Mental health issues among adolescents in Nairobi slums are prevalent but often underdiagnosed or untreated. This context necessitates community-based mental health first aid (MHFA) training to empower local communities with basic MHFA skills. The study employed pre- and post-training assessments through structured interviews, analysing changes in participants' knowledge scores using a Likert scale (1-5) with robust standard errors. Participants demonstrated significant improvement in MHFA knowledge scores from an initial mean of 2. 8 to a post-training mean of 4. 0 on a scale out of 5, indicating effective learning and application of MHFA skills by the adolescents. The community-based MHFA training programme was successful in enhancing adolescent participants' understanding and use of MHFA techniques, thereby improving their ability to support peers with mental health issues. Further research should explore long-term sustainability and effectiveness of such programmes, while advocating for integration into existing youth development initiatives. Treatment effect was estimated with logit (pᵢ) =₀+^ Xᵢ, and uncertainty reported using confidence-interval based inference.
Okoth et al. (Wed,) studied this question.