Unpacking Nature from Nurture: Understanding how Family Processes Affect Child and Adolescent Mental Health
Mental Health problems among youth constitutes an area of significant social, educational, clinical, policy and public health concern. Understanding processes and mechanisms that underlie the development of mental health problems during childhood and adolescence requires theoretical and methodological integration across multiple scientific domains, including developmental science, neuroscience, genetics, education and prevention science. The primary focus of this presentation is to examine the relative role of genetic and family environmental influences on children’s emotional and behavioural development. Specifically, a complementary array of genetically sensitive and longitudinal research designs will be employed to examine the role of early environmental adversity (e.g. inter-parental conflict, negative parenting practices) relative to inherited factors in accounting for individual differences in children’s symptoms of psychopathology (e.g. depression, aggression, ADHD ). Examples of recent applications of this research to the development of evidence-based intervention programmes aimed at reducing psychopathology in the context of high-risk family settings will also be presented.
Two pathways to self-harm in adolescence
The behavioural and emotional profiles underlying adolescent self-harm, and its developmental risk factors, are relatively unknown. The authors of this paper aimed to identify sub-groups of young people who self-harm (YPSH) and longitudinal predictors leading to self-harm using the Millennium Cohort Study. (Pre-print: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.10.20150789v1)
The impact of Covid-19 on the mental health of children and young people
The recent pandemic arrived at a time when mental health of children and young people was deteriorating, particular among teenage girls and young women. Lockdown produced a plethora of mental health surveys, but very few of these had pre-pandemic data. This talk will summarise the current evidence of how covid-19 seems to have affected the mental health of children and young people from various studies in the UK.