The Diminishing Association between Adolescent Mental Disorders and Educational Performance

Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH)

DOI: 10.13056/acamh.13660
In this Papers Podcast, Associate Professor Magnus Nordmo discusses his co-authored JCPP Advances paper ‘The diminishing association between adolescent mental disorders and educational performance from 2006–2019’. There is an overview of the paper, methodology, key findings, and implications for practice.
Learning Objectives
1. If mental health difficulties have increased over time in the child and adolescent population and how different forms of symptom measurement can impact the types of trends we see.
2. What educational performance, independent of mental health conditions, has looked like in the last decade, with a particular focus on Norway.
3. Insight into the hypothesis that increases in mental health difficulties might be driven by pressure to do well educationally.
4. The mental health conditions explored in the paper and what indicators were used, as well as the indicators used for educational performance.
5. The ‘Prevalence Inflation Hypothesis’ (Lucy Foulkes) and how this applies to the findings from this paper.
6. The relationship between mental health disorders and educational performance at the extreme ends of educational performance.
7. The implications for how we view the narrative around increases in adolescent mental health disorders based on the findings and the ‘Paradox of Health’.