The Effect of an Online Mental Health Promotion Program During COVID-19

Background The negative impact of Coronavirus 19 (COVID-19) on mental health has been observed through the pandemic. People have had to adapt to a new norm of social distancing, wearing a mask, and abstaining from big group gatherings. These changes have impacted all levels of society and the rise of mental health care continues to grow as COVID-19 continues at this time. Mental health promotion strategies may be enhanced through the use of telehealth. Purpose To determine if a six-week online mental health promotion intervention would improve the GAD-7 scores of participants. Methods This project utilized a quantitative quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test design from a convenience and snowball sample. Recruitment was done through a primary care medical clinic located in Mission, Texas, Facebook advertising page called Sane Through COVID with WILD-5 Wellness KickStart30 program and word of mouth referrals. The pre-test and post-test were utilized to evaluate the impact of the educational intervention, and the Health Belief Model of the theoretical framework used. Results Eighty (80) persons signed up for the project and forty (40) people finished the intervention. The data was of normal distribution, and it was noted that there was a statistically significant increase from the mean pre-test score to post-test score following the intervention, t(38) = 2.025, 1 tailed p= 0.025. The observed mean difference is significant at a 5% level of significance. Since 2.5% is less than 5% we can say that the mean is 1.67 is statistically significant from 0. Conclusion This six-week program implementation appeared to show an educational intervention with personal follow-up and reminders may make a positive difference in mental health status. This study also found that non- college graduates had a greater improvement in mental health scores than college graduates, those who reported a history of anxiety and/or depression had a greater improvement than those who did not have anxiety or depression, but since the sample size is small, a conclusion about the relationship between current reported levels of anxiety and depression and the amount of improvement could not be made. Although this study had positive results and appeared that lifestyle program seemed to make a positive difference on participants, the small sample size means further research is warranted to verify these findings