title: Mental health literacy measures evaluating knowledge, attitudes and help-seeking: a scoping review.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Mental health literacy has received increasing attention as a useful strategy to promote early identification of mental disorders, reduce stigma and enhance help-seeking behaviors. However, despite the abundance of research on mental health literacy interventions, there is the absence of evaluations of current available mental health literacy measures and related psychometrics. We conducted a scoping review to bridge the gap.
  
  
  METHODS
  We searched PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and ERIC for relevant studies. We only focused on quantitative studies and English publications, however, we didn't limit study participants, locations, or publication dates. We excluded non-English studies, and did not check the grey literature (non peer-reviewed publications or documents of any type) and therefore may have missed some eligible measures.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We located 401 studies that include 69 knowledge measures (14 validated), 111 stigma measures (65 validated), and 35 help-seeking related measures (10 validated). Knowledge measures mainly investigated the ability of illness identification, and factual knowledge of mental disorders such as terminology, etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, and consequences. Stigma measures include those focused on stigma against mental illness or the mentally ill; self-stigma ; experienced stigma; and stigma against mental health treatment and help-seeking. Help-seeking measures included those of help-seeking attitudes, intentions to seek help, and actual help-seeking behaviors.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our review provides a compendium of available mental health literacy measures to facilitate applying existing measures or developing new measures. It also provides a solid database for future research on systematically assessing the quality of the included measures.
authors.affiliation: Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health team, IWK Health Centre, Dalhousie University, 5850 University Ave., P.O Box 9700, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3K 6R8, Canada. Yifeng.wei@iwk.nshealth.ca.
authors.forename: Yifeng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.affiliation: IWK Health Centre, Nova Scotia Health Authority and Dalhousie University, 5850 University Ave., P.O Box 9700, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3K 6R8, Canada. Patrick.mcgrath@iwk.nshealth.ca.
authors.forename: Patrick J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: McGrath
authors.affiliation: Centre for Clinical Research, Dalhousie University, Room 403, 5790 University Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H IV7, Canada. jhayden@dal.ca.
authors.forename: Jill
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hayden
authors.affiliation: Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health team, IWK Health Centre, Dalhousie University, 5850 University Ave., P.O Box 9700, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3K 6R8, Canada. Stanley.kutcher@iwk.nshealth.ca.
authors.forename: Stan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kutcher
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D057220:Health Literacy; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*; D008603:Mental Health; D028642:Persons with Psychiatric Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D008875:Middle Aged; D010342:Patient Acceptance of Health Care / Q000523:psychology*; D011613:Psychotherapy / Q000379:methods; D057545:Social Stigma; D055815:Young Adult