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.