Blog
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Adolescent Mental Health Training: Inside the Teen Brain – Season 2
What does the teenage brain tell us about adolescent mental health? Access free adolescent mental health training covering depression, ADHD, self-harm and more.
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How empathy predicts bullying and victimisation
Sadly, bullying in schools is very common. Around one in three children report that they have experienced peer victimisation themselves. Victimised children are at an increased risk of feeling anxious or depressed, potentially missing school and struggling with their classes, and can even experience mental health problems later in life. Bullies on the other hand might be more likely to struggle with behavioural problems and have a propensity for later substance abuse.
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When Family-Based Treatment Stalls: Can We Adapt Earlier and More Precisely?
Family-Based Treatment (FBT) has the strongest evidence base among psychological treatments for adolescents with anorexia nervosa, yet a substantial proportion of young people do not achieve full recovery. A 2024 trial found that adding Intensive Parental Coaching did not improve outcomes overall for adolescents with limited early weight gain. However, it may help families with low parental self-efficacy, supporting a more targeted approach. Blog by Professor Francisco Mucish.
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Mentalising and Emotion Regulation in Children and Families
Midgley et al. (2023) describe the Emotion Regulation in Children (ERiC trial), the first large randomised clinical trial designed to evaluate a brief form of Mentalization-Based Treatment for children aged 6–12 with co-occurring internalising and externalising difficulties. The intervention aims to strengthen children’s and parents’ ability to understand behaviour in relation to thoughts, feelings and intentions, seeking to improve emotion regulation within the child and across the parent–child relationship.
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Cultural Formulation: When Does It Become Stereotyping?
Cultural formulation can help clinicians understand how culture shapes distress, help-seeking and experiences of illness. However, when cultural knowledge replaces curiosity about the individual, it can become the very stereotyping it is intended to prevent.
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Irritability and Later Depression and Self-Harm in Adolescence
Irritability is common in early childhood and for many children, it reduces over time as they develop better frustration tolerance, language, emotional regulation, and social understanding. However, when irritability remains high across early childhood, it may signal increased vulnerability to later mental health difficulties.
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Why Depression May Look Different in Young People with ADHD
Depression commonly co-occurs with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). When this combination occurs is associated with greater clinical complexity and poorer outcomes. Yet depression in young people with ADHD may not always be straightforward to recognise, some symptoms of depression overlap with ADHD, some may be expressed through irritability, sleep problems, or behavioural difficulties, and young people with ADHD may not always report depressive symptoms in the same way as their parents.
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EBSA in young people: complexity, pressure, and the value of slowing down
When a child stops going to school, the wish to help them back quickly is easy to understand. Emotionally based school avoidance rarely has a single cause, though, and the pace of a response can matter as much as its content. One thought runs through what follows: that slowing down can sometimes do more for a child than any effort to hurry a return.
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Mental Health and School Achievement: Why Gender and Age at Onset Matter
Discover how mental health conditions impact school performance in children and adolescents. Explore research on over 837,000 young people, highlighting the effects of anxiety, depression, gender differences, and age of onset on academic achievement—and why early support matters.
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Why Trauma-Focused CBT Isn’t Reaching Children
Trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy (TF-CBT) is one of the best-supported psychological treatments for children and adolescents with post-traumatic stress symptoms. Yet the existence of an evidence-based treatment does not mean that children and families can access it in routine care. Blog by Professor Francisco Musich.
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