Debate: Where to next for universal school-based mental health interventions? Time to move towards more effective alternatives.

There is an urgent need to improve mental health outcomes among young people. One approach taken to address this problem has been the design and delivery of universal school-based prevention, based on therapeutic models such as CBT and mindfulness. Such interventions are delivered to groups of young people, irrespective of risk or need.

Self-Diagnosis of Mental Disorders: A Qualitative Study of Attitudes on Reddit.

There is concern that a growing number of individuals, especially adolescents, are diagnosing themselves with mental disorders. However, there has been limited empirical research into this phenomenon: why it might happen, what the costs and benefits might be, and what the implications are for anyone who is experiencing distress. To address this, this study used reflexive thematic analysis to explore attitudes toward self-diagnosis of mental disorders as expressed on the discussion website Reddit.

Affective control in adolescence: The influence of age and depressive symptomatology on working memory.

People exhibit marked individual variation in their ability to exercise cognitive control in affectively charged situations. Affective control is typically assessed in laboratory settings by comparing performance in carefully constructed executive tasks performed in both affectively neutral and affectively charged contexts. There is some evidence that affective control undergoes significant improvement throughout adolescence, though it is unclear how adolescents deemed at risk of developing depression exercise affective control despite poor affective control being identified as a contributing factor to ongoing mental ill health in adulthood.

Sustaining attention in affective contexts during adolescence: age-related differences and association with elevated symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Sustained attention, a key cognitive skill that improves during childhood and adolescence, tends to be worse in some emotional and behavioural disorders. Sustained attention is typically studied in non-affective task contexts; here, we used a novel task to index performance in affective versus neutral contexts across adolescence (= 465; ages 11-18). We asked whether: (i) performance would be worse in negative versus neutral task contexts; (ii) performance would improve with age; (iii) affective interference would be greater in younger adolescents; (iv) adolescents at risk for depression and higher in anxiety would show overall worse performance; and (v) would show differential performance in negative contexts.