Approximately 80% of children experiencing mental health concerns do not receive treatment. Even when youth do have access to services, treatment dropout rates are high and the modal number of therapy sessions attended is one. Evidence-based treatments are sparse, however single-session interventions (SSIs) eliminate several traditional barriers to treatment and have shown preliminary effectiveness in preventing and reducing psychopathology in youth. A specific type of SSI that could be effective for youth are growth mindset interventions, which aim to enhance growth mindset (i.e., a belief in malleability or that an individual’s traits, abilities, and/or thoughts are malleable rather than fixed). The present study utilized an experimental, repeated measures design to pilot test an adapted, computerized growth mindset SSI as a precursor to mental health services in a sample of rural, treatment-seeking youth. Due to a small sample size obtained during the COVID-19 pandemic, only three participants fully completed the intervention. It was hypothesized that the growth mindset SSI will increase growth mindset with changes seen across measures of mindset at pre-intervention and post-intervention. Percentage of non-overlapping data results were promising and in the predicted direction, thus future research should continue to examine growth mindset SSIs in treatment-seeking populations with larger samples, comparison to an active control condition, and longer follow-up
