Brief resilience interventions for mental health among college students: Randomized controlled trial

Introduction: The resilience interventions have the potential to enhance the protective factors to prevent mental health problems in young adolescents. The present study evaluated the feasibility of brief resilience interventions in a sample of college students. Methods: The present randomized controlled study was conducted among 220 college students and the study protocol was registered in the Clinical Trials Registry of India (Ref.No.CTRI/2021/04/032716). The participants were randomly allocated to two groups: (i) A brief resilience intervention program group and (ii) a resilience self-help pamphlet group. The brief resilience intervention program is based on positive psychology and consists of two sessions, delivered on a 2-week interval period. The outcome measures were changes in the scores of the Brief Resilient Coping Scale (BRCS), Perceived Stress Scale, and Patient Health Questionnaire-4. Results: The mean age of the participants was 19.31 years (standard deviation - 1.17) and both the study groups were comparable during baseline (P > 0.05). At the 1-month follow-up, there was a slight increase in the mean BRCS scores of the brief resilience intervention group (15.57 vs. 15.87) as compared to the resilience self-help pamphlet group (16.15 vs. 15.79). There was no evidence that brief resilience intervention was superior to the self-help booklet in any of the outcome measures (P > 0.05). Conclusion: Brief resilience interventions have the potential to promote resilience and coping skills among college-going students in this setting. The integration of brief resilience interventions among college-based cohorts would appear to be an appropriate strategy for building protective factors to bolster resilience.