Publications by authors named "Cliodhna O'Connor"

Objective: The ways that mental health concepts are represented on social media could have significant implications for lay understandings and behavior. The current article reports an analysis of how trauma is represented on TikTok, one of the world's most popular social media platforms.

Method: Following a search for content using the hashtag #trauma, 143 videos were subjected to qualitative content analysis to characterize the profiles of their producers, intended function, and trauma-related content.

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Objective: Readiness among laypeople to classify ordinary adversities as "trauma" may activate cognitive, social, and behavioral patterns that either promote proactive help-seeking or exacerbate mental health difficulties. Clinical understandings of trauma have expanded across recent decades to encompass a wide range of aversive experiences. While some have suggested lay understandings of trauma have expanded in parallel, minimal data directly reveal how the lay public conceptualize trauma.

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Background: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face major financial losses due to mental health issues affecting employees at all levels but seldom apply programs to promote wellbeing and prevent mental health issues among employees. To support the development of a multi-country workplace-based mental health intervention for SMEs (MENTUPP), a multinational consultation study was conducted. The study aimed to examine the experiences and needs of SMEs concerning the promotion of employee wellbeing, and the prevention and management of non-clinical mental health problems in workplaces.

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Background: There is a gap between the necessity of effective mental health interventions in the workplace and the availability of evidence-based information on how to evaluate them. The available evidence outlines that mental health interventions should follow integrated approaches combining multiple components related to different levels of change. However, there is a lack of robust studies on how to evaluate multicomponent workplace interventions which target a variety of outcomes at different levels taking into account the influence of different implementation contexts.

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Lay representations of psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) are important both for understanding public stigma and anticipating patient responses to PNES diagnosis. The current study presents the first evidence of the general public's representations of PNES and the malleability of these understandings to different ways of explaining PNES. An online experimental study exposed participants (n = 193, aged 18-25 years) to a vignette describing a case of PNES in biomedical terms, PNES in biopsychosocial terms, or epilepsy.

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Public perceptions of the determinants of mental illness have important implications for attitudes and stigma, but minimal previous research has explored how causal attributions are spontaneously invoked in everyday public discourse. This study investigated how causal explanations for mental illness are disseminated in popular Irish news media, in the two years before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Keyword searches of a news media database identified 1,892 articles published between March 2018 to March 2022 that mentioned one of six categories of mental disorders: anxiety disorders, mood disorders, substance-related disorders, personality disorders, eating disorders, and psychotic disorders.

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Previous research agendas have prioritised the role of biological determinants in mental illness aetiology. This is of particular concern, as endorsing biological determinants has been shown to promote negative attitudes towards people with mental illness. The aim of this review was to provide an overview of high-quality evidence of the social determinants of mental illness.

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Α significant part of the psychological research on mental health and illness is interested in how the body can impact one's mental health. This impact is primarily explored using a biomedical framework, in studies that examine the body's role in the emergence of a mental illness, the ways it can signify the presence of an illness (i.e.

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Background: COVID-19 public health measures like handwashing and social distancing can help stem the spread of the virus. Adherence to guidelines varies between individuals. This study aims to identify predictors of non-adherence to social distancing and handwashing guidelines.

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Background: Though the socio-emotional significance of psychiatric diagnoses and the frequency of transitions between diagnostic classifications are widely acknowledged, minimal research reveals how "diagnostic shifts" are subjectively experienced by psychiatric service-users.

Aim: This study investigated how adult service-users make sense of diagnostic shifts and their impacts on one's life.

Methods: Twenty-seven people with self-reported experiences of diagnostic shifts opted into this qualitative study.

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Depression and anxiety are the most prevalent mental health difficulties in the EU, causing immense suffering and costing the global economy EUR 1 trillion each year in lost productivity. Employees in construction, health and information and communications technology have an elevated risk of mental health difficulties. Most mental health interventions for the workplace have been targeted at larger companies and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are often overlooked despite most people being employed in SMEs.

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COVID-19 is arguably the most critical science communication challenge of a generation, yet comes in the wake of a purported populist turn against scientific expertise in western societies. This study advances understanding of science-society relations during the COVID-19 pandemic by analysing how science was represented in news and social media coverage of COVID-19 on the island of Ireland. Thematic analysis was performed on a dataset comprising 952 news articles and 603 tweets published between 1 January and 31 May 2020.

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Background: Occupational stress is increasingly recognised as key factor contributing to service quality, safety, and worker wellbeing, with clinician providers most at high risk.

Objectives: To explore work-related stressors among consultant child and adolescent psychiatrists working in CAMHS.

Methods: Fifty-two consultants completed an online questionnaire with free-text entries describing factors contributing to occupational stress in CAMHS in Ireland.

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Rationale: International border controls were among the earliest and most effective of measures to constrain transmission of COVID-19. However, such measures are complex when established borders are open yet politically contested, as for the border that divides the Republic of Ireland (ROI) from Northern Ireland (NI). Understanding how this border affected the everyday lives of both populations during the pandemic is important for informing the continued development of effective responses to COVID-19 and future health crises.

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This study aimed to examine the convergence among interpretation bias measures and their associations with depressive symptom severity. Research into interpretation biases employs measures of interpretation bias interchangeably, however, little is known about the relationship between these measures. Participants (N = 82 unselected undergraduate students; 59 female) completed four computer-based interpretation bias tasks in a cross-sectional design study.

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COVID-19 and its countermeasures have negatively impacted the mental health of populations worldwide. The current paper considers whether the rising incidence of psychiatric symptoms during the pandemic may affect lay beliefs about the cause and course of mental illness. Laypeople's causal attributions and expectations regarding the trajectory of mental illness have important implications for societal stigma and therapeutic orientations.

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Background: An outstanding question in the stigma literature is the extent to which negative responses are provoked by diagnostic labels, rather than observable symptoms of mental illness. Experimental studies frequently use vignettes to identify the unique effects of diagnostic labels on social responses to people with mental illness, independent of their behaviour or socio-demographic characteristics.

Aims: The current article identifies, evaluates, and synthesises the body of experimental vignette studies of labelling effects.

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COVID-19 represents a serious challenge to governments and healthcare systems. In addition to testing/contact tracing, behavioural and social responses such as handwashing and social distancing or cocooning are effective tools for mitigating the spread of the disease. Psychological (e.

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Background: Mental health problems are common in the working population and represent a growing concern internationally, with potential impacts on workers, organisations, workplace health and compensation authorities, labour markets and social policies. Workplace interventions that create workplaces supportive of mental health, promote mental health awareness, destigmatise mental illness and support those with mental disorders are likely to improve health and economical outcomes for employees and organisations. Identifying factors associated with successful implementation of these interventions can improve intervention quality and evaluation, and facilitate the uptake and expansion.

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The current paper reports three experimental studies that investigate how selectively emphasising different treatment approaches (biological, psychological or social) for mental health difficulties affects lay beliefs about those illnesses. Online experimental vignettes exposed participants to different treatment narratives for a clinical case of Major Depressive Disorder (Study 1; n=164), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (Study 2; n=173) and Schizophrenia (Study 3, n=170). Measures of causal attributions and illness perceptions assessed effects on beliefs about the causes and course of the illness.

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Autism in boys has been well researched but very little is known about the everyday experiences of autistic girls or their families. Mothers' views and insights can be very helpful in increasing knowledge around the unique demands of raising a daughter with autism. This study conducted interviews with Irish mothers to examine their own experiences regarding (a) getting an autism diagnosis for their daughter, (b) their daughters' personal characteristics and (c) the impact of caring for a daughter with autism.

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Personality disorder (PD) diagnosis is currently in flux, with the latest edition of the proposing to overhaul PD classification. The stigma purportedly attached to PD labels is a common concern in debates about PD diagnosis. However, there is a paucity of data on the general public's attitudes to PD diagnoses.

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Psychiatric diagnoses are important resources in helping young people and families make sense of emotional or behavioural difficulties. However, the poor reliability of diagnoses in childhood means many young service-users experience their diagnosis being removed, revised or supplemented over time. No previous research has investigated how young service-users experience, understand or respond to alteration of their original diagnosis.

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