Evaluation of the xaʔtús (First Face) for Mental Health program at a youth residential addiction treatment facility.

The xaʔtús (First Face) for Mental Health program is designed to empower community members, including those without professional mental health training, to approach and support people who are experiencing mental health distress, and to address some of the root causes of this distress through mental health literacy and de-stigmatization. Members of several Tribal nations in the inland northwest United States contributed to this culturally grounded intervention. Although First Face might resonate particularly with Native American audiences, its impact might extend to other population groups. We evaluated the impact of First Face training among clinical and nonclinical staff (N = 92) at an Indigenous-focused youth residential treatment facility. In the context of a single-arm, pre-post study, we observed that after completing a day-long First Face training, participants showed improvements in mental health/substance use knowledge and perceived competence to respond to a mental health crisis, as intended. These benefits were not limited to Native American trainees and spanned both clinical and nonclinical staff. Improvements in perceived competence to respond to mental health crises were especially strong among staff with relatively little experience in the field. Contrary to expectations, we observed no overall impact on mental health stigma, although direct care providers, when considered as an individual group, showed a significant reduction in perceived mental health threat from pretraining to posttraining. We conclude that although more rigorous research is needed, First Face appears to be a promising intervention for training staff to respond to mental health problems in the youth residential addiction treatment setting. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).