The Sustainability of the Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management Programme: Insights from UK Primary School Teachers

The current youth mental health crisis highlights the need for preventive and early intervention strategies like the Incredible Years programmes. The Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management programme has shown positive effects on teachers’ classroom management strategies and pupil mental health. In this blog, we discuss teachers’ views on the sustainability of the programme, necessary to maintain its desired benefits in the longer term.

30 July 2024

Loneliness and Early Career Researchers: An Evidence-Based Perspective

Loneliness is a significant and often overlooked issue among early career researchers (ECRs). This phenomenon can have profound implications for both personal well-being and professional development. Recent studies have highlighted the prevalence of loneliness among academics, particularly those in the early stages of their careers, suggesting that this issue warrants serious attention from both research and policy perspectives.

8 July 2024

Chronotype and Depression in Adolescence

We know that there is a bidirectional association between sleep duration/quality and depressive symptoms in youth. In adult populations depressive symptoms and circadian rhythms (sleep chronotype) have also been linked. In this paper, we established an association between chronotype and depressive symptoms in middle adolescence, independently of poor sleep and prior mental health difficulties.

28 May 2024

Inclusion and Advocacy for Women with ADHD: Addressing Inequities and Challenging Diagnostic Bias on International Women’s Day

March 8th, 2024 is International Women’s Day and this year’s theme is “Inspire Inclusion.” Unfortunately, women who hold multiple intersecting identities that are systemically oppressed world-wide are often excluded from discussions. One example includes women who are neurodiverse, and more specifically for this post, women with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Women and non-binary folks are often excluded from appropriate diagnosis of ADHD due to bias in providers, boy/men-dominated symptoms in the DSM-5 (Barkley, 2023; Hinshaw et al., 2021), socialization to mask and internalize symptoms, and sexism and other forms of discrimination. As with most discrimination, this is even worse for women with ADHD who also hold other systemically oppressed identities. This blog will focus on how to increase equity for women with ADHD with concrete solutions for multiples systems that affect them.

8 March 2024

Photovoice within Mental Health Research Involving Adolescents

Photovoice, a research method developed by Wang and Burris (1997), combines photography and narrative, and has emerged as a powerful tool for researching adolescent mental health for participants to express themselves visually, providing unique emotional and metaphorical insights less accessible to other traditional research methods.

8 January 2024

Redistributing power in schools and how this can impact young people’s agency and identity

Recent Guardian articles have been reporting how this year’s GCSE exam results have been impacted by the crisis in young people’s mental health. There is increasing concern among school leaders about school absence and abnormal levels of anxiety. As I embark on the third blog related to my research, I explore how the research processes I developed, positively impacted the young people involved and acts as a counter to much of what young people see as being wrong with schools.

18 September 2023

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.

12 June 2023

Covid-19’s impact on Loneliness and Mental Health: A Study of Schizotypal Traits and Paranoia

The Covid pandemic lockdown has affected us differently, with some people being impacted more than others. Extensive research has indicated that lockdowns – which broadly include isolation measures, such as, in the UK, being required to stay at home unless for essential reasons – have disproportionately impacted individuals with higher levels of paranoia.

31 May 2023

Anxiety – Increasing Understanding and Improving Awareness

Celebrating its twelfth year, Mental Health Awareness Week has chosen to focus on ‘Anxiety’ – to increase public understanding of anxiety and improve awareness of the impact it can have on lives. Everyone, in some shape or form, experiences anxiety. However, anxiety can become overwhelming and, in some cases, can evolve into an anxiety disorder.

This Mental Health Awareness Week (15 to 21 May 2023), we encourage you to explore the FREE learning opportunities available on our website, and to share with your networks, to increase people’s awareness and understanding of the impact of anxiety on children and young people.

15 May 2023

Championing research about, by and for neurodivergent people

How neurodiversity-inspired thinking is casting a new light on brain development research, with neurodivergent young people at its core.

30 March 2023