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Every year, over 80,000 Western Australian children will have a diagnosed mental health disorder.

Mental health problems are the most prevalent and expensive chronic condition affecting children.

Research Assistant

Jaida Penny is an Indigenous Research Assistant with the Early Neurodevelopment and Mental Health team at The Kids Research Institute Australia.

Promoting wellbeing for youth is a global health priority and young people with chronic conditions demonstrate disproportionately low wellbeing compared to their peers. However, wellbeing is variably defined, and little is understood as to what wellbeing means for this population. The aim of this study was to develop a conceptualisation of wellbeing that is rooted in the perspectives of young people with chronic conditions. 

Maternal psychological distress is related to poorer physical and mental health as well as child developmental problems. Interventions that optimise maternal mental health and wellbeing during the "first 1,000 days" of life should have wide-reaching benefits for the mother and her child.

Experiencing stigma is associated with a range of negative outcomes for people with mental health disorders. However, little is understood about the contemporary stigma experiences of young people with anxiety and depression. This study aimed to describe these experiences using semi-structured qualitative interviews.

This study explored mental health profiles in Australian school students using indicators of well-being (i.e., optimism, life satisfaction, and happiness) and psychological distress (i.e., sadness and worries). The sample included 75,757 students (ages 8-18 years) who completed the 2019 South Australian Wellbeing and Engagement Collection.

Irritability is a transdiagnostic indicator of child and adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems that is measurable from early life. The objective of this systematic review was to determine the strength of the association between irritability measured from 0 to 5 years and later internalizing and externalizing problems, to identify mediators and moderators of these relationships, and to explore whether the strength of the association varied according to irritability operationalization.

The capacity for children to self-regulate is an important developmental task of early childhood, with caregivers playing an integral role in self-regulation development. While caregivers' emotions and behaviors are known to impact child self-regulatory capacity, the impact of child self-regulation difficulties on parents is less understood.