Volume 2 Issue 2, February 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented developmental disruptions to children and young people. Here we address its long-term impact on children and young people, relay their views on important issues for mental health in the context of the pandemic and provide recommendations for future research priorities.

In this Q&A, we speak to Melissa Marselle, a member of the British Psychological Society’s Climate Environment Action Coordinating Group, which supports and advises on the implementation of effective climate change and environment work rooted in psychological evidence, and a lecturer of environmental psychology at the University of Surrey, UK. Her research examines the mental health benefits of contact with nature, with a specific focus on biodiversity.

In this Perspective, Minnis and co-authors propose a new framework, the bio-exposome, to integrate the multiple aspects of biological and exposome factors associated with childhood adversity that interact and influence outcomes for individuals across their lifespan.

Erritzoe et al. review the current evidence from neuroimaging studies on psychedelics and discuss how these data advance our understanding of their action.

The authors conducted a systematic review and individual participant data meta-analysis of 14 studies to evaluate psychological interventions for depression relapse prevention.

Using a large multi-center neuroimaging dataset, Fu, Antoniades et al. reveal that major depressive disorder is characterized by two neuroanatomical dimensions exhibiting distinct treatment response to placebo and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor medications.

Instructions about nicotine strength influence smokers’ perception of the nicotine content in electronic cigarettes and are associated with neural responses in the thalamocortical system.

Using a multivariate approach in a sample from the UK Biobank, the authors examine the genetic relationships between measures of functional connectivity and psychiatric disorders.

Delli Colli and colleagues describe a mathematical model to predict plasticity, and thus susceptibility to change mood according to contextual factors, based on a large sample from the STAR*D dataset.

This longitudinal study of young people with parents with bipolar disorder assessed genetic and symptomatic risks associated with brain surface features, identifying reduced baseline frontotemporal cortical thickness in individuals who developed mood disorders at follow-up.

In this article, the authors use survey data from youth in three countries from the Caribbean to provide an evidence-based model of the association of climate distress and generalized anxiety and well-being more broadly.

Burrows, Denckla and colleagues performed a systematic review to evaluate the available evidence linking climate change to mental health outcomes.

In this Analysis, authors survey the current literature landscape COVID-19-related racism and mental health outcomes experienced by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in the US and provide stakeholder input on addressing and mitigating the effects discrimination.