Parent and child mental health has suffered during the pandemic and transition phase. Structured and shared parenting may be intervention targets beneficial to families who are struggling with parent or child mental health challenges.

First, we investigated associations between structured and shared parenting and parent depression symptoms. Second, we investigated associations between structured and shared parenting and depression, hyperactivity/inattention and irritability symptoms in children.

A total of 1027 parents in two-parent households (4797 observations total; 85.1% mothers) completed online surveys about themselves and their children (aged 2–18 years) from April 2020 to July 2022. Structured parenting and shared parenting responsibilities were assessed from April 2020 to November 2021. Symptoms of parent depression, child depression, child hyperactivity and inattention, child irritability, and child emotional and conduct problems were assessed repeatedly (one to 14 times; median of four times) from April 2020 to July 2022.

Parents who reported higher levels of shared parenting responsibilities had lower depression symptoms (β = −0.09 to −0.32, all P < 0.01) longitudinally. Parents who reported higher levels of shared parenting responsibilities had children with fewer emotional problems (ages 2–5 years; β = −0.07, P < 0.05), fewer conduct problems (ages 2–5 years; β = −0.09, P < 0.01) and less irritability (ages 13–18 years; β = −0.27, P < 0.001) longitudinally. Structured parenting was associated with fewer conduct problems (ages 2–5 years; β = −0.05, P < 0.05).

Shared parenting is beneficial for parent and child mental health, even under chaotic or inflexible life conditions. Structured parenting is beneficial for younger children.

Cross-sectional studies have shown that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the mental health of healthcare staff. However, it is less well understood how working over the long term in successive COVID-19 waves affects staff well-being.

To identify subpopulations within the health and social care staff workforce with differentiated trajectories of mental health symptoms during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 Staff Wellbeing Survey assessed health and social care staff well-being within an area of the UK at four time points, separated by 3-month intervals, spanning November 2020 to August 2021.

Growth mixture models were performed on the depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder longitudinal data. Two class solutions provided the best fit for all models. The vast majority of the workforce were best represented by the low-symptom class trajectory, where by symptoms were consistently below the clinical cut-off for moderate-to-severe symptoms. A sizable minority (13–16%) were categorised as being in the high-symptom class, a group who had symptom levels in the moderate-to-severe range throughout the peaks and troughs of the pandemic. In the depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder models, the high-symptom class perceived communication from their organisation to be less effective than the low-symptom class.

This research identified a group of health service staff who reported persistently high mental health symptoms during the pandemic. This group of staff may well have particular needs in terms of the provision of well-being support services.

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a psychiatric disorder with complex etiology, with a significant portion of disease risk imparted by genetics. Traditional genome-wide association studies (GWAS) produce principal evidence for the association of genetic variants with disease. Transcriptomic imputation (TI) allows for the translation of those variants into regulatory mechanisms, which can then be used to assess the functional outcome of genetically regulated gene expression (GReX) in a broader setting through the use of phenome-wide association studies (pheWASs) in large and diverse clinical biobank populations with electronic health record phenotypes.

Here, we applied TI using S-PrediXcan to translate the most recent PGC-ED AN GWAS findings into AN-GReX. For significant genes, we imputed AN-GReX in the Mount Sinai BioMe™ Biobank and performed pheWASs on over 2000 outcomes to test the clinical consequences of aberrant expression of these genes. We performed a secondary analysis to assess the impact of body mass index (BMI) and sex on AN-GReX clinical associations.

Our S-PrediXcan analysis identified 53 genes associated with AN, including what is, to our knowledge, the first-genetic association of AN with the major histocompatibility complex. AN-GReX was associated with autoimmune, metabolic, and gastrointestinal diagnoses in our biobank cohort, as well as measures of cholesterol, medications, substance use, and pain. Additionally, our analyses showed moderation of AN-GReX associations with measures of cholesterol and substance use by BMI, and moderation of AN-GReX associations with celiac disease by sex.

Our BMI-stratified results provide potential avenues of functional mechanism for AN-genes to investigate further.

Throughout the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, health and social care workers have faced unprecedented professional demands, all of which are likely to have placed considerable strain on their psychological well-being.

To measure the national prevalence of mental health symptoms within healthcare staff, and identify individual and organisational predictors of well-being.

The COVID-19 Staff Wellbeing Survey is a longitudinal online survey of psychological well-being among health and social care staff in Northern Ireland. The survey included four time points separated by 3-month intervals; time 1 (November 2020; n = 3834) and time 2 (February 2021; n = 2898) results are presented here. At time 2, 84% of respondents had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The survey included four validated psychological well-being questionnaires (depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and insomnia), as well as demographic and organisational measures.

At time 1 and 2, a high proportion of staff reported moderate-to-severe symptoms of depression (30–36%), anxiety (26–27%), post-traumatic stress (30–32%) and insomnia (27–28%); overall, significance tests and effect size data suggested psychological well-being was generally stable between November 2020 and February 2021 for health and social care staff. Multiple linear regression models indicated that perceptions of less effective communication within their organisation predicted greater levels of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and insomnia.

This study highlights the need to offer psychological support to all health and social care staff, and to communicate with staff regularly, frequently and clearly regarding COVID-19 to help protect staff psychological well-being.