Category: Mental Health

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Study Identifies Why Nightmares Persist in Children and How to Break the Cycle

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Recently published research from the University of Oklahoma and the University of Tulsa proposes a new model to explain why nightmares can persist over time in children and how therapy can be designed to break that cycle.

The study, published in Frontiers in Sleep, introduces the DARC-NESS model, a mnemonic for the factors that can keep a child stuck in chronic nightmares. At the centre of the model is “nightmare efficacy,” or the idea that children can learn skills to rid themselves of nightmares and restore good sleep.

“The DARC-NESS model looks at the mechanisms of what is maintaining nightmares, as well as the mechanisms that can break the cycle of nightmares,” said Lisa Cromer, PhD., a professor of psychology at the University of Tulsa and a volunteer child psychiatry faculty member at the OU School of Community Medicine in Tulsa. “It’s a child’s response to a nightmare that causes the chronic nightmares to happen, which means if we can learn to respond to nightmares differently, then we can interrupt that cycle. It’s empowering to understand that we can take steps to master our dreams.”

Rather than focusing only on the content of a nightmare, the model encourages clinicians to consider a broader set of factors, including how a child interprets the dream, worries about going to sleep, experiences anxiety at bedtime and copes after waking.

That information can help guide a personalized treatment plan instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. For some children, treatment may focus on reducing bedtime anxiety. Others may benefit from improving sleep habits or participating in exposure-based therapy, such as describing, writing about or drawing the nightmare and then working with a clinician to “rewrite” it.

“We believe we have created a way to conceptualize why nightmares persist and how we can better treat them in kids,” said OU Health child and adolescent psychiatrist Tara Buck, MD, an associate professor at the OU School of Community Medicine in Tulsa. “What’s unique about the model is that it’s customisable to what the patient needs, and it focuses on what the patient can control. We look for the potential intervention points and target those in a collaborative way with patients and their families.”

Unlike insomnia, in which people fear they won’t sleep, children with chronic nightmares are afraid they will sleep. According to Buck, helping children build confidence in their ability to address nightmares can have benefits far beyond sleep.

“Self-efficacy is at the heart of the model,” she said. “When children feel empowered to do something about the nightmares, they begin to see how things are interconnected – because they’re sleeping better, they have more energy, they go to school more consistently and their parents report improved behaviour.”

The model is designed for use by a range of clinicians, including therapists and pediatricians. For many years, health care providers either assumed that nightmares couldn’t be treated or that they would go away if an underlying trauma or mental health condition were addressed. However, that’s not always the case.

“We’ve worked with children who have been in mental health treatment for a long time and their nightmares are still persistent,” Buck said. “There is a need for a nightmare treatment model to help children when their nightmares are recurrent and distressing.”

“A nightmare is a bad dream that you wake up from,” Cromer said. “If you don’t wake up, then the brain is doing its job of resolving the fear of the dream. But if a child does wake up, they’re trying to escape the nightmare. And when a child wakes up, they’re not able to resolve the nightmare, which actually exacerbates the problem. That’s why nightmares are so important to treat.”

By April Wilkerson

Source: Oklahoma University

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Two Major Symptoms of Schizophrenia Share a Single Explanation

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Our dopamine learning system helps us make choices, some as simple as whether to eat a green or red apple, says Arvind Kumar (pictured). He co-authored a new study showing what happens when this system breaks down, and how misalignment contributes to two symptoms of schizophrenia. (Photo: David Callahan)

Scientists have long known that dopamine helps the brain learn from rewards, but a new computational model shows how for people with schizophrenia this learning system can break down and simultaneously produce two very different symptoms – delusions and a loss of motivation.

Publishing in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology and University of Tokyo, Japan found that problems with motivation and the formation of delusional beliefs may both be linked to a single underlying problem: when an overactivated cortex disrupts the brain’s ability to link actions and consequences.

Arvind Kumar, associate professor in computational neuroscience at KTH, says the study offers a computational neuroscience model that attempts to unify several known roles of the brain’s dopamine system: learning from rewards, controlling motivation and building an internal picture of what’s going on.

Why a unified explanation?

A unified explanation would make it easier to study how these symptoms develop together and may guide future research into treatments, the lead author Kenji Morita says. “If the suggested root cause is validated, then mechanistically grounded therapies could be developed.”

The model in the study shows what happens when this internal cause-and-effect tracking system breaks down. The model suggests that two simultaneous learning processes in the cortico-basal ganglia-midbrain circuits need to align for a person to realize what is rewarding and why.

Deep within the brain, the striatum is a control center that enables the brain to learn which reward is which and selectively increase motivation for right one, such as food when hungry or water when thirsty.

The other dopamine alignment takes place in the cortex. This is the part that enables the brain to essentially follow what is happening. It enables the brain to assign credit correctly: for example, a smell of baked bread predicts food, or the sound of liquid predicts drink.

The researchers found that both reduced motivation and delusion‑like beliefs could arise when an overstimulated cortex disrupts alignment between these processes.

“It causes the brain’s learning system to mix up association between motivation and reward,” Kumar says, “leading to both low motivation and delusion‑like ideas, such as assigning the wrong reasons for things happening.”

“The brain needs to align motivation, reward identity and their causes together to make a suitable choice,” he says.

By David Callahan

Source: KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Categories : Mental HealthTags :

Vivid Dreaming Makes Sleep Feel Deeper

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Perceived sleep depth is greater after having vivid immersive dreams

Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash

Researchers led by Guilio Bernardi at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Italy have discovered a key relationship between dreaming and the feeling of having had a good night’s sleep. Published in PLOS Biology on March 24th, the study shows that the feeling of deep sleep is not determined solely by slow-wave brain activity. Rather, immersive dreaming that comes with increases in wake-like brain activity leads to a greater feeling of deep sleep.

Why is it that sometimes we sleep 8 hours and don’t feel rested, while other times we feel like we had a great night’s sleep after only 5 hours? Research has shown that our feeling of deep sleep is related to a shift from high- to low-frequency brain waves, which is thought to drive unconsciousness. At the same time, other reports indicate that dream (REM) sleep is also perceived as deep, despite its wake-like brain waves. To better characterise the effects of dream sleep on perceived sleep depth, the researchers analysed EEG recordings from 44 adults who were repeatedly awoken during non-REM sleep over the course of 4 nights.

Analysis showed that shifts from faster to slower waves were indeed associated with a feeling of deep sleep. However, this relationship weakened when participants reported having had a dream, even if they could not remember the content. Perceived sleep depth was thus higher after dreaming even though this state is associated with wake-like brain activity. Specifically, vivid, bizarre, and emotionally intense dreams were all associated with subjectively deeper sleep, while abstract, reflective thought-like dreams with meta-awareness were related to more shallow feeling sleep.

These findings are contrary to the longstanding view that the feeling of deep sleep is governed solely by slow brain waves and the depth of unconsciousness, and suggest that perceptually immersive dreaming is what allows us to feel well rested – even if we can’t remember what we dreamed.

The authors add, “We already know that dreaming extends beyond REM sleep and occupies a large portion of the night, yet its function remains unclear. Our study suggests that dreams may help shape how we experience sleep by immersing us in an internal world that keeps us disconnected from the external environment.”

“Understanding how dreams contribute to the feeling of deep sleep opens new perspectives on sleep health and mental well-being. Alterations in dreaming – for example, a reduction in the richness or frequency of dreams – could influence how people perceive their sleep depth or duration, and may contribute to dissatisfaction with sleep quality.”

“This kind of research is extraordinarily demanding. Serial awakening studies require waking participants repeatedly across multiple nights and collecting detailed reports each time. It was only possible thanks to the dedication, resilience, and coordination of an exceptional team of researchers.”

Provided by PLOS

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GLP-1 Medications May Also Help with Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression

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GLP-1 medications used to treat diabetes and obesity were associated with a reduced need for hospital care and sickness absence due to psychiatric reasons, a new study shows. The large register-based study was carried out in collaboration between the University of Eastern Finland, Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and Griffith University in Australia.

Diabetes and obesity are associated with an increased risk of mental health symptoms, and similarly, individuals with mental disorders have an elevated risk of metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. Researchers have long been interested in the connections between these conditions and in how pharmacological treatments may affect both metabolic and mental health disorders.

The present study, published in The Lancet Pyschiatry, included nearly 100 000 participants, over 20 000 of whom had used GLP-1 medications. Participants were followed through Swedish national registers between 2009 and 2022.

The risk of substance use was also reduced

The results showed that the use of GLP-1 medications – particularly semaglutide – was associated with a reduction in sickness absence and hospital care due to psychiatric reasons. During periods of semaglutide use, the reduction was 42% compared with periods when GLP-1 medications were not used. For depression, the risk was 44% lower, and for anxiety disorders, 38% lower. 

In addition, semaglutide use was associated with a lower risk of substance use disorders: hospital care and sickness absence related to substance use were 47% lower during periods of semaglutide use compared with periods without GLP-1 medication. The use of GLP-1 receptor agonists was also associated with a reduced risk of suicidal behaviour.

One of the study’s authors, Professor Mark Taylor from Griffith University, says such results were to be expected: “An earlier study examining Swedish registers found the use of GLP-1 medications to be associated with a reduced risk of alcohol use disorder. Alcohol-related problems often have downstream effects on mood and anxiety, so we expected the effect to be positive on these as well.”

However, the magnitude of the association surprised the researchers:
“Because this is a registry-based study, we cannot determine exactly why or how these medications affect mood symptoms, but the association was quite strong. It is possible that, in addition to factors such as reduced alcohol consumption, weight loss-related improvements in body image, or relief associated with better glycaemic control in diabetes, there may also be direct neurobiological mechanisms involved – for example, through changes in the functioning of the brain’s reward system,” says Research Director, Docent Markku Lähteenvuo from the University of Eastern Finland.

Other recent evidence on the effects of GLP-1 medications on anxiety and depressive disorders has been somewhat inconsistent, but it has been largely based on small studies.

Source: University of Finland

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Well Over Three Million People in SA Develop Depression Every Year, Researchers Estimate

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It is estimated that around seven in 10 adults in South Africa have ever had depression at some point in their lifetime. Photo by Alex Green on Pexels

By Marcus Low

Around 3.8 million people in South Africa developed depression in 2024, estimate leading local researchers in a major new modelling study.

The prevalence of depression among people aged 15 and older in South Africa has dropped slightly from an estimated 5.1% in 2002 to 4.5% in 2024. While a decrease, this nevertheless means that over two million people in the country had depression in mid-2024.

When taken as a whole, there were an estimated 3.84 million new episodes of depression in South Africa in 2024. Since some people may have had more than one episode, the number of people who developed depression over the year will be slightly lower.

The estimates are from mathematical modelling published as a preprint earlier in March on medRxiv. While Spotlight doesn’t usually report on studies that haven’t yet been peer-reviewed, we made an exception because the estimates fill an important gap in our understanding of depression in South Africa and because of the stature of the authors. The new modelling drew on several nationally representative surveys of depression conducted in South Africa since 2002.

The researchers estimate that around seven in 10 adults in South Africa have ever had depression at some point in their lifetime.

“Previous studies have suggested that only 10-15% of the population ever experiences depression, but our study suggests a much higher proportion, 70%,” Dr Leigh Johnson, the lead scientist on the study, told Spotlight.

“Most of these people experience a single episode of depression and have no recurrences. The common belief is that depression is a frequently recurring condition, but this is true for only a minority of people who experience depression,” he said. Johnson is from the Centre of Integrated Data and Epidemiological Research at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and is also responsible for Thembisa, the leading mathematical model of HIV in South Africa.

The new modelling also suggests some interesting nuances regarding who is most at risk of depression. In mid-2024, prevalence in women was at 5.3%, well above the estimated 3.6% in men. Older people were significantly more likely to suffer from depression than young people.

Living with HIV has long been known to increase the risk of depression, but the modelling suggests that this effect has weakened over time as HIV treatment became more widely available. In 2010, 7.1% of people with HIV had depression compared to 4.9% in the general population. By 2024, 5.9% of people with HIV had depression, compared to 4.5% of the general population. In other words, the gap decreased from 2.2 percentage points to 1.4.

Increasing, but still very low antidepressant usage

While rates of depression have been relatively stable, the researchers estimate that antidepressant usage rates have almost tripled, from around 1% of the population using antidepressants in 2008, to 2.8% in 2024. In Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States, rates are between 4% and 16%.

The proportion of women taking antidepressants is more than four times higher than in men – a difference that cannot fully be explained by the higher rates of depression in women. Social factors like stigma are likely playing a role.

The differences between the private and public sectors are stark. Around 11% of medical scheme members are estimated to be taking antidepressants, compared to 0.9% in the rest of the population. “Levels of antidepressant use in the uninsured population are very low, despite a substantially greater prevalence of depression in people of lower socioeconomic status”, the researchers point out.

“Our study shows quite extreme inequality in access to antidepressant treatment in South Africa, with rates of antidepressant use in the private sector being about 12 times those in the public sector. Levels of antidepressant use in the private sector are quite similar to those in high-income countries, but in South Africa’s uninsured population there are major barriers to accessing mental healthcare,” said Johnson.

One such barrier, say the researchers, is regulatory obstacles that prevent nurses from prescribing antidepressants. This problem is made worse by the fact that South Africa has shortages of public sector psychiatrists and medical doctors.

“The study highlights the burden of depression in our country, the vast treatment gap, and stark inequities in access between the public and the private sectors despite on-paper availability of treatments we have known work to mitigate the effects of depression for decades,” the study’s principal investigator Professor Lara Fairall told Spotlight.

“There was a clear call to review regulatory barriers to wider access to antidepressants in the 2023 National Mental Health Policy Framework and Strategic Plan, but it has not been followed by definitive action,” she says.

“Unlocking these barriers requires clarity of mandate by multiple state and para-statal bodies including the National Department of Health, the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority and the South African Nursing Council, but the study is a reminder that failure to do so leaves millions of people vulnerable with desperate consequences for themselves, their families and the economy,” says Fairall who works as a health systems researcher at King’s College London and leads the Knowledge Translation Unit at UCT.

Republished from Spotlight under a Creative Commons licence.

Read the original article.

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Are Psychedelics Better than Antidepressants? New Study Says No

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With an innovative approach, scientists try to get around the problem of participant expectation in tests of psychedelics.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki

Psychedelic-assisted therapy may be no more effective than traditional antidepressants when patients know what drugs they are actually taking, according to a first-of-its kind analysis that compared how well each type of drug worked for major depression.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has resisted placebo-controlled testing methods, the gold standard in clinical trial design. Due to their powerful subjective effects, nearly everyone in the trial knows whether they received a psychedelic or the placebo even if they are not told.

But in trials of antidepressants, participants may not figure out whether they have received the drug or a placebo, which makes it hard to compare them with psychedelics.

To get around this problem, researchers from UC San Francisco, UCLA, and Imperial College, London tried a different approach. They compared the results from psychedelic therapy trials to the results from so-called open-label trials of traditional antidepressants, in which the participants all knew they were getting an antidepressant. That way, both treatments benefitted equally from the positive effect of patients knowing that they were being given a drug instead of a placebo. 

The findings both surprised and disappointed them: there was virtually no difference.

“Unblinding is the defining methodological problem of psychedelic trials. What I wanted to show is that even if you compare psychedelics to open-label antidepressants, psychedelics are still much better,” said Balázs Szigeti, PhD, a clinical data scientist at UCSF’s Translational Psychedelic Research Program, who led the study. “Unfortunately, what we got is the opposite result – that they are the same, which is very surprising given the enthusiasm around psychedelics and mental health.” 

Szigeti is the co-first author of the paper with Zachary J. Williams, MD, PhD, of UCLA; Hannah Barnett, MSc, of Imperial College, London is also an author. The study appeared March 18 in JAMA Psychiatry.

A sobering view

The hype around the use of psychedelics like psilocybin, or “magic mushrooms,” and LSD, to treat such conditions as depression and addiction has grown in recent years as an increasing number of studies have shown promising results, particularly for people who haven’t responded to traditional antidepressants.

The new findings don’t mean that psychedelic therapy does not work – just that it does not work better than traditional antidepressants. Patients improved substantially from both types of treatments, reducing depression scores by about 12 points on a standard scale.

Part of what has made psychedelics seem impressive in trials than antidepressants is how much more those who received the psilocybin or LSD improved than those who did not get it.

But the researchers concluded that this was the result of the lack of blinding in psychedelic trials: those who got the drug improved more because they knew they had gotten it, while those who received a placebo did worse because they knew they did not. Whereas in trials of traditional antidepressants, the difference between the groups was much smaller, making it seem like the drugs weren’t that effective.

When this ‘knowing the treatment’ factor leveled out, the seeming advantage of psychedelics disappeared. 

“Psychedelics may still be a valuable treatment option,” Szigeti said. “But if we want to understand their true benefits, we have to compare them fairly – and when we do that, the advantage over standard antidepressants is much smaller than many people, including myself, expected.”

Source: EurekAlert!

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Mental Health Issues Before Surgery can Affect Memory and Cognition

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Depression and other psychological factors may be linked to the risk of postoperative confusion in older adults. This is shown in a new systematic review from Karolinska Institutet, published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia. The study summarises results from more than 6700 patients.

Older individuals undergoing surgery face an increased risk of developing cognitive complications, such as postoperative delirium. Delirium is characterised by sudden changes in attention and awareness, and can lead to longer hospital stays and reduced functioning. The new study analyses 30 previously published works in which researchers examined whether preoperative psychological factors, such as depression, anxiety, stress, and personality traits, may influence these complications.

Depression most common

The review identified four groups of psychological factors. Depression was the most common and appeared in nearly all studies. In the statistical meta-analysis, no clear association between depression and delirium was observed, but when the researchers used alternative statistical synthesis methods, they found evidence suggesting that psychological factors play a role.

“Our results show that depression is the most consistently reported psychological risk factor, even though the pooled statistical analyses did not demonstrate a significant effect,” says Anahita Amirpour, PhD at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society.
“At the same time, we saw that anxiety, stress, and personality traits may also play a role, although the research base there is more limited.”

Postoperative delirium

In total, the study included 6714 patients from 16 different countries. Postoperative delirium was the most common outcome measure and occurred in between 9 and 55% of patients, depending on the study. Very few studies examined other cognitive complications, such as long-term effects on memory and attention.

The researchers emphasise that the results should be interpreted with caution. Many of the included studies varied greatly in how they measured both psychological factors and cognitive outcomes, and only two studies examined time periods extending beyond the immediate postoperative phase.

Source: Karolinska Institutet

Categories : Mental Health Substance UseTags :

Study: Adolescent Cannabis Use Linked to Doubling Risk of Psychotic and Bipolar Disorders

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Adolescents who use cannabis could face a significantly higher risk of developing serious psychiatric disorders by young adulthood, according to a large new study published in JAMA Health Forum. The longitudinal study followed nearly half a million adolescents ages 13 to 17 through age 26 and found that past-year cannabis use during adolescence was associated with a significantly higher risk of incident psychotic (doubled), bipolar (doubled), depressive and anxiety disorders.

The study was conducted by researchers from Kaiser Permanente, the Public Health Institute’s Getting it Right from the Start, the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Southern California, and was funded by a grant from NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA0531920).

The study analysed electronic health record data from routine paediatric visits between 2016 and 2023. Cannabis use preceded psychiatric diagnoses by an average of 1.7 to 2.3 years. The study’s longitudinal design strengthens evidence that adolescent cannabis exposure is a potential risk factor for developing mental illness.

“As cannabis becomes more potent and aggressively marketed, this study indicates that adolescent cannabis use is associated with double the risk of incident psychotic and bipolar disorders, two of the most serious mental health conditions,” said Lynn Silver, MD, program director of the Getting it Right from the Start, a program of the Public Health Institute, and a study co-author.

The evidence increasingly points to the need for an urgent public health response — one that reduces product potency, prioritises prevention, limits youth exposure and marketing and treats adolescent cannabis use as a serious health issue, not a benign behaviour. 

Lynn Silver, MD, Program Director, PHI’s Getting it Right from the Start

Cannabis is the most used illicit drug among U.S. adolescents. The Monitoring the Future study shows use rising with grade level — from about 8% in 8th grade to 26% in 12th grade — and according to the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, more than 10% of all U.S. teens aged 12 to 17 report past-year use. At the same time, average THC levels in California cannabis flower now exceed 20%, far higher than in previous decades, and concentrates can exceed 95% THC.

Unlike many prior studies, the research examined any self-reported past-year cannabis use, with universal screening of teens during standard pediatric care, rather than focusing only on heavy use or cannabis use disorder.

“Even after accounting for prior mental health conditions and other substance use, adolescents who reported cannabis use had a substantially higher risk of developing psychiatric disorders — particularly psychotic and bipolar disorders,” said Kelly Young-Wolff, PhD, lead author of the study and senior research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.

This study adds to the growing body of evidence that cannabis use during adolescence could have potentially detrimental, long-term health effects. It’s imperative that parents and their children have accurate, trusted, and evidence-based information about the risks of adolescent cannabis use.

Kelly Young-Wolff, PhD, Lead Study Author and Senior Research Scientist, Kaiser Permanente Division of Research

The study also found that cannabis use was more common among adolescents enrolled in Medicaid and those living in more socioeconomically deprived neighbourhoods, raising concerns that expanding cannabis commercialisation could exacerbate existing mental health disparities.

Source: Public Health Institute

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Poor Sleep may Drive up Teens’ Screen Time

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New research in Brain & Behavior found a link between screen time and adolescents’ sleep quality and beliefs about healthy lifestyles.

In the study of 700 teens attending 2 high schools in the Black Sea region of Turkey, questionnaire responses revealed that participants who spent more time exposed to screens tended to have lower sleep quality. These adolescents were also less likely to have beliefs supporting the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Screen exposure appeared to play a mediating role in the relationship between sleep quality and healthy lifestyle beliefs, meaning that poor sleep quality may lead to more screen time, which in turn can negatively affect beliefs about healthy lifestyles.

“It is recommended to promote interventions aimed at reducing screen exposure, increasing social interaction, and developing alternative activities among adolescents,” the authors wrote. “Implementing these recommendations may help adolescents adopt healthier lifestyles, regulate their sleep quality, and reduce their screen exposure.”

Source: Wiley

Categories : Mental HealthTags :

Comprehensive ADHD Study Confirms the Best Treatment Options

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The most comprehensive review to date of ADHD treatments has found that medication for children and adults, and cognitive behavioural therapy for adults, remain the most effective approaches, backed by the strongest short-term trial evidence.

Researchers led by the Université Paris Nanterre (France), Institut Robert-Debré du Cerveau de l’Enfant (France), and the University of Southampton (UK) analysed over 200 meta-analyses covering different treatment types, participant groups, and clinical outcomes in a study published 27 November 2025 in The BMJ.

The research was funded by public and peer-reviewed research grants from Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France), France 2030 program (France), and National Institute for Health and Care Research (UK).

To help people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their clinicians make more informed, shared decisions, the team has created an interactive website that clearly presents the findings and the evidence behind each treatment based on the review (ebiadhd-database.org).

“We know that people with ADHD and their families are often overwhelmed by conflicting messages about which treatments work,” says Professor Samuele Cortese , an NIHR Research Professor at the University of Southampton and senior lead author on the paper.

“We believe this study and the accompanying website provide the most authoritative, evidence-based, and accessible guidance currently available.

“The Evidence-Based Interventions for ADHD website provides freely available, evidence-based, and continuously updated information in an easy-to-understand way. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first platform in the world to do so based on such a rigorous synthesis of the available evidence.”

Overall, five medications in children and adolescents, and two medications and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in adults were shown to be effective while supported by a relatively robust evidence base. Critically, all this evidence was limited to the short-term, despite long-term treatment being common in clinical practice.

Treatments like acupuncture, mindfulness and exercise showed promise, but the evidence supporting their use was of a low quality due to small numbers of participants and risk of bias. The limitations applied to studies evaluating cognitive behavioural therapy in children and adolescents, as well as research on the long-term effects of mindfulness in adults, although mindfulness was the only intervention to demonstrate large beneficial effects at extended follow-up.

Dr Corentin Gosling, Associate Professor at the Paris Nanterre University and first lead author of the study, says: “Long waiting lists for mental health services are a major issue. Having incorrect information about treatments can make people’s journeys even more difficult, by wasting time and money on non-evidence-based approaches, for example.

“By contrast, taking the time to review all treatment options within a shared decision-making process using the web app we developed can empower people with ADHD, leading to better treatment adherence, improved outcomes, and an overall better patient experience.”

The findings generally complement current international clinical guidelines, not only by providing convenient access to current high-quality evidence, but also by covering interventions not usually mentioned in clinical guidelines.

The team hope this new project will achieve a similar impact in influencing clinical guidelines and practice as their previous project (ebiact-database.com), which looked at treatments for autism.

Benefits and harms of ADHD interventions: umbrella review and platform for shared decision making is published in The BMJ and is available online.

Source: University of Southampton