Sun Meng
Hi, I am Sun Meng from China. Thank you for having me here! I have been focused on early screening and prevention of mental disorders in adolescents for 10 years.
I would like to give a brief introduction of my research.
Fist is why we do it. Compelling evidence suggests that mental disorders always develop from middle adolescence. So we think there should be some early signs in this period. And if we can detect them and take measures on them, maybe we could prevent them from converting to clinical outcomes.
Scientists have found some experiences occurring in these individuals at high risk for psychosis and named them psychotic-like experiences (we call it PLE for short). Our study further verified the association of PLE with a series of mental disorders, such as mood disorders, anxiety disorders, substance use disorders and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. However, we still have little knowledge on these experiences. We don’t know the overall clinical manisfestation of individual with PLE, and we don’t know how PLE occur, develop and finally convert to mental disorders, which hinder us to do something to stop this process.
To address these issues, in the past five years, we conducted a cohort study among Chinese college students who are exactly at the very risky age. We screened out individuals with PLE, made clinical evaluation, performed EEG examination, and followed up them for three years. Today we bring part of our new findings here.
We found that PLE seem to be an undifferentiated state on the continuum of psychosis, characterized by multi-dimensional subclinical changes. Also, we found time-variant associations between PLE and other symptoms and adverse life events, as well as the interaction within PLE during its development. We believe these findings can help to better understand PLE and shed light on future early intervention for these individuals.
Please see poster M1 and T34 for our detailed findings. Thank you!
