ACAMH Website Content Types
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Children’s Understanding of Depression
Depression is a mental illness that affects children and especially adolescents, however little is known about how children and adolescents understand depression. Gaining an understanding of how children perceive illness can facilitate effective communication with health professionals and children’s active involvement in decision-making about their health.
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Continued family dysfunction accounts for the association between childhood adversity and adolescent self-harm
Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is any deliberate attempt at inflicting physical self-harm in the absence of suicidal intent. NSSI peaks during adolescence, with roughly 17% of adolescents reporting having engaged in it at least once.
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Autism Spectrum Disorders and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder edition
This edition of ‘The Bridge’ focusses on Autism Spectrum Disorders and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Both of these can resemble each other with the over-focus, special interests and anxieties seen in ASD resembling the obsessions of OCD, and the routines, rituals and need for order and sameness that can be seen in ASD resembling the compulsions in OCD.
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Connecting the senses: an area of difficulty in infants later diagnosed with autism?
Autism Spectrum Disorder, or autism for short, can be diagnosed from around 2-3 years in most cases (although in practice, it is often done much later – for various reasons). It is a neurodevelopmental condition, meaning that in order to understand it we need to understand the underlying developmental processes, in both brain and behaviour.
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Working memory deficits may compromise cognitive flexibility in OCD
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterised by recurrent intrusive thoughts and/or behaviours. These traits imply deficits in cognitive flexibility in affected patients, but it is unclear at what stage of information processing these deficits might emerge. To address this question, Nicole Wolff and colleagues asked 25 adolescents with OCD and 25 matched healthy controls to complete a computer-based task switching paradigm.
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Cognitive flexibility in OCD: challenging the paradigm
Data from a new study by Nicole Wolff and colleagues suggest that cognitive flexibility can be better in children with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) than typically developing controls.
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Dysregulation profile risk may be identified in infancy
The “dysregulation profile” (DP) describes a child psychopathology construct that measures broad-based, generalised emotional and behavioural dysregulation using the Child Behaviour Checklist
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Children with ASD at heightened risk for maltreatment
A study conducted by researchers at the University of South Carolina is the first to provide empirical evidence from population-level data that maltreatment is elevated in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relative to the general population.
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Conduct Disorders and Aggression edition
Children and young people with conduct disorders often have additional comorbid learning difficulties, neurodevelopmental or mental health disorders, so it is important to be able to assess, recognise and offer appropriate interventions. The effects on a young person’s future and society may be significant if not managed well.
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Abnormal visual fixation does not mediate deficits in emotion recognition in conduct disorder
Studies have shown that conduct disorder (CD) is associated with impaired recognition of facial emotions1, but whether the cause of this deficit is due to difficulties with attention, interpretation and/or appraisal is unclear. Now, researchers at the Universities of Southampton and Bath have addressed this question.
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