The next seminar, hosted by the Centre for Society and Mental Health, will be led by George Ploubidis, Professor of Population Health and Statistics and Dr Dario Moreno-Agostino, Research Fellow in Population Mental Health, University College London. 

Common mental health problems such as anxiety and depression make a substantial contribution to the global burden of disease. Such difficulties often emerge early in childhood and demonstrate considerable continuity across the life-course, while some evidence has suggested they are increasing. In order to address this considerable public health concern, it is important to understand trends and risk factors that are universal across development (i.e. age effects) and those that are specific to individuals who were born at particular points in history (i.e. cohort effects). High quality life-course research is required to disentangle age, period and cohort effects, and the British cohorts represent a particularly powerful data resource in this regard. In this talk George and Dario will present recent work on the measurement properties of common mental health problems in six national British cohorts, pre and post pandemic findings on the antecedents and consequences of mental health over the life course and discuss future directions for mental health research and measurement.

George is based at the UCL Social Research Institute and currently holds the posts of Director of Research and Chief Statistician at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies. His main research interests relate to socioeconomic and demographic determinants of health over the life course and the mechanisms that underlie generational differences in health and mortality. His methodological work in longitudinal observational data focuses on applications for handling missing data, causal inference and measurement error. He has published widely in the fields of Demography, Epidemiology and Psychiatry and his first book “Pathways to Health” was published in 2019. Since the start of the pandemic he is scientific co-lead of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies COVID19 Web Survey in 5 national cohorts. George is also co-lead for the Centre for Society & Mental Health's Cohorts and Statistics Platform. 

Darío is also based at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies and the Centre for Society and Mental Health (King’s College London). Darío is interested in the longitudinal study of mental health and subjective wellbeing outcomes in the population from a life course perspective, as well as in the study of inequalities in those outcomes over time.

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