New insights into children and young people’s mental health derived from the interaction between the family ecosystem and the COVID-19 pandemic (360G-Wellcome-224243_Z_21_Z)

Children and young people’s (CYP’s) mental health is an urgent priority. Dramatic, socio-economic changes following the COVID-19 pandemic has already disproportionately affected families, and with economic uncertainty, further shocks are expected. This fellowship shall use epidemiology, biostatistics, causal inference and machine learning applied to high-quality psychiatric surveys to investigate how changes to the family ‘ecosystem’ affects CYP mental health. The first goal is to describe typical family ecosystems and assess CYP mental health in each. The second goal will be to conduct first network analysis of mental health symptoms within families using graphical networks. The third goal will be to estimate the effect of acute changes from the pandemic (e.g. school closures) on CYP mental health. Finally, longer term changes to the family ecosystem will be determined, then analysed to assess their effect on CYP. For the latter two, I shall use causal mediation analysis to determine modifiable determinants of mental health and interaction analyses to determine which children are vulnerable, and what modifiable factors could create resilience. A website disseminating findings and provided a children’s mental health dashboard shall be co-created with a CYP advisory group.