Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy

Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy

A Five-Hour Online Course for Parents, Caregivers and Adults

5 contact hours · Online · 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.

Description

Mental health literacy is the knowledge and fluency needed to recognize, manage and prevent mental health difficulties. Join dozens of national experts featured in documentary film segments for a five-hour online course on what mental health literacy is, why stigma has to be addressed directly, and how to start a conversation with someone who is struggling.

Participants meet researchers, clinicians and people speaking from lived experience - humanizing mental health stories, promoting stigma reduction, trauma and suicide prevention, disordered eating prevention, and building strategies for improving resilience and social-emotional skills.

Evidence base

Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy has evolved over twenty years of development and 30 research studies. The program 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, in collaboration with more than 25 researchers.

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).

This program was 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, and to college students and peer mentors. 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, Hussa Farrell & Farrell, 2026). 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 is in peer review at the Journal of American College Health (Levy et al., forthcoming). Among parent participants in post-program evaluations, 98% highly recommended the course and reported increased engagement with treatment.

Learning objectives

Understand recent research surrounding mental health literacy

Learn cultural and family stigma that impacts a client’s mental health

Identify strategies for getting the conversation started, and recent dissemination and implementation science

References:

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

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

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.

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. (forthcoming). A program evaluation of the Sharpen® Mental Health Literacy college course at a southeastern university in the United States. Journal of American College Health.

Martinez, A. G., & Hinshaw, S. P. (2016). Mental health stigma: Theory, developmental issues, and research priorities. In D. Cicchetti (Ed.), Developmental psychopathology (1st ed., pp. 1-43). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119125556.devpsy420

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

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), 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

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