institutions. Its modules were selected using Sharpen® platform data on the most requested and most used content, on top of two decades of community-based participatory research, and they follow the Sharpen® logic model of risk and protective factors (Hussa Farrell & Farrell, 2026).

The program is built against the established mental health literacy literature (Jorm et al., 1997; Kutcher et al., 2016; Sampaio et al., 2022), and it follows the finding that interventions raising knowledge alone may leave stigma untouched, so that stigma has to be addressed directly if literacy gains are to translate into behavior (Martinez & Hinshaw, 2016; Soria-Martinez et al., 2024). The trauma, suicide prevention and disordered eating sections draw on the core literature for each topic, including the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (Felitti et al., 1998), clinical trials of mindfulness-based interventions (Goldberg et al., 2018; Hoge et al., 2023), the 2024 National Strategy for Suicide Prevention (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2024), and a review of eating disorder risk factors across 284 studies (Barakat et al., 2023).

This program has been delivered to foster parents through the South Carolina Foster Parent Association, to medical students at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine as the branded Mindful MEDS toolkit (Berreta et al., 2023), and to college students and peer mentors (Biber & Rothman, 2024; Hussa Farrell & Abel, 2025). Across three years in which the course was delivered to South Carolina foster parents, 334 completers gained on the Brief Resilience Scale (8.63%) and the Self-Compassion Scale Short Form (7.35%), both p < .001, alongside an 88.5% mean module completion rate (Biber et al., 2026); an earlier pilot with South Carolina foster parents found significant improvement in the same two measures (Biber, 2025). Across four consecutive cohorts of the semester-long college build, 97.4% of respondents recommended the course and 24.7% volunteered unprompted that it should be required of all students; the fourth cohort was independently analyzed by an evaluation team at San Diego State University and has been submitted for publication (Levy et al., 2026).

Learning objectives

As a result of participating in this program, participants will be able to:

Mental Health Literacy

• Describe the four components of mental health literacy
• Identify the core features, risk factors and protective factors of common mental disorders, including ADHD, depression, anxiety and panic disorders, and PTSD
• Describe how public stigma, self-stigma and cultural and family stigma affect help-seeking and engagement in treatment
• Describe strategies for starting a supportive conversation with someone who may be struggling, and identify when to connect them to crisis resources
• Identify what to expect from therapy, including the types of providers, the limits of confidentiality and the evidence-based treatments

Trauma and Stress

• Explain how adverse childhood experiences and chronic stress affect mental and physical health, and identify the role of supportive relationships in resilience
• Describe the stress response, including the roles of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and apply evidence-based stress management strategies
• Summarize research on mindfulness practices and how they improve health outcomes
• Identify mental health stressors and help-seeking barriers specific to athletes, and describe ways to support them
• Explain how identifying and naming emotions improves protective factors for coping and help-seeking

Suicide Prevention

• Differentiate warning signs from risk factors for suicide
• Identify evidence-based protective factors for suicide and apply strength-based approaches when working with youth
• Describe the four strategic directions of the 2024 National Strategy for Suicide Prevention and explain how a comprehensive approach is structured
• Identify evidence-based gatekeeper training models for suicide prevention

Disordered Eating Prevention

• Identify the types of eating disorders, their common risk factors and their medical and psychiatric comorbidities
• Explain how weight stigma and internalized weight bias affect self-esteem, and describe strategies, including ending fat talk and mindful eating, that build a partnership with the body

Sources

Barakat, S., McLean, S. A., Bryant, E., Le, A., Marks, P., National Eating Disorder Research Consortium, Touyz, S., & Maguire, S. (2023). Risk factors for eating disorders: Findings from a rapid review. Journal of Eating Disorders, 11, Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-022-00717-4

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), Article 6266. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20136266

Biber, D. (2025). The impact of an mHealth mental health literacy training for foster parents. Trends in Psychology, 33(3), 836-849. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-023-00348-x

Biber, D., & Rothman, R. (2024). Mental health literacy training for college female peer mentors: A pilot study. Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, 14(1), 181-191. https://doi.org/10.1108/HESWBL-06-2023-0148

Biber, D. D., Hussa Farrell, R., & Farrell, T. (2026). Mental health literacy training for foster parents: A three-year implementation and analysis [Preprint]. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6624959

Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss, M. P., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245-258. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8

Goldberg, S. B., Tucker, R. P., Greene, P. A., Davidson, R. J., Wampold, B. E., Kearney, D. J., & Simpson, T. L. (2018). Mindfulness-based interventions for psychiatric disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 59, 52-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2017.10.011

Hoge, E. A., Bui, E., Mete, M., Dutton, M. A., Baker, A. W., & Simon, N. M. (2023). Mindfulness-based stress reduction vs escitalopram for the treatment of adults with anxiety disorders: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry, 80(1), 13-21. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2022.3679

Hussa Farrell, R., & Abel, C. (2025). Efficacy of mental health literacy training for college peer mentors: Sharpen® MHL impact on Vescent mentors [White paper]. Resiliency Technologies, Inc.

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. https://sharpen.health

Jorm, A. F., Korten, A. E., Jacomb, P. A., Christensen, H., Rodgers, B., & Pollitt, P. (1997). "Mental health literacy": A survey of the public's ability to recognise mental disorders and their beliefs about the effectiveness of treatment. Medical Journal of Australia, 166(4), 182-186. https://doi.org/10.5694/j.1326-5377.1997.tb140071.x

Kutcher, S., Wei, Y., & Coniglio, C. (2016). Mental health literacy: Past, present, and future. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 61(3), 154-158. https://doi.org/10.1177/0706743715616609

Levy, J., Hussa Farrell, R., Farrell, T., Pish, M., Fassas, J., Reed, E., Hinshaw, S., & Biber, D. (2026). A program evaluation of the Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy (Sharpen® MHL) college course at a southeastern university in the United States [Manuscript submitted for publication].

Martinez, A. G., & Hinshaw, S. P. (2016). Mental health stigma: Theory, developmental issues, and research priorities. In D. Cicchetti (Ed.), Developmental psychopathology: Vol. 4. Risk, resilience, and intervention (3rd ed., pp. 997-1039). Wiley.

Sampaio, F., Gonçalves, P., & Sequeira, C. (2022). Mental health literacy: It is now time to put knowledge into practice. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(12), Article 7030. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19127030

Soria-Martinez, M., Navarro-Pérez, C. F., Pérez-Ardanaz, B., & Martí-García, C. (2024). Conceptual framework of mental health literacy: Results from a scoping review and a Delphi survey. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 33(2), 281-296. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.13249

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2024). 2024 national strategy for suicide prevention. https://www.hhs.gov/programs/prevention-and-wellness/mental-health-substance-use-disorder/national-strategy-suicide-prevention/index.html

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