26th September 2024
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News round-up (27 September 2024)
This week we highlight interesting new research on the mind-body connection. One study identifies a difference in brain activity between teenagers with depression and those without, while another suggests that in pregnant women, greater activity in the amygdala was linked to more difficulty in regulating emotion, and an increased likelihood of developing depressive symptoms. Meanwhile, a new research hub at Edinburgh University will focus on the hypothesis that bipolar depression is a metabolic disturbance rather than a mood disorder. In policy news, the primary care mental health service Practitioner Health has been extended for another year, while in Wales Mind Cymru has called for better data collection to improve the care of mental health inpatients.
Main stories this week
University partners with YouTube Health to improve quality of mental health information
University College London (UCL) has teamed up with YouTube Health to train 100 mental health experts to train them in creating video content for YouTube.
NHS ICB to use data to improve mental health services
NHS Cheshire and Merseyside, an integrated care board (ICB), is planning to make better use of data to help it improve mental health services.
Digital mental health therapies could free up thousands of NHS hours, NICE says
The use of digital therapies for mental health conditions could free up thousands of NHS therapists’ hours, according to the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
Mental illness is Britain’s biggest health concern
Mental health has overtaken cancer and obesity as the health problem people in Britain are most likely to worry about, a new survey has found.
Other stories from the week
GP mental health service offer is extended another year
NHS England has extended the contract for the national GP mental health support service.
The contract for Practitioner Health, a primary care service that supports health and care practitioners with mental health problems, has been extended to March 2026. A review into all mental health services is continuing, however.
In April, NHS England said it would no longer fund the service to take on new registrations from hospital doctors, and that it would review its offer to all staff groups in the long term.
However, NHSE was forced to reverse its plans to axe new secondary care registrations following strong criticism from the profession, including from the BMA and the Doctors’ Association, who called the decision “short-sighted” and “cruel”.
Professor Dame Clare Gerada, a GP and ambassador for Practitioner Health, said there was now “uncertainty” for the service as March 2026 is “only 18 months away”.
Practitioner Health employs approximately 190 members of staff. Gerada said: “It’s the largest single physician health programme in the world – it’s a world leader. And instead of saying congratulations, well done, we say, ‘well you’ve got 18 months of funding.’”
Mind Cymru urges Welsh Government to take the lead in improving care for mental health inpatients
A report launched by the charity Mind Cymru has raised concerns about the safety of mental health inpatients in Wales.
Its report, Raising the Standard, says that the country has a struggling mental health workforce, with 13 of 18 hospitals between 2022-23 having problems stemming from staff shortages, negatively impacting those in their care.
Drawing on patient experiences of care as well as freedom of information request information and inspectorate reports, Raising the Standard has set out a number of areas for improvement, including a stronger commitment to collecting and publishing data, particularly of race and other protected characteristics, to better understand and tackle inequality and discrimination.
The report also highlights the need to follow restrictive practice guidance to limit harm to patients, and introduce the Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Act 2018 to Wales.
Brain scans show differences in young people with depression
Young people with severe depression experience disruptions in the way regions of their brain communicate with each other which are distinct from those observed in adults, a new study has found.
The University of Melbourne research, published in Nature Mental Health, could be used to identify potential targets for brain stimulation therapies, extending their existing application from adults to young people.
The study analysed the brain scans of 810 young people aged 12-25, of whom 440 had major depressive disorder (MDD) and 370 were healthy comparison individuals.
The study found that in young people with MDD, some densely connected regions of the brain (known as hubs) showed stronger connectivity and others showed weaker connectivity compared with young people without depression.
Professor Andrew Zalesky, who supervised the research, said the connectivity was particularly strong in the part of the brain associated with someone’s internalised thoughts and rumination: “We see that in youth with depression, the default mode is more strongly connected, it’s more activated, which suggests that there is a greater focus on self-thought and self-reflection.”
Metabolism and diet are linked to bipolar depression, say researchers
Bipolar depression should be seen as a metabolic disturbance rather than a mood disorder, researchers have argued.
Iain Campbell, a researcher at Edinburgh University who himself has bipolar depression, believes that the condition can be addressed through diets and other interventions that can change bodily processes. Last week, the university set up a new hub for metabolic psychiatry, which will investigate bipolar depression’s links to metabolic disorders, such as diabetes and obesity, and will also investigate how it is affected by disruptions to circadian rhythms.
“We should be thinking of bipolar depression, not as a primary emotional problem, but as a malfunctioning of energy regulation in the body,” said Campbell. “It is a very different way of thinking about mental illness.”
He added: “Ketogenic diets, in which a person eats no carbohydrates but lots of fats, are quite common. They are used to cut weight but also to treat epilepsy in some cases. However, it is now becoming clear they can help alleviate bipolar depression.”
Study finds symptoms of depression during pregnancy linked to specific brain activity
Activity to a specific area deep in the brain is linked to regulation of negative emotions in healthy pregnant women, a study has found.
About one in seven women develop postnatal depression. The researchers believe that their findings will enable doctors to test for this particular brain activity and thereby identify which women are at risk of developing the condition.
The study, published in the journal Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology, involved looking at 15 healthy pregnant women with very high oestrogen levels due to the pregnancy. They were compared with 32 non-pregnant women, who had naturally fluctuating oestrogen levels. Each woman was put in an MRI scanner and shown upsetting pictures. They were then asked to regulate their emotional state using cognitive reappraisal, which is a technique where the person aims to modify their emotional state by changing their thoughts and trying to reinterpret the situation.
The researchers found that pregnant women who showed more activity in the amygdala while regulating their emotions were less successful in controlling emotions. In addition, pregnant women with this greater activity in the amygdala reported more symptoms of depression.
Urgent action needed to understand links between air pollution and mental health
Progress in understanding why poor air quality is a risk factor for mental illness has been too slow, according to researchers at the University of Oxford.
In a paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry Open, the researchers argue that research needs to focus on developing standard ways of measuring exposure to bioaerosols – airborne compounds or microfragments from plant or animal matter. “The composition of the air we breathe, both indoors and outdoors, comprises various gaseous and particulate pollutants, among which particulate matter stands out as a significant public health concern,” the researchers write. They also suggest research designs for investigating causal mechanisms as important intermediate steps before undertaking larger-scale and definitive studies.
Professor Kam Bhui, professor of psychiatry at Oxford and lead author of the paper, said: “Existing evidence suggests that mental illness is more prevalent in deprived and urban areas where the influence of higher levels of air pollution may have been overlooked.”
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, has said that there is no research evidence of a causal connection between social media and poor mental health among young people.
In an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg said: “The academic research shows something that I think, to me, fits more with what I’ve seen of how the platforms operate. But it’s counter to what a lot of people think, and I think that’s going to be a reckoning that we’ll have to have.” Zuckerberg argued that giving parents the tools they need to limit their child’s social media use is the right approach for the company: “You can play a role in trying to make something better even if the thing wasn’t caused by you in the first place… I think that we can play a role in giving people parental controls over the apps. I think that parental controls are also really important because parents have different ways that they want to raise their kids.”
Last year Meta launched a new suite of controls for Instagram and Messenger that gives parents more insight into what their children are doing on both platforms.