Learning for Mental Health and Wellbeing: Introducing an integrative neurodevelopmental framework for school mental health and wellbeing curricula

The current child and adolescent mental health crisis necessitates improvements across prevention and intervention pathways. This includes identifying shortcomings of approaches to MHW curricula in schools and ways to address these through refinement of developmental theories on which they are built. In this talk, I will discuss main limitations of current school-based MHW approaches and outline a new developmental framework of MHW called the Neurodevelopmental Theory of Mental Health and Wellbeing Capacities (NDeTeC) which may address some of these limitations. The NDeTeC specifies two key neuro-cognitive-affective capacities, the self-regulation capacity and the self-world capacity, underpinning MHW from a developmentally-nuanced and socially-contextualised perspective on MHW. The two capacities will be described in terms of their facets, reflecting a progression in cognitive-affective-neural processes in terms of their cognitive and metacognitive demands. I will discuss how specifying the capacities via such progression of processes may enable ready translation of the NDeTeC into learning outcomes and objectives, and thus create a basis for curriculum frameworks to guide new comprehensive approaches to formulating MHW school curricula. Examples of such ongoing translational work will be provided together with considerations about implications of the framework for further research on MHW in schools.