Greatly enjoyed all the inspiring presentations, including the insightful talks by @wlutzpsyres.bsky.social and Bill Stiles on data-driven and theoretical perspectives on personalisation.
Many thanks to Jaime Delgadillo and the other organisers (Biljana & Orya)!
Pleasure to speak at the Society for Psychotherapy Research (@sprofficial.bsky.social) at King's College London last week
Here w/JM Penedo, @miriamhehlmann.bsky.social & F Mink after our panel discussion on the future of Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) in clinical psychology and psychotherapy
Very interesting work! Thanks for sharing.
AbstractBackground:There is growing concern about adolescents self-diagnosing with mental health problems, with potential links to increased mental health awareness efforts and social media. However, little is known about adolescents’ attitudes towards self-diagnosis, including why they think it happensand potential consequences.Methods:We conducted online semi-structured interviews with 24 UK school-aged adolescents (13-to 17-years-old)recruited from four schools. Data wasanalysed using reflexive thematic analysis.Results:Four themes were generated. Acceptable versus unacceptable motives for self-diagnosishighlights the different reasons adolescents perceived to driveself-diagnosis, which were given a value judgement. Self-diagnosis was more acceptable when carefully researched and used for self-understanding or help-seeking, andless acceptable when used superficially to seek attention or excuse bad behaviour. Rules for determining (in)authenticityexplores the implicit criteria adolescents set for judging the credibility of someone’s self-diagnosis, including openness, severity, and gender. Self-diagnosis is the only viable route to supportencompasses adolescents’ belief that self-diagnosis is understandable given the current inaccessibilityof healthcare systems, providingaccess to informal sources of emotional, practical, and social support. Finally, modern adolescence is fertile ground for self-diagnosisdiscusses how the current context of adolescence, including social media and the widespread use of diagnostic language, facilitates self-diagnosis. Conclusions:School-aged adolescents view self-diagnosis as an understandable yet potentially problematic practice. While it may be a pragmatic response to inaccessible services, adolescents are concerned about the impact of inaccuracy. Improving access to timely mental health support and promoting balanced information may reduce reliance on self-diagnosis
Note: This version of the article is a pre-print and has not been peer-reviewed. Title:"It seems that everyone has got something”: A qualitative studyof adolescents’ attitudes towardsself-diagnosing withmental health problems Nina Higson-Sweeney1* & Lucy Foulkes1 Affiliations:1Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Life and Mind Building, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3EL, UK*Corresponding author: Dr Nina Higson-Sweeney, nina.higson-sweeney@psy.ox.ac.uk
🌟 NEW PRE-PRINT! 🌟
“It seems that everyone has got something”: A qualitative study of adolescents’ attitudes towards self-diagnosing with mental health problems
from me and @nhigsonsweeney.bsky.social
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Many thanks, Ellen! I'm glad you found it interesting
Very excited to share this multi-year collaborative effort, led by the brilliant @mihaelcudic.bsky.social, @juandelahoz.bsky.social & @jorsmo.bsky.social, w/Ronald Kessler, Vikram Patel, Daisy Fancourt, Sarah Bauermeister, Andre Brunoni, Heather Lee & many others:
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
8:
💡 For future pandemics, lifting restrictions promptly when epidemiologically safe may offer short-term mental health benefits - but longer-term wellbeing will depend on factors beyond the policies themselves.
7: In conclusion:
💡 C19 containment policies produced real, but short-lived mental distress.
💡 Extended policies alone are unlikely to explain the persistent mental health problem increases observed during this period.
6 - Results (continued):
▶️ School and workplace closures, examined individually, showed no significant independent effects:
▶️ Only full lockdown (simultaneous closure of schools, workplaces, and public events) produced a significant mental health impact.
5 - Results:
▶️ Lifting full lockdown produced an immediate ~5.5–5.7% reduction in psychological distress.
▶️ These effects, however, dissipated within 30–60 days, and no significant difference (between lifting versus maintaining policies) remained at 90 days.
4: During these periods, we tested whether lifting lockdowns would reduce mental distress, and whether maintaining these policies would have deteriorated mental health.
We used three causal inference methods:
▶️ Target trial emulation
▶️ Synthetic control analysis
▶️ Within-state fixed effect models
3: In a sample of 400,000 US adults, we addressed this by restricting all analyses to periods of low or declining COVID-19 infection rates (when policy decisions were least driven by viral severity)
We also restricted analyses to a period prior to widespread vaccine availability (Apr 2020-Apr 2021)
2: The central methodological challenge in the pandemic literature is confounding by indication:
Containment policies are imposed when infection rates are high, making it difficult to separate the effect of the policy from the effect of the pandemic itself.
One of the most challenging issues in studying mental health during COVID-19 was separating the impact of containment policies (lockdowns) from pandemic severity (societal infection rates), as both can contribute to mental distress.
In this extensive international effort, we aimed to address this 🧵
I learnt a heck of a lot working on this piece, now out in American Psychologist. Big thanks to all collaborators particularly the mentorship of @omidvebrahimi.bsky.social and @ludvigdb.bsky.social. And of course the amazing resource that is the UKHLS @usociety.bsky.social
5/5: Preregistered, Open Access, Open data, & Open code:
▶️ osf.io/9aqkv/
▶️ psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
Thanks to @emkbridger.bsky.social and all collaborators!
4/5 | Side-note:
@ludvigdb.bsky.social & I have promised to systematically document how (poorly) we age in the literature via sporadic publishing in American Psychologist.
Current documentation from 2024 --> 2026, since our last article on environmental risk factors & MH:
doi.org/10.1037/amp0...
3/5 | Household material deprivation (e.g. broken fridge) was the variable most strongly related to distress, tied to worthlessness, sleep disturbance, & functional impairment.
Socioeconomic disadvantage was closely linked to impairments in daily roles & social activities via mental distress.
2/5 | Studying 15,851 UK adults, we show that household-level disadvantage (e.g., income, inability to heat one's home, household material deprivation) were more strongly related to distress than neighbourhood-level factors (e.g., area deprivation, vandalism, crime).
Our new article on socioeconomic disadvantage, mental distress & functional impairment is out #OpenAccess in American Psychologist.
Led by the brilliant @emkbridger.bsky.social, with J. Maltby, @eikofried.bsky.social, co-supervised by me & @ludvigdb.bsky.social.
🧵
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
Can LLMs infer depression severity from clinical notes?
Here, we evaluate GPT-5.2 on outpatient psychiatry notes to infer depression severity.
Results show moderate agreement with PHQ-9 and stronger agreement with clinician chart review (see comments).
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
So well-deserved! Congrats, Dan!
And we are off to dinner after a beautiful sunny day in Oxford. Thanks to all speakers, panelists and the audience for their wonderful contributions today.
Maren Kopland on developing a novel dynamic model for personalising treatments, and Graham Thew on better using the gap between treatment sessions to improve clinical outcomes.
Excellent panel discussion by Emma Černis, Talya Greene, Rebecca Murphy, Ingunn Holbæk, and Elizabeth Woodward on complex clinical presentations including dissociative disorders, focusing on the limitations of current treatment and assessment approaches, and the pathways to improvement.
Wonderful presentations by Alex Lau-Zhu on intrusive imagery as a transdiagnostic clinical target; and Karine Frost & Peter Sele on prescriptive machine learning for complex trauma conditions.
I wish I was that creative! It would be fun to organise one on research waste and suggested improvements. Maybe next time.
😅 Thanks, Peter. Modum Bad is the name of a famous psychiatric hospital in Scandinavia. Its name indeed does not lend itself well to English.
The director of the hospital made a joke about the hospital's name earlier in her talk you would have enjoyed.
Brilliant talk by @talyagreene.bsky.social on the dynamics of traumatic stress symptoms, presenting key mechanistic insights from her intensive longitudinal studies.
Thanks Tom! Modum Bad is a famous psychiatric hospital in Scandinavia. Not the best name for an English audience :-)