Professor Siobhan Hugh-Jones

Profile

I am Professor of Mental Health Psychology in the School of Psychology, University of Leeds. My work has spanned developmental, clinical and applied health psychology, especially adolescent mental health, school based interventions, mindfulness and qualitative, participatory and co-design methods. I lead UKRI funded research globally and nationally, in the areas of Adverse Childhood Experiences, public health interventions, school mental health and developing inter- and transdisciplinary methodologies for mental health research. I contribute to grant review panels for the MRC, Wellcome Trust and EU funders. 

Research interests

I am interested in understanding the nature, origin and experience of mental health difficulties, particularly in adolescents, and in investigating the potential of co-designed programs as prevention and early intervention. Adolescence appears to be a time of heightened vulnerablity to the onset of mental health difficulties. There is still much to learn about why this is the case, whether difficulties can be prevented, and what form of intervention post-onset is the most acceptable, effective and sustainable in different arenas (e.g. schools, community, primary care). I also contirbute to global mental health research, working with collaborators in low-and-middle income countries, to address adolescent mental health in different contexts, and with varying conceptualisations of mental health, resources and needs. I collaborate with national and international academics, the third sector, local government, digital innovation services, mental health and educational services, young people, families/carers and schools, and have expertise in the co-design and evaluation of school interventions and the scholarly application of creative participatory methods to examine psychological functioning, well-being and health.

Current projects

CREATE: Creating Research Ecologies to ADvance Transdiscipinary Learning – Arts-based programes and the study of adolescent loneliness. (£1.2m, UKRI funded, led by Professor Paul Cooke, University of Leeds) 

Arts-based mental health research, using creative practices like music, theatre, dance, drawing, poetry is enjoyed by many young people and can bring new insights and understanding about adolescent mental health in ways that traditional, often adult-led, research methods cannot. There is untapped potential to improve understanding of mental health if we could bring arts-approaches together with science and youth perspectives. However, this potential is held back by many research barriers. Project CREATE will address key barriers by bringing youth, scientists and arts researchers together. We first conduct reviews of the main barriers and potential solutions and take these ideas into Living Labs. These bring youth lived experience into exploration around methods and interpretation with researchers. We focus our methods development in relation to adolescent loneliness as stimulus. Our ambition is to create a large resource hub, for anyone working at the intersection of arts, science and youth voice, presenting teaching tools, frameworks, glossaries, analysis methods and good practice guides to improve and optimise the learning we can glean from youth-informed, science friendly, arts based research. 

ATTUNE: understanding mechanisms and mental health impacts of adverse childhood experiences to co-design preventative arts and digital interventions (Sept 2021- 2025)

Led by Professor Kamaldeep Bhui at the University of Oxford and Professor Minhua Ma at Falmouth University, this £3.8 million project is one the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) seven funded programmes, as par of a £24 million investment into improving the mental health and wellbeing of adolescents in the UK. The ATTUNE project brings together diverse creative-arts, digital and health experts to investigate how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can affect adolescents’ mental health with the aim of developing new approaches to prevention and care. ACEs refer to harsh, unsafe, abusive and/or distressing events or living conditions during childhood. Three in four adolescents exposed to multiple ACEs develop significant distress and mental health disorders as young adults. We do not yet fully understand what how ACEs unfold to affect their mental health and the role that place, identity and neurodiversity plays in that. We also do not yet have good enough ways of reaching affected young people with effective support. ATTUNE aims to address these gaps in knowledge and will do so by placing young people at the centre of our learning and action. The project draws in diverse disciplines to work together in new ways, spanning the arts, psychology, psychiatry and digital health. Four areas of England will be study sites, including Cornwall, Kent and Yorkshire and we will be working in partnership with several NGOs. ATTUNE will focus first on understanding lived experience, inviting young people to engage in creative practices around music, art and theatre to represent their story in their way. With their help, we will map their different contexts, experiences, and pathways through ACEs and where particular risk and resilience points arise.  We will learn about youth-preferred vocabularies and ways of making sense of ACEs and mental health outcomes and their creative outputs will feed into intervention and impact. Via an analysis of a large dataset we will examine what contributes to heterogeneity of adolescent mental health outcomes following ACEs. Learning from our creative and analytic outputs will help us shape, with young people, action for intervention. This will focus on public mental health initiatives, to help services and organisations understand ACEs and what young people need as well how we can support them in playing the parts they want to in their communities. A further major piece of work in ATTUNE focuses on improving therapeutic outreach. Talking about personal experiences of ACEs can be very hard and without easy access to services (eg because of rurality), many young people are not benefitting from evidence-based intervention that could help them experience safety and build trust. ATTUNE will co-design with young people, a serious game and examine whether this technology is acceptable for some young people as an early engagement tool which could help them feel ready for further therapeutic support. We will examine cost-effectiveness of a serious game intervention in different settings.  In ATTUNE, we aim to create a paradigm shift in how we are understanding and responding to ACE-affected young people. Siobhan is Co-I and supports public health intervention co-design and youth participatory research.  Watch an introduction to ATTUNE.

SAMA Project: Safeguarding Adolescent Mental Health in India (Jan 2021- June 2024)

I am Co-PI on this MRC / ESRC / UK Aid  / NIHR £1million funded project in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in India, and involving multiple Indian and UK partners. It is estimated that 9.8 million Indian 13-17 year olds have a diagnosable mental health condition and suicide is the leading cause of death among adolescents. Project SAMA (meaning equal in Sanskrit) aimed to develop and test a whole school, systems based interventions to provide Indian adolescents with information and strategies to take care of their mental health and to improve school cultures and family knowledge to support well-being. In Year 1 of SAMA, we co-designed interventions with young people, parents,teachers, school leaders, mental health professional, policy makers and representatives from Indian health and education departments. We built on international evidence and interventions and co-designed four interventions that (1) help young people understand and manage their own mental health, especially anxiety and depression; (2) help teachers reduce their use of corporal punishment and improve their understanding of adolescent mental health; (3) improve the school climate for mental health and reduce mental health stigma; and (4) improve parents' understanding ofadolescent mental health to support their young person. We will develop plans to implement and evaluate these interventions, with close attention to training people who deliver them and how to prepare an intervention's 'soft landing' in school to increase chances of success. Year 2 was a feasibility study of the intervention and  Year 3 involved working with the communities to learn about what we need to do to improve interventions so that we can build towards a trial to determine if the interventions are effective. SAMA has also learedn how to increase the use of evidence on school mental health programmes in Indian health policy.  Follow us @_Project( Sama Twitter)   _projectsama (Instagram). Sign up to join our professionals’ network and / or for our project newsletter or vist the SAMA website for more detail

Recently completed research

The Big Picture: Understanding risk and resilience in India young people around substance use disorder

I was Co-I on an ESRC / AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund project (2018-2020) using photovoice to enhance psychological, social and cultural insights into the prevention and treatment of substance abuse in youth in India. Based in Assam, India, this project aimed to understand how young people who are at risk of substance dependence (given familial risk) manage to remain safe and psychologically well. The team examined how some young people come successfully through treatment for substance abuse disorders (which has varying outcomes for many). Learning more about the experiences of both of these groups will help us to understand resilience (and therefore possibly promote it among other young people) and 'what works' for treatment. This project kept young people's perspectives and needs at the centre, and through photovoice, the team generated films, exhibitions and social media campaigns to challenge myths about substance dependence as well to as raise the 'voice' of young people in the mental health arena. The team helped institutions to explore potential therapeutic uses of photovoice for their service-users, and mapped the way that evidence on mental health is taken up in policies, and what status user perspectives can have. Follow on Twitter @UKProResilience.

Mainstreaming Global Mental Health.

Could research addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (eg around climate change, heritage, health), be supported to broaden their impact to mental health and wellbeing of participants and communities?  This is the question asked in our EPSRC GCRF seed-funded Challenge Cluster, led by Professor Anna Madill. The project examined the in principle potential of awarded Global Challenges projects to have secured some impact on psychosocial wellbeing, with little extra burden on the project. The ambition was to examine whether mental health impacts could be mainstreamed into research across many disciplines and across multiple global Sustainable Development Goals. 

IMMERSE: Exploring the potential of immersive technologies for adolescent mental health

Funded by the Medical Research Council’s Proximity to Development Fund, this project (2019-2020) spanned city-wide consultation in Leeds to determine the vision and concerns for the use of immersive technology for adolescent mental health within UK schools, and to deliver a proof-of-concept feasliblty study by the end of 2020. This is now complete, working in partnership with AnotherSpaceVR, and we are working towards our next studies, which will include working with specialist settings, and with a focus on children and young people in specialist settings. Watch an introduction to the VR technology and example VR environments.

Co-design of digital mental health interventions for UK schools

I led an MRC funded project (2017-2019) which co-deisgned and feasiblity tested a smartphone delivered psychoeducational resource to young people who self-referred as experiencing deteriorating mental health. This resource was designed to address transdiagnsotic risk factors, and to be available only in secondary schools, with wrap-around human support. The team represented a collaboration between young people, schools, parents / carers, digital innovation services, Leeds CCG and MindMate. The project tested the prototype in four secondary schools in Leeds.  A next stage RCT is planned. See pre-print here.

Doctoral students

Siobhan has supervised 20 students to completion, many funded via scholarships, with most drawing upon qualitative and visual methods to explore aspects of well-being and mental health in the UK and internationally. Current Phds (~2018-2024) include Strengthening Adolescent Mental Health in India: developing measures and theory (A Palmer, School of Psychology Scholarship)  and Examining the mechanisms of participatory filmmkaing for youth mental health benefits following Adverse Childhood Experiences (K Harris, Scholarship).

Qualifications

• PhD Developmental Psychology
• BSc Psychology
• Certificate in Counselling
• Postgraduate Teaching & Learning in Higher Education

Professional memberships

• British Psychological Society
• Anna Freud Learning Network: Schools in Mind
• ESRC Emerging Minds Network
• ESRC eNuture Network
• Mental Health Innovation Network
• International Association of Youth Mental Health

Student education

I teach applied health psychology (intervention design), qualitative methods, introduction to psychological approaches to mental health, and advanced developmental psychology.I supervise undergraduate, Masters and doctoral projects in adolescent mental health.

Research groups and institutes

• Health and social psychology

Current postgraduate researchers

• Shuhan Dong
• Ning Song