Mental Health Literacy: Conceptualisation, Measurement, and the Relationship within wider student mental health.

This thesis proposes a new measure of mental health literacy specifically for use among university students by developing items relevant to university experiences and testing the usefulness of this measure within wider student mental health research. To do this, four studies were conducted using various methods such as longitudinal and experimental design. Participants included university students who completed measures of mental health literacy, help-seeking intentions, internal stigma, personality, and mental health. The first study was split into two parts; the first part sought to develop the Student Mental Health Literacy Scale items. The second part tested the factor structure and confirmed that mental health literacy is multidimensional comprised of six unique factors. Using the new Student Mental Health Literacy Scale, study Two explored the relationship between mental health literacy and help-seeking intentions. Study Three was a longitudinal study that assessed whether mental health literacy predicted mental health outcomes (depression and anxiety) over time. The final study evaluated whether individual differences such as personality accounted for unique variance in mental health literacy levels in university students. Overall, the results suggest that the concept and new measurement of mental health literacy are useful in furthering our understanding of mental health outcomes and help to increase the specificity of existing relationships, specifically within university students.