CYP Wellbeing seminar series- Jessie Baldwin - Childhood adversity and mental health

Jessie is a senior research fellow at University College London, funded by the Wellcome Trust. She completed an undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Warwick, followed by an MSc and PhD in Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry at King’s College London. She subsequently worked as a post-doctoral researcher at King’s and UCL, before starting a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2019. Her research aims to understand the role of early environmental risks (such as child trauma) in mental health. In her Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship, she is investigating the extent to which adverse childhood experience cause mental health problems. This involves using causal inference methods to disentangle the effects of adversities from other genetic and environmental risk factors. She is also interested in how the measurement of childhood adversity is related to mental health problems. 

Abstract:

It is well-established that childhood adversity is associated with mental health problems. However, there is a lot that we still do not know about the effects of childhood adversity on mental health. For example, it is unclear to what extent these associations are causal, or whether the effects differ according to how childhood adversity is measured. It is also unclear whether screening for childhood adversity would enable the identification of individuals at risk of later mental health problems. In my presentation, I will describe my research addressing these questions, which can help inform interventions to prevent mental health problems.