Psychotherapy and Physical Activity for School-aged Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Psychological Wellbeing

Background:
Combining psychotherapy and physical activity (PA) has been proposed as an effective approach to address mental health and psychological wellbeing (MH&PW) outcomes. While this intervention shows promise with adults, its effectiveness with children and young people (CYP) remains unclear.

Purpose:
To synthesize the evidence across academic and grey literature to identify, describe, and assess multi-component interventions that include psychotherapy and PA for school-aged (4 – 18 years) CYP MH&PW.

Methods:
The systematic scoping review was conducted using Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) six-stage framework, with revisions from Levac, Colquhoun and O’Brien (2010), Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology, and PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) recommendations. The protocol is registered on Open Science Framework to ensure transparency and replicability. Searches were conducted in Scopus, CINAHL, PsychINFO, MEDLINE, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), as well as grey literature databases, and mental health organization, city council and Government websites in the UK. Studies conducted across all settings, in any geographical location were considered, except for those conducted in psychiatric and in-patient mental health facilities. The review was limited to publications written in English, between January 2013 and October 2023.

Results:
The data extraction and analysis is expected to be completed by April 2024, and the results will be available to present at the time of the conference.

Conclusions:
To the best of the research team’s knowledge, this will be the first review to explore multi-component (psychotherapy and PA) MH&PW interventions for CYP, with research and applied implications.

Practical implications:
The results will contribute new knowledge, support practitioners, and inform future interventions. This review, part of a PhD project, will facilitate the potential integration of PA into psychological support provided to school-aged CYP in the UK and will inform a qualitative study exploring practitioner perspectives on multi-component interventions.

Funding:
No funding.