Child study targets mental illness, learning problems

Health Sciences

New research at the University of Adelaide aims to help prevent mental illness and learning difficulties among school children.

The research hopes to better understand the relationship between adverse childhood conditions and mental illness.

PhD student Amelia Searle in the University's Discipline of Paediatrics has won a $75,000 scholarship to conduct the study.

She said the project would provide valuable information as to how children's mental health and learning outcomes are related.

The project will focus on children in their first year of primary school.

"This early period is an important focal point, since children must cope with the transition to school, together with the accompanying changes to their roles, responsibilities and relationships," Ms Searle said.

Ms Searle said children living through "adversity", such as poverty, divorce and parental mental illness, had a "greatly heightened risk of mental health problems and learning difficulties". She said learning difficulties can then lead to reduced self-esteem and further mental health problems among children. These problems can manifest themselves as early as kindergarten and persist into adulthood.

Ms Searle hopes to determine how positive child, parent and teacher influences can help to protect children from the negative effects of adversity, and instead set them on the pathway to success in school and in wider society.

"The information obtained through my project may help to optimise children's success in learning and in life by means of early, well-informed intervention that builds upon children's strengths," she said.

To that end, the Department of Education and Children's Services has undertaken to be a collaborative partner in her work and to ensure the knowledge she gains informs education policy and practice.

Ms Searle's research is funded by the University of Adelaide, the Australian Rotary Health Research Fund and the Rotary Club of Adelaide.

The research is being conducted in the Research and Evaluation Unit at the Children, Youth and Women's Health Service. Her supervisors are Professor Michael Sawyer and Dr Lauren Miller-Lewis (Paediatrics) and Dr Peter Baghurst (Public Health).

The support for Ms Searle's research by the Australian Rotary Health Research Fund is part of the Fund's $2.2 million contribution to medical research for 2006.

Story by Scott Arthurson and David Ellis