Promoting mental health and building resilience in adolescence: Investigating mindfulness and attentional control. (360G-Wellcome-107496_Z_15_Z)

Mental health problems most commonly start during adolescence. Major depression carries the largest potential burden in terms of years lived with disability and this proposal aims to determine how best to prevent it. It is based on the hypothesis that depression, and co-occurring behavioural problems, in part represent a failure to exercise top-down executive control, impairing the ability to recruit effective problem-solving skills in the face of emotional distress. Mindfulness training (MT) has been seen to be highly effective in adults. This Strategic Award addresses the question: Has mindfulness training (MT) in adolescence the potential to shift the secondary school-age population away from psychopathology and towards improved mental health by addressing key processes of mental regulation and executive control that operate across the spectrum of risk/resilience? Two of three interlinked research themes' examining mechanisms (Theme 1) and implementation (Theme 2) have been funde d. This invited resubmission addresses Theme 3, namely a large-scale cluster randomised controlled trial to investigate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of MT in schools.