Health
-
Being and Becoming Mentally Healthy: A framework for understanding the mental health of babies and young children
Although there is increasing interest and investment in infant mental health, the term itself is not well understood. To support professionals to work together to protect and promote babies’ and young children’s mental health, we have worked with UNICEF-UK to create a new framework describing what it means to be mentally healthy in this life stage. The framework has two parts, “Being” and “Becoming” capturing both babies’ and young children’s current mental health as well as the capacities they are developing that will enable them to be mentally healthy in the future.
Read more -
Developing schools to enhance young people’s mental health
Research has shown that many risk factors influence young people’s mental health needs, one of which is school expectations. The youth mental health crisis continues, with one in six young people (aged 6-16) having a probable mental health problem. My research aimed to determine what young people thought of their mental health strategy. However, the way in which the research process developed suggests schools have much more to offer than just specific mental health support.
Read more -
Hunter-gatherer childhoods may offer clues to improving education and wellbeing in developed countries, Cambridge study argues
Hunter-gatherers can help us understand the conditions that children may be psychologically adapted to because we lived as hunter-gatherers for 95% of our evolutionary history. And paying greater attention to hunter-gatherer childhoods may help economically developed countries improve education and wellbeing. JCPP Editorial from Dr Nikhil Chaudhary, and Dr Annie Swanepoel.
Read more -
ACEs – Adverse Childhood Experiences
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are defined as situations that lead to an elevated risk of children and young people experiencing damaging impacts on their health and other social outcomes across the life course.
Read more -
Are ACE scores useful for identifying individuals at risk of health problems?
Clinics are increasingly screening for ACEs, but ACE scores may not tell us who will go on to develop poor health, explain Jessie R Baldwin (pic) and Andrea Danese.
Read more -
Chronic illness may present barriers to engaging in CBT for depression
Between 10 and 20% of teenagers have a chronic illness:1 an ongoing health condition that lasts at least 3 months, and for which a cure is unlikely. Research suggests that teenagers with chronic illnesses are more likely to also have low mood and develop depression than their healthy peers.2
Read more -
Mothers’ prenatal BMI is linked with foetal brain connectivity
New data suggest that a high maternal prenatal body mass index (BMI) is associated with differences in functional connectivity in the foetal brain that might confer a risk of mental health and cognitive problems in childhood.
Read more -
Insufficient sleep might affect children’s emotional health
Data from a new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry suggest that insufficient sleep can affect emotional health in children. The study, conducted by Candice Alfano and colleagues, assessed the impact of sleep duration on different aspects of emotion in a cohort of 53 children aged 7-11 years old.
Read more -
How common and costly is persistent health anxiety in young people?
Health anxiety – characterized by excessive and impairing worry about health issues1 – has been minimally described in childhood and adolescence, and longitudinal studies are lacking.
Read more -
Depressed mothers and their offspring differ in terms of health risk profiles and allostatic load
Allostatic load is essentially the “wear and tear” that accumulates in the body in individuals exposed to chronic stress. Because some patients with psychiatric disorders have a shorter lifespan than their healthy counterparts,1 some researchers have suggested that there might be a link between disorders such as depression and increased allostatic load.
Read more