Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

In Canada, 20% of children and youth are diagnosed with mental health disorders, and yet, there is limited understanding of the underlying biology of these disorders. The traditional approach of understanding biology of mental health disorders compares patients with a disorder to those without one. However, this approach has limitations including investigating a small number of participants and using statistical approaches which do not leverage the different ways a disorder can be presented. Treatment innovations would benefit from increased knowledge of the different manifestations within a single disorder and the overlap between mental health disorders. Mental health disorders feature problems with behavioural regulation (such as aggression and anxiety), impairments in executive functioning (such has a poor self-control), and alterations in the brain activation patterns. However, it is unclear how these three components are linked to one another in a given disorder or across disorders. My project aims to understand the relationships between these three components using: 1) a large dataset comprising of children who have mental health disorders and those who do not, 2) measures of brain activation, behaviour and executive functioning, and 3) innovative statistics. By exploring these relationships, we hope this could be the first step towards understanding whether certain combinations of these three components lead to higher risk of a mental health diagnosis or greater everyday life impairment. From there, this research may be able to inform early preventative and/or intervention treatment strategies.