Tag Archives: Depression

Adolescent mental health and risky behaviour – how have things changed for millennials?


In recent years the incidence of adolescent mental health problems has been rising. But at the same time, risky behaviour such as substance abuse – which has been linked to such problems – has become less common. So what has been going on? Praveetha Patalay from University College London and Suzanne Gage from the University of Liverpool looked at how things have changed over a decade among millennials born in early 1990s and early 2000s.

Headlines about adolescents have been dominated in recent years by concerns about mental health and wellbeing.

We know the prevalence of mental health issues has been rising among this group – and that the phenomenon is not restricted to the UK: international comparisons  have shown the trend is mirrored across the globe.

And there’s a growing recognition that adolescence is a key time in this respect – half of those who suffer later from a mental health disorder experience symptoms by the age of 14.

Changing behaviour

Yet we know from official reports that at the same time, some types of risky behaviour which are linked with poor mental health have become less common among the young. Adolescents in the UK are less likely to be under-age substance abusers, and the proportion of 14 year-olds who smoke regularly has dropped to just a quarter of what it was in 1982.

A new piece of research looks at how rates of different mental health and health related behaviours such as substance use but also sleep, weight perception and underage sex are changing.  

The paper looks at data for two cohorts of UK adolescents – those who were 14 in 2005 and those who were the same age in 2015. It uses data from two UK birth cohort studies – 5,627 young people born in 1991-2 who were part of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, and  11,318 born 2000–02 who were part of the Millennium Cohort Study.

The researchers looked at trends in mental health problems such as depression and self-harm, and found a picture broadly similar to previous studies. These phenomena had become more prevalent over time, with the incidence of high levels of depressive symptoms rising from six per cent in 2005 to 15 per cent in 2015. In contrast with some other studies they found boys had suffered an increase just as great as girls.

Poor mental health in our teenage years can predict a whole range of negative outcomes later on – poor physical health, worse job prospects and poor personal relationships, for instance.

Behaviour and health

And yet these results showed significant drops in various types of behaviour which are linked with poor mental health. For instance, the proportion who had assaulted someone at age 14 dropped from 40 per cent in 2005 to 28 per cent in 2015. Fewer young people had tried alcohol, binge drinking, smoking or having sex by the age of 14. 

In this sample, young people in 2015 were more likely to have later bedtimes, to wake up earlier and to sleep less than the recommended eight hours. They were more likely to see themselves as overweight and to have higher Body Mass Index, or BMI. 

These relationships aren’t simple. Other factors have changed over time, too. For instance the proportion of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds has risen, though that was taken into account. 

The researchers suggest that increasing trends in risky behaviours such as decreasing sleep times, increasing weight and poor body image need to be investigated as potential explanatory factors for increasing mental health difficulties experienced by adolescents.

But there are some clear findings from this study. The rapid increase in depressive symptoms, self-harm, obesity and loss of sleep in adolescents over the past decade is an important finding in itself, and understanding the reasons for this could be a priority for both practitioners and policy-makers.

Changes in millennial adolescent mental health and health-related behaviours over 10 years: a population cohort comparison study is research by Praveetha Patalay and Suzanne H Gage and is published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Do children feel better outdoors?

Many of us believe it’s bad for children to spend too much time indoors or looking at screens – but what does research evidence tell us about the possible mental health benefits of interacting with nature? A major new review of the evidence by Suzanne Tillmann and colleagues at Western University and the The Lawson Foundation in Canada finds there is a positive link – but the researchers say more work needs to be done, as Fran Abrams explains.

We know that mental health issues that develop at an early age have the potential to burden people – and their families and friends – throughout life. And in recent years there have been lots of studies linking these problems to things that happen outside the family home: neighbourhood, environment, school. There have been an increasing number that have looked at positive effects – for example, the possible benefits of activities such as spending time in nature.

The researchers wanted to know more about this last factor – so they decided to look more closely at the connections between the natural environment and children’s mental health.

After searching academic databases, 35 studies published in English or French between 1990 and 2017, focused on children and teens ranging from nine months to 18 years, were included. Early adolescence was the most commonly-studied age, and three fifths of the papers came from the USA, UK or Canada. In those 35 studies there were a total of 100 individual findings.

Parks and green spaces

The papers looked at various kinds of activities which took place in natural areas such as parks, green spaces, water, gardens or forests. Fifteen focused on emotional well-being, 10 on attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), nine on overall mental health and nine on self-esteem, while others looked at stress, resilience, depression and health-related quality of life.

So, what did the findings show? Overall, the review showed nature could have a positive effect on many outcomes measuring mental health. But only around half of all 100 reported findings revealed statistically significant positive relationships between nature and mental health outcomes, with almost half reporting no statistical significance.

For some outcomes – ADHD, stress, resilience, overall mental health and health-related quality of life – there were more positive findings than there were non-significant ones. Studies which looked at emotional well-being, self-esteem, and depression had a greater number of non-significant findings than positive ones. Only one finding, on the impact of greenness on a subgroup of children, showed a negative effect.

So, what did we know already, and what do we know now that we didn’t know before?

We already knew nature had a significant impact on health – including physical, social and cognitive as well as mental health, especially when we look at the research on adults. However, here in this review we can see that there are quite a few studies with inconclusive results.

What has this review added? We now know a little more about the effects of nature on the mental health of those under the age of 18. It has highlighted the need for more rigorous tools to measure those effects and the growth of research on children’s mental health and nature in the past five years.

Framework

The research team have also devised a framework that might help future researchers by categorising papers into three groups based on types of nature interaction: ‘accessibility,’ meaning studies that look at mere opportunity to access outdoor space, ‘exposure,’ which means studies that look at incidental interactions with nature while taking part in another activity,  and ‘engagement,’ which means a more direct engagement such as participation in a wilderness therapy programme.

Overall, the messages are mixed. But what this review does demonstrate is the need for more in-depth and more rigorous research. Maybe we need a standard way of measuring the effects of being in nature, its authors say. Certainly we need to continue to look at this area to find out why the research shows such mixed results. But the researchers believe spending time in nature can make a difference – so it’s vital that policy makers and planners think about how we can provide opportunities for children and young people to have those experiences.

Mental health benefits of interactions with nature in children and teenagers: a systematic review is research by Suzanne Tillmann, Danielle Tobin, William Alison and Jason Gilliland and is published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Time to ACE the way we measure the bad things that happen to children

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have been a hot topic for policy work in child health and development in recent months. The Select Committee for Science and Technology announced an inquiry into evidence-based early-years interventions, with a particular focus on ACEs. Also a new All Party Parliamentary Group for the Prevention of Childhood Adversities was set up. Essential to the success of these policy initiatives is a fit for purpose method of measuring the negative things that happen to people when they are young, something Rebecca Lacey from the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies at University College London argues is often overlooked. As part of a new research project, she is hoping to change that.

When Norman Lamb MP launched the early-years intervention inquiry in late 2017, he expressed concern that research in this area was “not being effectively used” in the creation of health policy and other support arrangements. Part of the problem with effective evidence in this area is that the system used to ‘score’ the number of bad things that have happened to a child and assess their risk of poor outcomes later in life is often poorly thought through and rarely questioned.

In 1998 a landmark piece of research by Vincent Felitti and colleagues showed that adults who reported being abused as children, witnessing violence against their mother, living with a substance misuser, or someone who had been in prison or had a mental illness had an increased risk of numerous health problems, such as depression and drug misuse, when they grew up.

It also showed that the number of adversities that someone reported having experienced as a child was really important; the more adversities reported, the higher the risk of health problems in adulthood. This number of adversities is often known as an ‘ACE score’ and Felitti’s paper was the first to use this approach for childhood adversities. It’s an approach that has since been employed in hundreds of academic studies.

Advantages and disadvantages

ACE scores have several advantages. They’re easy to calculate by simply adding up the number of adversities each person has experienced. In a clinical setting, a simple screening tool can be used to identify people at particularly high risk of health problems. These are generally people who have experienced four or more adversities, regardless of which ones.

This approach also acknowledges that people reporting one adversity are much more likely to have experienced at least one other. In Felitti’s study more than half of the people reporting that they’d been psychologically abused as a child had also been physically abused. Similarly, 3 out of every 5 people who had a family member in prison also reported that someone in the household had substance misuse problems. This clustering of adversities is crucially important to recognise both in research and in policymaking.

However, there are many reasons why ACE scores aren’t helpful for policy use. In fact they were never ‘designed’ with policy use in mind. Because they lump together adversities which are often very different (for example, experiencing abuse is likely to be a different experience to having a parent in prison), it’s difficult to tell which adversities have the potential to have the most harmful effects on health. We also don’t always know a lot about how those adversities affect health. Knowing this information would help us to better inform where to target policies. The problem is further confused by different studies including different adversities in their ACE score. So when looking at the findings of different studies you can be comparing apples and pears.

Policy relevance

The heightened interest in ACEs combined with the recognition that early life is important for how a person’s life will pan out is really good news. But we do need to think more carefully about how we measure adversities in research and in particular how we can make our research more policy relevant.

For instance, if there’s a limited budget, which adversities would you try to tackle first? Are there particular childhood adversities which increase the risk of a child experiencing many other adversities? How do different types of adversities affect health? Is it appropriate to lump together very different types of adversities into an ACE score or is there a more appropriate way of treating the clustering of adversities in a less crude way? These are just some of the questions that need to be addressed quickly.

 Whilst the research is underway, there are a few things that researchers and policymakers can think about. As a starting point researchers and policy makers and practitioners interested in this area need to think more critically about how adversities are measured, with an aim of being more meaningful and policy relevant. What do we and don’t we know by using ACE scores? What other approaches to adversity measurement could we explore?

Longitudinal studies are key

Longitudinal studies, such as the British Birth Cohorts, which collect information on children and their family circumstances over their lives, are key to improving the evidence base on ACEs and health. Many of the existing studies on ACEs and health have relied on people recalling information on what they experienced as a child. This is prone to error and bias, and can be affected by what people are experiencing at the time they are asked, such as depression or stress at work.

These studies can also help us better understand whether and how timing matters. Not only can we ask which adversities appear to be particularly harmful for health, but also, when exposure to specific adversities are particularly harmful. By doing this/taking this kind of approach, we can also identify the most fruitful times to intervene to help people flourish across their lives.

Finally, the communication of risk is really important. There are many advocates of ACEs who directly translate findings from observational, population-level research into their work with individuals. For instance, if a research study shows that children who experience 4 or more adversities are on average 6 times more likely to be depressed in adulthood, this doesn’t mean that every individual who experienced 4 adversities will be 6 times more likely to have depression in adulthood. This approach of directly translating population risk is not appropriate and if done means that research often gets miscommunicated in a way that’s too deterministic. The health (or other) consequences of ACEs are not inevitable.

The recent increase in policy interest gives us an opportunity to achieve a step-change in the way we look at adverse childhood experiences.  If we seize this opportunity, the research community can play a key role in supporting the desire of policy makers and politicians to be effective in achieving their aim of helping at-risk children, adults affected by earlier bad experiences, the NHS, all those working in this area and UK taxpayers.