Mental health problems commonly persist from childhood to adulthood. This study tested whether young adult life transitions can improve adult mental health symptoms after adjusting for childhood mental health symptoms.

The analysis uses data from the prospective, representative Great Smoky Mountains Study. Life transitions (e.g., high school completion, partnering, parenthood, and living independently) were assessed up to three times in young adulthood (ages 18 to 26; 3,241 observations). A cumulative variable counted the number of young adult transitions. Emotional, substance use, and antisocial personality symptoms were assessed at age 30 (1,154 participants or 81.2% of the original sample). Propensity models adjusted for early life adversities and psychiatric symptoms.

Multiple young adult transitions were common (m = 4.62; SD = 1.57). After adjusting for childhood mental health problems and adversities, each additional transition was significantly associated with a reduction in subsequent adult emotional symptoms (β = −0.34, 95% CI: −0.59, −0.08, p = 0.01) and adult antisocial personality disorder symptoms (β = −0.08, 95% CI: −0.14, −0.02, p < 0.001. These associations were stronger in males than in females. Young adult transitions were not associated with reductions in subsequent substance use symptoms (β = −0.04; 95% CI: −0.11, 0.03, p = 0.30). Young adult transitions related to educational milestones and consistent employment were associated with the largest reductions in symptoms.

In this cohort study, life transitions during young adulthood were associated with reduced emotional and behavioral symptoms in adulthood. These transitions may constitute a potential mental health turning point and a specific, modifiable target for social policies.

Hypochondriacal disorder involves persistent anxiety about suffering from an undetected serious medical condition, despite medical reassurance. Hypochondriacal disorder significantly affects social relationships, occupational functioning and personal well-being. In university settings, where mental health concerns are prevalent, insights into prevalence of hypochondriacal disorder and associations with depression and other health challenges are essential.

This study examines the prevalence and correlates of hypochondriacal disorder among Norwegian university students, focusing on its associations with depression, mental distress and somatic symptom burden.

The 2022 Students’ Health and Wellbeing Study, a national survey of Norwegian higher education students, included 59 536 participants aged 18–35. Participants were categorised based on a pre-defined diagnostic list of mental and somatic concerns, and participants were grouped as follows: hypochondriacal disorder only, depression only, comorbid hypochondriacal disorder and depression and controls. Validated instruments included the Somatic Symptom Scale-8, the Hopkins Symptoms Checklist, the Satisfaction With Life Scale, an abbreviated version of the University of California, Los Angeles, Three-Item Loneliness Scale and four items on suicidal ideation.

Hypochondriacal disorder was reported by 0.86% (n = 457) of participants, with 52% also reporting depression. Those with hypochondriacal disorder had significantly worse mental and somatic health outcomes, especially when comorbid with depression, including elevated distress, suicidality, insomnia and poor quality of life.

Although uncommon, hypochondriacal disorder is linked to severe mental and somatic health burdens, particularly when co-occurring with depression. These findings highlight the need for integrated mental health strategies in academic settings to address hypochondriacal disorder and its frequent comorbidities.

Why, What, Who, When are a set of questions, sometimes referred to as the ‘WH calibration questions’ that help interrogate a concept in terms of its application and utility. In this article these questions are used to evaluate decisions made by footballers around their mental health (MH) and wellbeing. They allow us to examine the help-seeking behaviours of footballers, such as: Why seek help? What help is available? Who to go to? When’s the right time? The article examines the psychotherapies, mainly CBT, suitable for football players and offers practical examples of how clubs have supported their players. The roles of multi-disciplinary team members involved in promoting the wellbeing of players are discussed. The content of this paper is based on a review of the literature and personal knowledge of the authors’ experiences as MH clinicians in professional football clubs.

1. (1) To show the extent to which professional footballers experience mental health difficulties, and the nature of these problems.

2. (2) To highlight the thought processes of footballers during their management of their mental health.

3. (3) To provide a description of the therapies available to footballers, and highlighting the forms of CBT in common use.

4. (4) To emphasise the need for a holistic approach to MH provision, and clarify the roles of people within football clubs who provide MH support.

5. (5) To reflect on the need for ‘in-house’ specialist mental health input within professional football clubs.

More people than ever are receiving support for mental health crises, and instances of suicide continue to grow. Mental health funding has recently increased, focusing on improving services that provide an alternative to emergency departments, such as urgent helplines and crisis cafés. However, there is a lack of literature examining the efficacy of these services, despite research suggesting they may be associated with lower hospital admission rates.

We aimed to evaluate the perspectives of people with lived experience of accessing a variety of mental health crisis services in the UK.

One-to-one interviews were conducted with 25 individuals as part of a qualitative grounded theory analysis.

The following themes were identified as important for recovery: more than a diagnosis (a need for person-centred care); instilling hope for the future (access to creative spaces and community); and a safe space for recovery (out-of-hours crisis cafés). Many have credited crisis cafés with saving their lives and felt there should be increased funding provided for collaboration between the National Health Service (NHS) and the third sector. Participants highlighted the need for interim support for those awaiting therapy via the NHS and continuity of care as key areas for improvement.

NHS services are struggling to meet the mental health needs of the population, resulting in lengthy waiting times for therapy and an over-reliance on the third sector. While crisis cafés are currently provided at a low cost and appear to result in satisfaction, policymakers must ensure they receive adequate funding and do not become overburdened.

Women from minoritised ethnic communities experience inequalities in access, experience and outcomes of psychological therapy. Understanding the factors associated with these inequalities could inform improvements to mental health services.

To explore therapists’ experiences of providing treatment to women from minoritised ethnic communities, including insights on adaptations made at the delivery, content and wider organisation levels, and to gather suggestions about potential treatment improvements.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 therapists working in two National Health Service Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression services and who had experience of treating women from minoritised ethnic communities. Data were analysed using thematic analysis.

Three high-order themes were identified: incorporating ethnicity and culture in the delivery of psychological therapies, challenges associated with delivering therapeutic interventions to women from minoritised ethnic groups and improvements to services that could support better access, engagement and outcomes for women from minoritised ethnic groups.

Findings indicate that therapists viewed cultural adaptation and cultural sensitivity as important to the delivery of appropriate care for minoritised ethnic women. Challenges to appropriate care included limited service resources, communication and language barriers, stigma and existing access and engagement inequalities. Therapists suggested that, to deliver high-quality care and optimise outcomes, improvements are required in cultural sensitivity training, flexibility of service delivery, outreach work with communities to encourage uptake and reduce stigma, support for staff and workforce diversity.

Mental health conditions, particularly depression and anxiety, are highly prevalent and impose substantial health burdens globally. Despite advancements in machine learning, there is limited application of these methods in predicting common mental illnesses within community populations in low-resource settings.

This study aims to examine the prevalence and associated risk factors of common mental illnesses collectively (depression and anxiety) in a rural Bangladeshi community using machine learning models.

This cross-sectional study surveyed 490 adults aged 18–59 in a rural Bangladeshi community. Depression and anxiety were assessed using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-2) and Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD-2) scales. Machine learning models, including Categorical Boosting, the support vector machine, the random forest and XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting), were trained on 80% of the data-set and tested on 20% to evaluate predictive accuracy, precision, F1 score, log-loss and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC).

Some 20.4% of participants experienced at least one common mental illness. Feature importance analysis identified house type, age group and educational status as the most significant predictors. SHAP (Shapley Additive exPlanations) values highlighted their influence on model outputs, and the XGBoost gain metric confirmed the importance of marital status and house type, with gains of 0.76 and 0.73, respectively. XGBoost delivered the best performance, achieving an F1 score of 71.01%, precision of 71.58%, accuracy of 71.15% and the lowest log-loss value of 0.56. The random forest had an accuracy of 78.21% and an AUC-ROC of 0.90.

The findings of this study suggest targeted interventions addressing housing and social determinants could improve mental health outcomes in similar rural settings. Further studies should consider longitudinal data to explore causal relationships.

Studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic found high occurrence of suicidal thoughts and behaviours (STBs) among healthcare workers (HCWs). The current study aimed to (1) develop a machine learning-based prediction model for future STBs using data from a large prospective cohort of Spanish HCWs and (2) identify the most important variables in terms of contribution to the model’s predictive accuracy.

This is a prospective, multicentre cohort study of Spanish HCWs active during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 8,996 HCWs participated in the web-based baseline survey (May–July 2020) and 4,809 in the 4-month follow-up survey. A total of 219 predictor variables were derived from the baseline survey. The outcome variable was any STB at the 4-month follow-up. Variable selection was done using an L1 regularized linear Support Vector Classifier (SVC). A random forest model with 5-fold cross-validation was developed, in which the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and undersampling of the majority class balancing techniques were tested. The model was evaluated by the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) curve and the area under the precision–recall curve. Shapley’s additive explanatory values (SHAP values) were used to evaluate the overall contribution of each variable to the prediction of future STBs. Results were obtained separately by gender.

The prevalence of STBs in HCWs at the 4-month follow-up was 7.9% (women = 7.8%, men = 8.2%). Thirty-four variables were selected by the L1 regularized linear SVC. The best results were obtained without data balancing techniques: AUROC = 0.87 (0.86 for women and 0.87 for men) and area under the precision–recall curve = 0.50 (0.55 for women and 0.45 for men). Based on SHAP values, the most important baseline predictors for any STB at the 4-month follow-up were the presence of passive suicidal ideation, the number of days in the past 30 days with passive or active suicidal ideation, the number of days in the past 30 days with binge eating episodes, the number of panic attacks (women only) and the frequency of intrusive thoughts (men only).

Machine learning-based prediction models for STBs in HCWs during the COVID-19 pandemic trained on web-based survey data present high discrimination and classification capacity. Future clinical implementations of this model could enable the early detection of HCWs at the highest risk for developing adverse mental health outcomes.

NCT04556565

This study assessed compassion satisfaction, compassion fatigue, and burnout in health care providers from public health care institutions in Ecuador during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted in 2022, involving 111 different public health care institutions in 23 provinces in Ecuador, with 2873 participants recruited via convenience sampling. The survey instrument was the revised Stamm’s Professional Quality of Life Scale Version-5 tool, designed to measure self-reported compassion fatigue, work satisfaction, and burnout among providers. Kruskall-Wallis test assessed subscale score differences by gender, professional role, region, and health care facility level. Dunn’s test was then applied to determine whether groups differed from each other.

On average, health care providers from all facilities had a high rate of compassion satisfaction (84.9%). However, the majority presented moderate levels of burnout (57.1%), and moderate levels of secondary traumatic stress (59.6%). Higher burnout levels were observed in the Amazon regions compared to Coastal regions.

Despite high compassion satisfaction, most surveyed health care providers from Ecuador’s public health institutions experienced moderate burnout and secondary traumatic stress, with higher burnout levels in the Amazon region. Ecuador, similarly to other LMICs, requires mental health policy and legislation targeted to the mental health workforce and these needs. More research is needed on burnout factors among health care providers in resource-challenged low- and middle-income countries.

This study exploratively analyzed the associations of well-being with psychological characteristics, socioeconomic status (SES), and the number of relocations after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Using a cross-sectional study design, an online questionnaire survey was administered to 416 residents of Fukushima and Tokyo each aged 20-59 years (832 in total) between August 25 and 26, 2018, which was 7 and a half years after the disaster. Categorical factor analysis and multiple regression analysis were performed to investigate associations of 5 well-being scales (positive emotion, negative-free emotion, life satisfaction and general happiness, positive characteristics, and positive functioning) with psychological characteristics, SES, and the number of relocations.

Four of the well-being scales, except for negative-free emotion, were strongly associated with each other and showed similarities in the strength of their associations with psychological characteristics and SES. Among the items surveyed, psychological distress, mindfulness, and marital status were strongly associated with well-being among Fukushima residents. Contrarily, radiation risk perception or the number of relocations were not significantly associated with well-being.

Focusing on psychological distress is expected to have a significant impact on improving well-being after the disaster. In addition, assistance in avoiding unintended family separation may be helpful.