Child and adolescent psychiatry

Our research mission is to undertake high-quality research to generate findings that will improve children and young people’s mental health.

All our research is co-developed with our Youth Advisory Group and their families and integrated with NHS clinical practitioners.

We have a history of strong advisory and implementation links with policymakers in Wales including through a dedicated post working across the Wolfson Centre for Young People’s Mental Health, the Welsh Government, UK charities and international Advisory and Guidelines groups. Consequently, our research has a track record of informing the Welsh Government’s policy on young people’s mental health.

Our current research has been funded by the Wolfson Foundation; the Wellcome Trust; Medical Research Council (MRC), part of UK Research and Innovation; and the National Institute for Health and Care Research, and Health and Care Research Wales.

Our research

Our research in child and adolescent psychiatry covers four key areas:

Depression and anxiety

Our research aims to:

Examine the causes and antecedents of depression in young people, including those at highest risk, assess how depression develops and identify prevention targets
Develop and evaluate early detection, intervention, and psycho-education programmes in collaboration with young people and practitioners
Use genetic and family-based approaches to examine cross-generational transmission
Use genetic discoveries (polygenic scores and rare copy number variants) to help stratify depression and identify causal risks
More details can be found on The Wolfson Centre for Young People's Mental Health website

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and other neurodevelopmental conditions

Our research aims to:

Examine the development, causes, and outcomes of ADHD, autism, and other neurodevelopmental conditions from early childhood through to adult life
Understand links with anxiety, depression and psychosis
Investigate why there are sex differences in ADHD using genomic and epidemiological study designs

Cross-disorder epidemiology and genetics

Our research aims to:

Examine the development and outcomes of mental health problems across the life course in population-based cohorts
Examine trends in the population prevalence of childhood and adolescent mental health problems and the reasons for these
Identify causal environmental exposures using a range of causal inference approaches including genetic methods and informative designs including twin and IVF designs
Use genetic discoveries to improve our conceptualization of psychopathology

Mental health problems in schools

Our research aims to:

Investigate mental health problems in young people and their life at school
Identify ways of promoting optimal mental health during risk periods such as the transition from primary to secondary school
Highlight the importance of children’s age within their school year for mental health problems
Examine the impact of the school environment on mental health and wellbeing in adolescents with ADHD

For recent publications, see individual Cardiff University staff member profiles below.

Our work

Photograph of adolescent boy accessing MoodHwb on a tablet

MoodHwb: mood and wellbeing in young people

We collaborated with young people and parents/carers to develop a web programme to support young people with their mood and well-being.

Animating ADHD

We are working together with local ADHD parent support groups to develop an animation video for children aged 7-11 years about what it means to have ADHD.

Data sharing

We have a range of child and adolescent longitudinal and genetically informative in-house datasets, including the Early Prediction of Adolescent Depression (EPAD) study, the Cardiff University Study of ADHD Genes and Environment (SAGE), the Cardiff Study of all Wales and North West of England Twins (CaStANET) and the School Transition and Adjustment Research Study (STARS).

We have participated in international data sharing, including the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) ADHD and depression working groups (data can be accessed through the PGC), the prospective high-familial risk family consortium and the Cross-Cultural Consortium on Irritability.

We are committed to Open Science and data sharing where possible. Many of our in-house datasets were collected when different data-sharing requirements were applied and so cannot be openly available to all.

We will consider applications to use this data from researchers based at Higher Education institutions for non-commercial purposes and process these in line with appropriate permissions.

If you would like to use this data, please send an overview of your proposed research question to the study Principal Investigator. Any requests will be subject to a data transfer agreement.

The Early Prediction of Adolescent Depression (EPAD) study is included in the Catalogue of Mental Health Measures, where full documentation is available.

Anonymised data from the School Transition and Adjustment Research Study (STARS) is available on the UK data archive.

Public involvement

We work with two Youth Advisory Groups (YAGs) of young people with lived experiences of mental health difficulties or neurodevelopmental conditions, these are the Wolfson Centre YAG and the National Centre for Mental Health YAG for co-development and co-production.