Publications, Podcasts and Plans
As we approach the end of 2022, here are some of the highlights of the past academic term in the Digital Mental Health Group.
Podcast Appearance 🎧
In October, one of our wonderful PhD students, Luisa Fassi, appeared on the Science or Fiction podcast with Kathryn Bates to discuss whether social media use damages young people’s mental health.
In her episode, Luisa covered some current research and explained why the links between social media and mental health are far more complex than meets the eye. The vast controversies around this topic typically arise from attempts to simplify intricate interactions, removing the nuanced perspective required to make sense of the impacts of social media. This is brilliantly summarized and explained by Luisa, and can be found here on Spotify
Plans for research vision and culture 💡
At the start of this term, our research group rapidly grew in size, welcoming new PhD student Georgia, Postdoctoral Research Associates Amanda and Sebastian, and Research Assistants Lukas and Millie. To welcome new starters and lay the groundwork for collaborating on upcoming projects, we took a day away from our desks, and completed various teamwork and team building activities. For example, we discussed our research visions, and the culture we would like to foster within the group. This involved brainstorming a plan to incorporate our joint values into our research and day to day work as a team.
We established the following mission statements about our research vision and culture:
Research Vision📚
We aim to conduct research that works with and benefits society through a variety of avenues, including policy, clinical practice and education. To achieve this, we strive to build interdisciplinary and collaborative working groups that celebrate complementary skills and knowledge. This allows us to work as an innovation hub, producing transparent, robust and open research outputs that routinely push the boundaries of current scientific knowledge and practice.
Research Culture🤝🏻
We aim to create and sustain a group culture that values diversity and inclusion and makes everyone feel welcome and respected. We foster respect for our teammates through kindness, trust, honesty and collaboration, and support each other’s welfare by nurturing safe spaces for conversation within the group. We also value work-life balance, celebrating and respecting people’s lives outside of the group. This allows us to support each other to achieve both academic and personal goals.
And lastly… a Final Publication of 2022📝
In a recent publication, Amy Orben worked alongside Sonia Livingstone and Candice Odgers to shed light on the debate of whether academics should collaborate with digital companies to improve young people’s mental health. As it stands, data collected by tech companies is difficult to access for independent research, but collaborations often serve to promote commercial interests. To collaborate or not to collaborate is a dilemma that is plaguing our research field, and there is limited constructive guidance from academic institutions, a lack of collective spaces to debate opinions and therefore a barrier to evolve best research practice.
In natural or computational sciences, industry collaborations are common and encouraged, whereas in social sciences or humanities, they are treated with caution and suspicion. Mental health researchers often find themselves somewhere in the middle. Some research questions require engagement from platforms, such as those involving experimentation of services. Others might require more impartial investigation, such as those investigating industry claims.
Amy, Sonia and Candice propose that the decision of whether to collaborate with digital companies may be best informed by context: why and under what conditions would the collaboration be most beneficial? They suggest that research aiming to identify problems is better conducted independently, while research aiming to develop interventions would benefit from collaboration. One unified consideration that should however be made in both contexts, is that the research adheres to open science policies allowing for transparency, replication and real-world application.
The full article can be found here in text - https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/camh.12630
And a presentation about this paper can also be accessed through YouTube:
We are now looking forward to our exciting projects to come in 2023 and wish everybody a happy holidays and new year! 🎊🌟🥂
This newsletter was written by Amelia Leyland-Craggs, Research Assistant in the group.