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Research

Many trans young people seek mental health support and gender-affirming medical interventions including puberty suppression, gender-affirming hormones and/or surgeries. Trans young people and their parents face multiple barriers in accessing gender-affirming care and mental health support, however little is known about the parent perspective on accessing services for their trans child.

Research

Schools are increasingly recognized as important settings for mental health promotion, but it is unclear what actions schools should prioritize to promote student mental health and wellbeing. We undertook a policy review of global school-based mental health promotion policy documents from United Nations agencies to understand the frameworks they use and the actions they recommend for schools.

Research

Transgender and gender diverse (“trans”) people are more likely to experience adverse mental health outcomes due to the social adversities that are commonly experienced. One ameliorating factor for poor mental health outcomes can be connection to community, often facilitated in online spaces such as TikTok.

Research

Regular exercise can be beneficial for people living with a severe mental illness. By better understanding the perspectives and challenges of adults with severe mental illness who are engaged in exercise, we can enhance the design and implementation of exercise programs to better support their mental health and recovery.

Research

Globally, Indigenous peoples have incurred significant harm due to colonisation of their lands. Dispossession of culture, language, family and land, and the historical, systematic removal of children in Australia (the ‘Stolen Generation’), has resulted in evident ongoing negative outcomes in the contemporary lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Research

Masculine norms influence internalizing problems in men. The processes that explain this association are not yet comprehensively understood. However, there exists a compelling argument to highlight the role of emotional functioning in explaining how conformity to the traditional Western conceptualization of masculine norms confers risk for internalizing problems.

News & Events

The Kids Research Institute Australia warmly welcomes youth mental health researcher Associate Professor Kathryn Modecki.

Research

According to the Cognitive Emotional Model of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI), this behavior is governed by a complex interplay of NSSI-related cognitions (i.e., a person's expected outcomes of self-injury and self-efficacy to resist NSSI) and emotion-regulatory strategies (i.e., cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression). To empirically test this proposition, the current study examined the moderating roles of self-efficacy to resist NSSI, cognitive reappraisal, and expressive suppression in the relationships between outcome expectancies and NSSI frequency among university students.

Research

There is limited evidence on heterogenous co-developmental trajectories of internalizing and externalizing problems from childhood to adolescence and predictors of these joint trajectories. We utilized longitudinal data from Raine Study participants to identify these joint trajectories from 5 to 17 years using parallel-process latent class growth analysis and analyze childhood individual and family risk factors predicting these joint trajectories using multinomial logistic regression.

Research

Beliefs about the controllability and usefulness of emotions may influence successful emotion regulation across multiple emotional disorders and could thus be influential mechanisms in long-term mental health outcomes. However, to date there has been little empirical work in this area.