Fiona Warner-Gale presents the findings of a meta-analytic review of the Incredible Years Parent Training programme, which is found to be effective at modifying disruptive and prosocial child behaviour. This evidence will be of interest to many, including policymakers, planners and practitioners.
[read the full story...]
Lisa Burscheidt reports on a recent Cochrane review that looks at the effects of kinship care versus traditional foster care for the safety, permanency and well-being of children removed from the home for maltreatment.
[read the full story...]
My grandfather had a nearly religious conviction of the value of physical activity. No weekend was complete without a strenuous bout of outdoor exercise, regardless of the weather. New England gets cold and damp, and his five children would prepare themselves for winter excursions with some reluctance. ‘Healthy body, healthy mind!’ my grandfather would say, exhorting them [read the full story…]
Bullying is just not good for you. Here on Mental Elf, we’ve already picked some great examples of studies demonstrating this. André blogged about how bullied children are more likely to develop psychosis, and how bullies are at higher risk for teen pregnancy, and not so long ago, I told you how Wolke et al demonstrated that [read the full story…]
I was a terrible sleeper as a child. I remember lying awake on one particular occasion because I had read a book about space and thought that the sun might swallow up the earth. I was intrigued then, when I was asked to review a paper for the Mental Elf about parasomnias and childhood psychotic [read the full story…]
The relationship between cannabis and psychosis has been one of the hottest topics in psychiatry over the last decade, and with good reason. Policy-makers still disagree on whether cannabis should be legalised or how it should be classified, with Uruguay being the most recent country to legalise it. Drawing broadly from work initiated by Robin [read the full story…]
How many children develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after a traumatic experience such as an assault, a car crash, war or disaster? William Yule, one of the godfathers of child traumatic stress research, once pointed out that rates reported in separate studies varied from 0 to 100%. So what is on average the rate [read the full story…]
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is unfortunately a relatively common condition in children and adolescents. Depression is estimated to affect 2% of pre-pubertal children and 5-8% of adolescents (Son et al, 2000). As you might expect, depression has a significant negative impact on the development, functioning and risk for suicide in individuals affected, as well as [read the full story…]
For many years, psychiatry has highlighted that people with epilepsy appear to have an elevated risk for psychosis. However, studies exploring this relationship (of which there are many) seem to disagree on just what the prevalence of psychosis is in this group. For example, Gudmundsson (1966) interviewed every patient with epilepsy in Iceland and concluded [read the full story…]
Is it possible to work out which of two adolescents sitting before you complaining of unhappiness, which one will go home and sleep it off and which will go on to develop an episode of major depression? Has the biological revolution in psychiatry finally come to fruition with a useful biomarker for making treatment decisions? [read the full story…]
