School mental health: Achievements of a mental health preventive intervention on first year Elementary School male and female students Salud mental escolar: Logros de una intervención preventiva en salud mental en niños y niñas del primer ciclo de enseñan

Abstract

Within the scope of the program "Habilidades para la Vida" (Skills for Life), we identified and evaluated children deemed as at-risk, who participated in the Program's preventive activities. We evaluated if they exhibited a difference in the pre-post intervention in the variables attention, concentration, cognitive achievement, acceptance of the authority, level of activity, social contact, emotional maturity and psycho-social dysfunction; according to the level of attendance to the intervention sessions by boys and girls, parents and teachers. In a sample of one thousand three-hundred and thirty-six students of elementary education from low-income areas, we applied a prospective longitudinal ex-post-facto design, with measurements recorded before and after interventions. We computed the ANOVA of repeated measurements, Chi-squared and multiple linear regression. Results showed positive changes in all computed variables post-intervention and in the group where the teacher attended at le