Child and Adolescent Mental Health最新文献

We are in a competitive, burgeoning market for journals and currently in a transition to open access publications, with the aim of making research more widely accessible. Where is the place for practice-based journals in this new and evolving world of publishing? The recent growth of CAMH in terms of Impact Factor, downloads and submissions suggests there is a need for such journals. Professionals are swamped with research findings, often contradictory, sometimes inflammatory, with little time to explore the meaning of these findings within the real world. This editorial reflects on the need for academics and practitioners to be able to debate the evidence base within the real world context (or to consider the lack of it) to inform practice and policy, and also on the importance of providing a platform for topics that are current and/or controversial. Recent contributions to CAMH are highlighted, namely the perceived gender gap in research on emotional disorders in women and girls, and the need for an ethical data sharing framework for academics to investigate the potential harms and benefits of technology. CAMH will continue to ask questions, and aim to remain relevant by focusing on both the evidence and real world context, in order to inform best practice and policy decisions.

No ethics approval was required for these updates.

There is a substantial gender gap in common mental health difficulties such as depression and anxiety, and evidence on drivers of this gap is sparse. Yet, the current tendency in the field is to treat it as inevitable, and its drivers are rarely examined as a worthwhile question to pursue. We discuss possible reasons for this oversight, while highlighting the need to reform research priorities and systems to ensure this issue receives the investment and interest necessary to inform better prevention and support. We emphasise the need to meaningfully engage with women on the gender mental health gap to better inform investigations into salient drivers and, in turn, efforts toward change. We challenge the research community to question such pervasive disinterest in this large inequality disproportionately affecting over half the population, to prevent and narrow this for future generations.

Much of the debate about academic collaboration with digital companies (see Livingstone, Orben & Odgers, 2023) has surrounded commercial use of data and children's mental health. The debate has also spilled into the educational value of technologies and academic collaboration with companies to improve their learning design. Given the close relationship between learning and mental health, the evaluation of digital companies' impact should focus on both their emotional and educational effects. The collaborative models used by educational researchers provide a source of inspiration for transparent evaluations and evidence-based recommendations for holistic interventions that target children's learning and mental health.

Most mental health research largely ignores or minimises gender and age differences in depression. In ‘Don't mind the gap: Why do we not care about the gender gap in mental health?’, Patalay and Demkowicz identify a dearth of research on the causal factors of depression in young women. They attribute this to an over-reliance on biological accounts of gender differences in depression. Patalay and Demkowicz conclude that a person-centred approach that meaningfully engages with the reports of young women with depression is more likely to expose the social drivers of depression that impact this group. This commentary focuses on Patalay and Demkowicz's call to examine the patient's lived experience. We argue that there is an urgent need to reflect upon the methodologies involved in examining lived experience and how they can be best utilised. Ultimately, we advocate for an approach known as ‘phenomenological psychopathology’, through a phenomenological investigation of depression in young women, we can go some way towards closing the gender gap.

Academic research collaborations with the technology industry should be complementary to and, importantly, must not replace noncollaborative research that is independent from the industry (and, in particular, ‘adversarial research’ whose negative findings will likely operate against industry interests). Reflecting on the author's own research projects concerning companies' compliance with video game loot box regulation, he agrees with Livingstone et al.'s proposition (Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 2022, 28, 150) that research seeking to identify problems (and thereby work against the industry's interests) should be conducted independently (p. 151), at least initially. He also echoes the sentiment expressed by Zendle and Wardle (Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 2022, 28, 155) that ‘a moratorium’ (p. 156) or a ban on industry collaborations is not a proportional response to legitimate concerns about conflict of interest stemming from the video game industry's discretionary provision of data access. A combined approach that conducts both noncollaborative and collaborative research, but with the latter being conducted only after the former's unbiased results are known, might prove fruitful. Academics must bear in mind that industry involvement at any particular stage of the research, or at all, is not always appropriate. Some research questions should not and cannot be answered objectively with industry involvement. Funding bodies and other stakeholders should also recognise this and not render industry collaboration compulsory.