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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0486

Examining Patterns of Use in a Nationwide Mental Health Program for French Students

PROFILING USAGES IN A NATIONWIDE MENTAL-HEALTH PROGRAM FOR FRENCH STUDENTS

More than half of users of the free psychological support program use it only once or minimally, while a 2024 government decree significantly increased uptake.

The aim is to describe patterns of use, costs, and student engagement in a national program launched during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 to provide free psychological support to students in French higher education and subsequently made permanent. A dataset from the Ministry of National Education and Research covering 2021 through April 2025 was used; the data consist of session counts linked to pseudonymized identifiers and contain no clinical information. The program recorded 84,420 students, 1,674 psychologists, and 439,320 sessions. Daily session counts were tracked separately for weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays; recurring decreases during summer and winter holidays and a marked increase following the June 2024 government decree were observed. The decree increased the number of free sessions from 8 to 12 and reimbursement for psychologists from €30 to €50. Machine learning–based student clustering (KMeans) identified six groups: one-time users, minimal users, intensive short-term users, fluctuating moderate users, consistent moderate users, and long-term users. More than 50% of users were classified as one-time or minimal users. When completed sessions were compared with expected values based on the national student population, the 18–21 age group had 40,278 completed sessions versus 44,927 expected (p<2e-16), and the 22–25 age group had 27,814 completed sessions versus 19,614 expected (p<2e-16). The difference was not significant in the 16–17 age group (798 completed, 735 expected; p = 0.11). The estimated cost through April 2025 was €16,222,830, with an estimated cost of €1,318,020 for the following month. The authors state that the decree increased uptake, that political haste prevented an evaluation of clinical effectiveness in collaboration with scientific partners, and that the findings support continuity of care within university preventive health services; the program itself has not yet been evaluated.

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