New framework aims to unlock the potential for social media research into young people’s mental health

New framework aims to unlock the potential for social media research into young people’s mental health

by | Jan 10, 2023 | Research

New framework aims to unlock the potential for social media research into young people’s mental health

Research led by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London proposes a new framework to empower young people in providing informed consent to social media data access by researchers to better understand the relationship between social media and young people’s mental health.

a young girl holding a leaf

The paper, published today in Frontiers in Psychiatry, lays out four core elements to facilitate regulated, confidential access for researchers to social media data in order to make long-term progress toward improved public mental health.

Social media data offers unique insights into the details of a user’s online activities. Currently, ‘enhancing user experience’ is the main factor that social media platforms apply in determining if access to data is granted. However, accredited researchers’ use of social media platform data does not usually improve user experience in the commercial sense, rather it has the potential for wider public health benefits. As a result, researchers rely either on self-reported social media use (which is not accurate) or on study participants requesting a copy of their own social media data and providing this to researchers in a non-user-friendly way.

Access to social media data will help researchers understand the interactions and perceptions of users and provide insight into mental health and wellbeing. The new framework, developed in collaboration with a lived experience advisor, psychiatrists and researchers, proposes four core elements to facilitate secure and regulated researcher access to data:

    1. Determining research need: Qualified researchers at accredited universities intending to use social media data to understand and improve young people’s mental health should co-produce their research with patients, carers and members of the public to justify the rationale for data access.
    2. Ethical approval and informed consent: Participants should always be empowered to understand why and how their data will be used for research. This should be in accessible formats which service user groups co-produce with researchers.
    3. Data access and analysis: Robust data management guidelines and well-defined accountability of individual institutions should be established. Having a trained service user group with lived experience involved in data analysis can realign researchers’ misinterpretations and challenge the ways in which findings are reported.
    4. Open dissemination: It is recommended for peer review to be conducted before data collection and public dissemination, emphasising the importance of the research question and the quality of methodology. Lived experience advisers or service user researchers should be included in the creation of any documents, briefings and research papers arising from the research to promote accessibility, transparency and collaboration for the public and academic community.

Co-production with user and stakeholder groups is the cross-cutting theme incorporated into each of the four elements. Researchers should work collaboratively with those with lived experience, carers and members of the public to first identify the research priorities and then co-produce research protocols and methods.

“We know social media has an impact on young people’s mental health and wellbeing, but there is not enough evidence to determine who is affected, how and to what extent. Although social media has strengthened communication networks for many, the dangers posed to at-risk young people are serious. It is important that we unlock social media data’s potential for research and use this data for societal good. We hope this framework will be a ‘call to action’ to stimulate social media platforms, policy makers, researchers, users and stakeholder groups to make positive changes by collaborative working.”

Dr Rina Dutta

Reader in Suicidology and Psychiatry and Consultant Psychiatrist at King’s IoPPN and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the study’s senior author

Proposed framework to facilitate regulated, confidential access for researchers to social media data to investigate young people’s mental health.

This work was supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Medical Research Foundation, Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre.

‘Maximizing the positive and minimizing the negative: Social media data to study youth mental health with informed consent‘ (Daniel Leightley, Amanda Bye, Ben Carter, Kylee Trevillion, Stella Branthonne-Foster, Maria Liakata, Anthony Wood, Dennis Ougrin, Amy Orben, Tasmin Ford, Rina Dutta) was published in Frontiers in Psychiatry (DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.1096253)

For more information, please contact Franca Davenport, Communications and Engagement Manager (part-time), NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, franca.davenport@kcl.ac.uk Tel: +44(0) 7976 918968.

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IoPPN researchers announced winners of the 2022 ACAMH Awards

IoPPN researchers announced winners of the 2022 ACAMH Awards

by | Nov 22, 2022 | News, Research

IoPPN researchers announced winners of the 2022 ACAMH Awards

A total of £4.4 million funding from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Medical Research Council (MRC) has been awarded to research projects at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) to advance adolescent mental health and wellbeing research.

a young girl holding a leaf

Three projects led by IoPPN researchers have been awarded UKRI MRC funding, with research ranging from understanding loneliness in students to analysing expressed emotion to enhance mental health research in adolescence.

Two further projects which will be co-led by IoPPN researchers have also received funding. The projects will start in November and will run for three years.

Dr Nicola Byrom

Dr Nicola Byrom’s project entitled ‘The time of their lives? Developing Concepts and Methods to Understand Loneliness in Students’ has been awarded £848K by the UKRI MRC to develop concepts and methods to understand loneliness in university students.

There are many reasons why university students may feel lonely. Working alongside students and young people, the researchers aim to make it easier to measure loneliness sensitively, developing new tools to analyse the links between loneliness, social connection, sense of belong and expectations.

The project will investigate how social contacts change as young people move to university and ask if these changes cause loneliness It will also test whether a sense of belonging helps understand loneliness.

“Loneliness in university students is a major concern. Attempts to address loneliness are hampered by insufficient conceptual understanding and a lack of relevant research tools. We are bringing together an interdisciplinary team to use qualitative and quantitative methods, supported by historical analysis with the aim to create a new and transferable conceptual framework for loneliness.”

Dr Nicola Byrom

Senior Lecturer in Psychology at King's IoPPN

Dr Nicola Byrom is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the IoPPN whose research interests lie within student mental health and learning theory. Dr Byrom founded Student Minds in 2009, with the ambition of changing the way we talk about mental health in Higher Education. Today Student Minds is the UK’s main student mental health charity and has been instrumental in developing a whole-university approach to mental health and implementing a University Mental Health Charter.

Professor Paola Dazzan

Professor Paola Dazzan has been awarded over £1.1 million by the UKRI MRC for her CELEBRATE project ‘Co-producing a framework of guiding principles for Engaging representative and diverse cohorts of young peopLE in Biological ReseArch in menTal hEalth’.

The project is co-led by researchers and young people from three different UK locations (London, Birmingham and Bradford). Together, and working with parents and teachers, the project will use co-production to develop a ‘Framework of Guiding Principles’ – a document that will tell researchers interested in studying adolescent biology and mental health how young people prefer to be approached about research, what makes them interested to stay involved, what roles they would like to play in the research team, and what benefits they would like to see from taking part.

“Receiving this award from the MRC is truly reflective of our study’s title. Participants are a crucial part of the research process, and this study hopes to grow our understanding of what engages and retains young people participating in research. Our project is inter-disciplinary, involving several IoPPN colleagues, working across three research sites, and including parents, teachers and, of course, young people themselves. We are aiming to produce a framework of guiding principles which we hope will become a useful reference for the next generation of researchers.”

Professor Paola Dazzan

Professor of Neurobiology of Psychosis and Vice Dean (International Affairs) at King's IoPPN

IoPPN researchers, Professors Chiara Nosarti, Craig Morgan, Carmine Pariante, and Valeria Mondelli, will work with Professor Paola Dazzan on the project, alongside Professor Seeromanie Harding from the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine at King’s, and colleagues from the University of Birmingham, Bradford Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College London.

Professor Paola Dazzan is Professor of Neurobiology of Psychosis and Vice Dean (International Affairs) at the IoPPN. Her main area of interest is the study of neurobiological risk factors for psychosis in the early illness stages, and in explaining the relationship between the brain, social and biological risk factors for psychosis across the lifespan – from pregnancy, through adolescence, to adulthood. Professor Dazzan is internationally known for her work on the relationship between neuroimaging and other biological measures in the initial stages of psychosis. Her work has been extensively published in high impact papers and she is among those named in the 2019, 2020, 2021 Highly Cited Researchers List which recognises influential researchers around the world. She is currently President Elect of the Schizophrenia International Research Society.

Dr Johnny Downs

Dr Johnny Downs’ project, ‘The automated coding of expressed emotion to enhance clinical and epidemiological mental health research in adolescence’ has been awarded £299K funding by the UKRI MRC to investigate how data on parental speech can provide an index of a child’s home environment and help profile their risk of developing, and recovering from, adolescent-onset mental health disorder.

We are delighted to have received this award from the MRC, and really grateful to the Psychiatric Research Trust for supporting our initial pilot work. This is a truly interdisciplinary project – bringing together young people, parents and experts in spoken language, affective processing, developmental psychopathology, epidemiology, science communication and ethics. We are really excited about the next two years, and ultimately developing a clear blueprint of what is required to build a secure digital platform that enables other research groups to rapidly code expression emotion in an accurate and cost-effective manner.

Dr Johnny Downs

NIHR Clinician Scientist at King's IoPPN and Child and Adolescent Lead at the Centre for Translational Informatics

IoPPN researchers, Professor Helen Fisher, Dr Nicholas Cummings and Dr André Bitter will work with Dr Johnny Downs on the project, alongside Dr Christine Aicardi from the the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s, and colleagues from the University of Sheffield.

Dr Johnny Downs is an NIHR Clinician Scientist at the Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Lead at the Centre for Translational Informatics. His research focuses on the use of digital information for epidemiological studies, examining risks factors and outcomes for childhood neurodevelopmental and mental health disorders.

Dr Delia Fuhrmann

Dr Delia Fuhrmann is co-investigator on a project which has received £883,222 funding from the UKRI MRC. The project, ‘Capturing loneliness across youth: Co-production of a new developmentally sensitive scale’ is led by Professor Jennifer Lau from Queen Mary University of London and will see the development of a new questionnaire to measure youth loneliness.

I am so pleased that the UKRI have funded this project. Through discussions with young people we have heard again and again that loneliness is major concern from them. At the same time, we really know very little about how and why youth loneliness arises and how we can help young people manage feelings of loneliness. In order for us to better support young people, we first need better ways of measuring youth loneliness. The questionnaires we see used in practice tend to be very short (“How often do you feel lonely?”). This doesn’t allow us to capture the complex experiences young people have around loneliness. We hope to change this status-quo through this project.

Dr Delia Fuhrmann

Lecturer in Psychology at King's IoPPN

Dr Fuhrmann continued: “Together with young people and our charity partners, we will develop a sensitive questionnaire that can capture the authentic experiences of young people. This will allow us to collect better data on youth loneliness, and ultimately help us contribute to prevention and intervention efforts.”

Dr Delia Fuhrmann is a Lecturer in Psychology at the IoPPN. She leads the Development and Environment Research Group, which focuses on understanding how environmental influences, such as adversity, shape the brain, cognition and mental health between childhood and adulthood. Her lab also develops new methods and models to study development.

Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke

Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke is co-investigator on the CREATE project, led by Professor Paul Cooke from the University of Leeds, which has received over £1 million funding from the UKRI MRC.

CREATE explores the best way to utilise the performing arts in adolescent mental health research to optimise the participation of young people while addressing persisting methodological barriers in the field. It has a special focus on the impact of childhood loneliness.

CREATE builds on the approaches to participation being used in RE-STAR (Regulating Emotions – STrengthening Adolescent Resilience) – a large programme, led by Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke, which investigates emotion regulation in neurodivergent adolescents and its link to depression.

One important aim of CREATE is to construct a large resource hub for anyone working at the intersection of arts, science and youth voice, which will contain teaching tools, research methods and good practice guides to optimise the information we can gain from arts-based research.

Arts-based mental health research using creative practices like music, theatre, dance, drawing and poetry is enjoyed by many young people and can bring new insights and understanding about adolescent mental health in ways that traditional, often adult-led, research methods cannot. Through the CREATE project we hope to unlock the untapped potential to improve understanding of mental health by bringing the arts together with science and young people’s perspectives.

Professor Edmund Sonuga Barke

Professor of Developmental Psychology, Psychiatry & Neuroscience at King's IoPPN

Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke is Professor of Developmental Psychology, Psychiatry & Neuroscience at the IoPPN. Motivated by his own experience of growing up with learning difficulties, his research focuses on understanding the origins of neurodevelopmental differences, particularly variations in attention and impulse control (such as ADHD), and their impact on mental health. Professor Sonuga-Barke is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (elected 2016) and The British Academy (elected 2018), and a Skou Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark (elected 2019). He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry.

The King’s Maudsley Partnership

This funding from the UKRI MRC has been awarded to research projects at the IoPPN to advance adolescent mental health and wellbeing research. This is an example of some of the work that will happen within the King’s Maudsley Partnership for Children and Young People’s Mental Health.

The King’s Maudsley Partnership brings together leading academics at King’s IoPPN and specialist clinicians from the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust in a “bench to bedside” collaboration, supported by the Maudsley Charity. The unique partnership will transform child and adolescent mental health care by speeding up the time taken to bring research breakthroughs into clinical treatment.

The partnership will have its home at the £69m Pears Maudsley Centre for Children and Young People in Denmark Hill, set to open in 2024.

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Five IoPPN research projects receive UKRI funding

Five IoPPN research projects receive UKRI funding

by | Nov 7, 2022 | News, Research

Five IoPPN research projects receive UKRI funding

A total of £4.4 million funding from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Medical Research Council (MRC) has been awarded to research projects at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) to advance adolescent mental health and wellbeing research.

a young girl holding a leaf

Three projects led by IoPPN researchers have been awarded UKRI MRC funding, with research ranging from understanding loneliness in students to analysing expressed emotion to enhance mental health research in adolescence.

Two further projects which will be co-led by IoPPN researchers have also received funding. The projects will start in November and will run for three years.

Dr Nicola Byrom

Dr Nicola Byrom’s project entitled ‘The time of their lives? Developing Concepts and Methods to Understand Loneliness in Students’ has been awarded £848K by the UKRI MRC to develop concepts and methods to understand loneliness in university students.

There are many reasons why university students may feel lonely. Working alongside students and young people, the researchers aim to make it easier to measure loneliness sensitively, developing new tools to analyse the links between loneliness, social connection, sense of belong and expectations.

The project will investigate how social contacts change as young people move to university and ask if these changes cause loneliness It will also test whether a sense of belonging helps understand loneliness.

“Loneliness in university students is a major concern. Attempts to address loneliness are hampered by insufficient conceptual understanding and a lack of relevant research tools. We are bringing together an interdisciplinary team to use qualitative and quantitative methods, supported by historical analysis with the aim to create a new and transferable conceptual framework for loneliness.”

Dr Nicola Byrom

Senior Lecturer in Psychology at King's IoPPN

Dr Nicola Byrom is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the IoPPN whose research interests lie within student mental health and learning theory. Dr Byrom founded Student Minds in 2009, with the ambition of changing the way we talk about mental health in Higher Education. Today Student Minds is the UK’s main student mental health charity and has been instrumental in developing a whole-university approach to mental health and implementing a University Mental Health Charter.

Professor Paola Dazzan

Professor Paola Dazzan has been awarded over £1.1 million by the UKRI MRC for her CELEBRATE project ‘Co-producing a framework of guiding principles for Engaging representative and diverse cohorts of young peopLE in Biological ReseArch in menTal hEalth’.

The project is co-led by researchers and young people from three different UK locations (London, Birmingham and Bradford). Together, and working with parents and teachers, the project will use co-production to develop a ‘Framework of Guiding Principles’ – a document that will tell researchers interested in studying adolescent biology and mental health how young people prefer to be approached about research, what makes them interested to stay involved, what roles they would like to play in the research team, and what benefits they would like to see from taking part.

“Receiving this award from the MRC is truly reflective of our study’s title. Participants are a crucial part of the research process, and this study hopes to grow our understanding of what engages and retains young people participating in research. Our project is inter-disciplinary, involving several IoPPN colleagues, working across three research sites, and including parents, teachers and, of course, young people themselves. We are aiming to produce a framework of guiding principles which we hope will become a useful reference for the next generation of researchers.”

Professor Paola Dazzan

Professor of Neurobiology of Psychosis and Vice Dean (International Affairs) at King's IoPPN

IoPPN researchers, Professors Chiara Nosarti, Craig Morgan, Carmine Pariante, and Valeria Mondelli, will work with Professor Paola Dazzan on the project, alongside Professor Seeromanie Harding from the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine at King’s, and colleagues from the University of Birmingham, Bradford Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College London.

Professor Paola Dazzan is Professor of Neurobiology of Psychosis and Vice Dean (International Affairs) at the IoPPN. Her main area of interest is the study of neurobiological risk factors for psychosis in the early illness stages, and in explaining the relationship between the brain, social and biological risk factors for psychosis across the lifespan – from pregnancy, through adolescence, to adulthood. Professor Dazzan is internationally known for her work on the relationship between neuroimaging and other biological measures in the initial stages of psychosis. Her work has been extensively published in high impact papers and she is among those named in the 2019, 2020, 2021 Highly Cited Researchers List which recognises influential researchers around the world. She is currently President Elect of the Schizophrenia International Research Society.

Dr Johnny Downs

Dr Johnny Downs’ project, ‘The automated coding of expressed emotion to enhance clinical and epidemiological mental health research in adolescence’ has been awarded £299K funding by the UKRI MRC to investigate how data on parental speech can provide an index of a child’s home environment and help profile their risk of developing, and recovering from, adolescent-onset mental health disorder.

We are delighted to have received this award from the MRC, and really grateful to the Psychiatric Research Trust for supporting our initial pilot work. This is a truly interdisciplinary project – bringing together young people, parents and experts in spoken language, affective processing, developmental psychopathology, epidemiology, science communication and ethics. We are really excited about the next two years, and ultimately developing a clear blueprint of what is required to build a secure digital platform that enables other research groups to rapidly code expression emotion in an accurate and cost-effective manner.

Dr Johnny Downs

NIHR Clinician Scientist at King's IoPPN and Child and Adolescent Lead at the Centre for Translational Informatics

IoPPN researchers, Professor Helen Fisher, Dr Nicholas Cummings and Dr André Bitter will work with Dr Johnny Downs on the project, alongside Dr Christine Aicardi from the the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s, and colleagues from the University of Sheffield.

Dr Johnny Downs is an NIHR Clinician Scientist at the Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Lead at the Centre for Translational Informatics. His research focuses on the use of digital information for epidemiological studies, examining risks factors and outcomes for childhood neurodevelopmental and mental health disorders.

Dr Delia Fuhrmann

Dr Delia Fuhrmann is co-investigator on a project which has received £883,222 funding from the UKRI MRC. The project, ‘Capturing loneliness across youth: Co-production of a new developmentally sensitive scale’ is led by Professor Jennifer Lau from Queen Mary University of London and will see the development of a new questionnaire to measure youth loneliness.

I am so pleased that the UKRI have funded this project. Through discussions with young people we have heard again and again that loneliness is major concern from them. At the same time, we really know very little about how and why youth loneliness arises and how we can help young people manage feelings of loneliness. In order for us to better support young people, we first need better ways of measuring youth loneliness. The questionnaires we see used in practice tend to be very short (“How often do you feel lonely?”). This doesn’t allow us to capture the complex experiences young people have around loneliness. We hope to change this status-quo through this project.

Dr Delia Fuhrmann

Lecturer in Psychology at King's IoPPN

Dr Fuhrmann continued: “Together with young people and our charity partners, we will develop a sensitive questionnaire that can capture the authentic experiences of young people. This will allow us to collect better data on youth loneliness, and ultimately help us contribute to prevention and intervention efforts.”

Dr Delia Fuhrmann is a Lecturer in Psychology at the IoPPN. She leads the Development and Environment Research Group, which focuses on understanding how environmental influences, such as adversity, shape the brain, cognition and mental health between childhood and adulthood. Her lab also develops new methods and models to study development.

Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke

Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke is co-investigator on the CREATE project, led by Professor Paul Cooke from the University of Leeds, which has received over £1 million funding from the UKRI MRC.

CREATE explores the best way to utilise the performing arts in adolescent mental health research to optimise the participation of young people while addressing persisting methodological barriers in the field. It has a special focus on the impact of childhood loneliness.

CREATE builds on the approaches to participation being used in RE-STAR (Regulating Emotions – STrengthening Adolescent Resilience) – a large programme, led by Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke, which investigates emotion regulation in neurodivergent adolescents and its link to depression.

One important aim of CREATE is to construct a large resource hub for anyone working at the intersection of arts, science and youth voice, which will contain teaching tools, research methods and good practice guides to optimise the information we can gain from arts-based research.

Arts-based mental health research using creative practices like music, theatre, dance, drawing and poetry is enjoyed by many young people and can bring new insights and understanding about adolescent mental health in ways that traditional, often adult-led, research methods cannot. Through the CREATE project we hope to unlock the untapped potential to improve understanding of mental health by bringing the arts together with science and young people’s perspectives.

Professor Edmund Sonuga Barke

Professor of Developmental Psychology, Psychiatry & Neuroscience at King's IoPPN

Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke is Professor of Developmental Psychology, Psychiatry & Neuroscience at the IoPPN. Motivated by his own experience of growing up with learning difficulties, his research focuses on understanding the origins of neurodevelopmental differences, particularly variations in attention and impulse control (such as ADHD), and their impact on mental health. Professor Sonuga-Barke is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (elected 2016) and The British Academy (elected 2018), and a Skou Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark (elected 2019). He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry.

The King’s Maudsley Partnership

This funding from the UKRI MRC has been awarded to research projects at the IoPPN to advance adolescent mental health and wellbeing research. This is an example of some of the work that will happen within the King’s Maudsley Partnership for Children and Young People’s Mental Health.

The King’s Maudsley Partnership brings together leading academics at King’s IoPPN and specialist clinicians from the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust in a “bench to bedside” collaboration, supported by the Maudsley Charity. The unique partnership will transform child and adolescent mental health care by speeding up the time taken to bring research breakthroughs into clinical treatment.

The partnership will have its home at the £69m Pears Maudsley Centre for Children and Young People in Denmark Hill, set to open in 2024.

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What is Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)?

What is Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)?

by | Oct 31, 2022 | Blog Post, Research

What is Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)?

The clocks going back have signalled the start of autumn / winter. While it’s common to be affected by the change of seasons, many experience Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Here are some evidence-based ways you can support yourself and your child over the coming months.

a young girl holding a leaf

What is Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)?

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that comes and goes in a seasonal pattern.

SAD is sometimes known as “winter depression” because the symptoms are usually more apparent and more severe during the winter. A few people with SAD may have symptoms during the summer and feel better during the winter.

What causes SAD?

The exact cause of SAD is not fully understood, but it’s often linked to reduced exposure to sunlight during the shorter autumn and winter days.

The main theory is that a lack of sunlight might stop a part of the brain called the hypothalamus working properly, which may affect the:

  • Production of melatonin – melatonin is a hormone that makes you feel sleepy; in people with SAD, the body may produce it in higher than normal levels
  • Production of serotonin – serotonin is a hormone that affects your mood, appetite and sleep; a lack of sunlight may lead to lower serotonin levels, which is linked to feelings of depression
  • Body’s internal clock (circadian rhythm) – your body uses sunlight to time various important functions, such as when you wake up, so lower light levels during the winter may disrupt your body clock and lead to symptoms of SAD

It’s also possible that some people are more vulnerable to SAD as a result of their genes, as some cases appear to run in families.

Here are some ways to support you or your child through the next couple of months:

Keep Cool:

Professor Andrea Danese collaborated with young people to create KeepCool, a series of educational videos designed to give young people a platform to share their experiences of difficult emotions and discuss how they cope with them.

KeepCool focuses on fundamental emotions like anxiety, sadness, and anger rather than psychiatric disorders.

 

Watch the series

Spend time in nature:

Spending time in nature can help improve your mood and wellbeing Last week, research from the Urban Mind Project

found that seeing or hearing birds is linked with an improvement in mental wellbeing that can last up to 8 hours.

 

Find out more

Going with the flow:

Futher research from the Urban Mind Project, published last month, found that there was a link between spending time by canals and rivers and feeling happy and healthy. 

 

Find out more

Music for the mind:

Professor Sally Marlow is the BBC’s first researcher in residence where she is exploring ideas around mental health, music, arts & creativity. For World Mental Health Day 2022, she produced a mood-boosting mixtape in collaboration with BBC Radio 3. 

Listen here

Talking therapy:

There are options for talking therapies – such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or counselling

Find out more

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Paternal stress associated with children’s emotional and behavioural problems at age two

Paternal stress associated with children’s emotional and behavioural problems at age two

by | Oct 11, 2022 | Research

Paternal stress associated with children’s emotional and behavioural problems at age two

New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London with the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare and others has found an association between fathers who experience too much stress in the months following the birth of their child, and the child’s subsequent development of emotional and behavioural problems at age two.

Group of children sitting on the floor and smiling

The research, published in the Journal of Child Psychology, Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, suggests that new fathers should be assessed for stress during the perinatal period as it presents an opportunity for early intervention to help prevent future difficulties for both father and child.

Read the full story on the IoPPN website

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Autism, ADHD and school absence are risk factors for self-harm, according to new study

Autism, ADHD and school absence are risk factors for self-harm, according to new study

by | Apr 30, 2022 | News, Research

Using data from over 11,000 adolescents, researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience have identified key risk factors associated with self-harm.

Research led by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s and the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has analysed factors associated with self-harm in over 111,000 adolescents aged 11-17 years old.

Read More: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/autism-adhd-and-school-absence-are-risk-factors-for-self-harm-according-to-new-study

 

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