Getting to grips with the youth mental health crisis

In this blog we hear from Irish Research Council DOROTHY MSCA COFUND awardee Dr Niamh Dooley on her research focusing on mental health of teenagers in Ireland, especially in light of changing societal dynamics and challenges.

There has been an alarming increase in mental health problems among adolescents and young people internationally. In Ireland, this has been largely reflected in media coverage of waiting lists for mental health services and numbers of hospital admissions. One of the things we are missing in Ireland is good information on how mental health among the general teenage population is changing over time. We learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that good data is key to good decision making. The first aim of my project is to use existing surveys in the Irish adolescent population to fill this knowledge gap. See planetyouth.ie and planetyouthpartner.ie for more information about these surveys. I will be using this data to inform service planning and regional need for mental health services. Another aim is to try and understand why youth mental health has been deteriorating. Some of the likely contributing factors were mentioned in a recent paper by international experts. These include anxiety and powerlessness around climate change and wars, and social media as an accelerator for problematic cultural phenomena like loneliness and bullying.

I will be conducting this research alongside Mary Cannon, Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Youth Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences in Ireland, and Louise Arseneault, Professor of Developmental Psychology at King’s College London.

I also look forward to effectively communicating with members of the public, bringing the voices of young people, parents and mental health clinicians into the research. I have set up an extensive training plan including courses on statistics, causal inference and patient/public involvement (PPI). I am fortunate enough to have the backing of two highly respected and experienced supervisors and mentors throughout this fellowship: Prof. Louise Arseneault (King’s College London) and Prof. Mary Cannon (RCSI).

Since I started on 2 September, I have had a paper published which I began prior to the fellowship and I presented some early findings at the conference for the European Psychiatric Association in Switzerland. This conference had some fascinating talks including one from Prof. Arnstein Mykletun (Norway) on how the threshold for ADHD is subjective, and another from Prof. Sir Simon Wessely (UK) on why we can’t blame social media alone for rising youth mental health problems.

Follow me on LinkedIn and X/Twitter (@niamhdooley7) for updates on my DOROTHY fellowship work.