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Professor Jessica Deighton is a senior research fellow and Deputy Director of the CAMHS Evidence Based Practice Unit (EBPU – based across UCL and the Anna Freud).
Can you tell us about your background and what attracted you to the area of children and young people’s mental health?
I began my research career looking at the impact of family conflict on children’s mental health and how this in turn was associated with their academic outcomes.
My research now focuses primarily on the prevalence and course of mental health problems through childhood and adolescence; school- and community-based interventions to support mental health and wellbeing; and the effectiveness of mental health support delivered in more specialist settings.
Why is mental health such an important focus of research in today’s society?
For a number of reasons: mental health is so fundamental to how we function as human beings and mental health disorders are also a lot more common across the lifespan than we think.
Recent studies have suggested that only a very small proportion of people won’t experience a mental health problem ever – so it’s an issue that affects most of us. Also, it’s important because we still have a lot to learn in terms of developing effective prevention and intervention strategies.
To what extent do you think mental health disorders among children and young people are on the rise, and why might this be?
We have some fairly good evidence to indicate that the prevalence of mental health problems in young people has been rising.
We certainly saw rates increase over the pandemic and those rates appear to be staying stubbornly high. However, much of that increase in concentrated in specific groups. Particularly in older young people (aged 16-19) and more so in girls than boys.
What do you think are some of the main challenges in understanding and treating mental health disorders among children and young people? How can research help overcome these challenges?
One of the key challenges is translating what we know from the research literature into good mental health support.
In spite of all our developments in understanding in what places people at risk of mental health problems and what protects them, we still seem to be struggling to provide good models of prevention that can begin to shift the recent trends in young people’s mental health. There is real promise in resilience research that could help us develop more sophisticated, embedded approaches to embedding support across the system.
You lead the HeadStart Learning Programme, which has been hugely successful in changing mental health policies in schools across England. Can you tell us more about this?
HeadStart has been a fantastic opportunity to explore exactly those kinds of resilience-based approaches. We were incredibly lucky to work with the National Lottery Community Fund and the six partnerships who developed and rolled out a whole range of programmes to support the mental health and wellbeing of their young people.
They worked really hard to embed support across the whole system – from school-based interventions and training for school staff to community action programmes, support and training for parents and a really strong commitment to ensure young people’s voices were front and centre in all areas of activity.
HeadStart has been such a long-term programme – seven years. We’ve been able to squeeze a huge amount out of the programme, not just in terms of what works to support young people, but also shedding more light on their experience of mental health, the things that challenge them, how they manage and the complex interplay between risk and protection.
We’ve been able to produce 59 publications for a whole range of audiences, including evidence briefings, journal articles and briefings for young people (you can find them all here: HeadStart Learning Team | Evidence Based Practice Unit - UCL – University College London). It’s been a huge opportunity to share learning far and wide.
How can school support help overcome mental health problems in young people?
Schools can support young people by creating an ethos that gives equal parity to wellbeing as to academic achievement.
The answer isn’t always an intervention. Often it’s about being a trusted presence in a child’s life, giving them opportunities to develop agency and to manage set-backs. Providing learning around social and emotional skills and additional support for those experiencing specific challenges is also important.
So it’s much more about developing a whole-school approach than thinking about any one support programme. Anna Freud have some great guidance around this: 5 Steps to Mental Health and Wellbeing (annafreud.org).
What working achievement are you most proud of?
I feel very proud that we have been able to maintain and continue two incredibly important long-term pieces of work through the pandemic when there was a real risk they might have been derailed.
HeadStart is one of those and the other is Education for Wellbeing – a Department for Education commissioned suit of RCTs testing preventative mental health interventions in schools.
If I had to pick a study, there’s quite a neat paper about enduring mental health in childhood that I wrote with colleagues a couple of years ago titled 'Enduring Mental Health in Childhood and Adolescence: Learning From the Millennium Cohort Study'. It shows that event through childhood and adolescence, when we look beyond point prevalence to experiences across childhood, we find that the experience of mental health problems is very common.
Most of all I’m proud to lead such a thriving research team as the Evidence Based Practice Unit. Every one of them is brilliant, hard-working and a joy to work with.
Why would you recommend UCL as a place to study children and young people’s mental health?
The quality and profile of the child mental health research at UCL I’d say is second to none. Also, there’s such a breadth of expertise at UCL around child mental health, the knowledge spans so many disciplines, it allows a much more three dimensional perspective of the nature of these problems and how to address them. Colleagues are also incredibly collaborative and generous with their expertise.