Answered Questions

Hello again!

Assuming you've already explored the core OT journals, I would begin with the OT LibGuide, but go to the Psychology databases first. I chose PsycINFO because it's BIG. There's not a lot of full text because it's primarily an index, but you can request articles through interlibrary loan if the full text isn't available.

The search terms here are "mental health promotion" (with the quotes), health promotion, mental health, and school based intervention to get the school aspect in. Use them in combination, for example "mental health promotion" AND school based intervention. Limit to the last 5 or 10 years. DON'T limit to full text, because it will knock out the linked full text as well. You can select Source Type: Academic Journals to eliminate the pesky books. There are numerous good articles, such as Mental health and the school environment: Secondary schools, promotion and pathways to care and Implementation quality of whole‐school mental health promotion and students’ academic performance.

Also search ScienceDirect. I used "mental health promotion" AND schools as my search term. Again, there are a lot of good articles such as Rainbows: A primary health care initiative for primary schools. Some aren't full text. Science Direct provides a PDF link to every article, whether we have access or not.  Spot the articles with available full text by looking to the right of the article title. You will see a striped box. If the stripes are green or red, we have access to the full text. If the box's stripes are black, we don't - the full text is blacked out, so to speak. There's no Interlibrary Loan link to click in ScienceDirect, but you can find the link on the Articles tab of the OT LibGuide.

Sage Journals will also return results using the same combination of terms.

A word of warning about requesting articles through interlibrary loan! It seems that there are a couple of key journals that we don't have access to, such as International Journal of Mental Health Promotion and Advances in School Mental Health Promotion. We can only obtain 5 articles from each journal per year through interlibrary loan. Prioritize your articles. We can request 5 now if needed, and 5 more in July (when the new year starts for us).

If your thesis group is have difficulty with aspects of the search, I'll be glad to sit down with y'all and we can work together to uncover the literature!