The role of bullying in psychosis: a novel analysis of national survey data using Directed Acyclic Graphs.
12 July 2017, 4:00 pm–5:00 pm
Event Information
Open to
- All
Location
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Maple House Seminar room, 6th Floor, 149 Tottenham Court Road, W1T 7NF
Speaker: Professor Paul Bebbington, UCL Division of Psychiatry
Abstract: Complex interactions
between multiple variables in large datasets create difficulties for causal
inference. Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) represent a considerable advance.
They use Bayesian probabilistic models to capture the dependence structure
of multiple variables and provide robust conclusions about causal effects. To
illustrate this we investigated putative mediators of the
association between bullying victimization and persecutory ideation, using data
from the 2007 English National Surveys of Psychiatric Morbidity. Bullying had
direct effects on worry, persecutory ideation, mood instability and drug use.
Depression, sleep and anxiety lay downstream, and therefore did not mediate the
link between bullying and persecutory ideation. Bullying led to hallucinations
indirectly, via persecutory ideation and depression. An equivalent DAG analysis
of the 2000 dataset suggested the technique generates stable results.