Svenja Kretzer
Hi, I'm Svenja. I'm a PhD student at King's College London and A*STAR Singapore. My poster is looking at the persistence of psychotic-like experiences through adolescence and their relationship with mental health problems and brain structure. Come see my poster S55, on Sunday at lunchtime.
The problem: psychotic-like experiences are common in children and adolescents, but only some of them signal an increased risk for a broad range of mental health problems, including psychosis, while others are not harmful and commonly decreased through adolescence.
The challenge is identifying when psychotic-like experiences are benign and when they are clinically relevant and shouldn't go unnoticed.
Why does this matter? Around 50% of adult psychiatric disorders show their first symptoms before the age of 15, and 75% before the age of 18. So, overlooking clinically relevant psychotic-like experiences means missing a critical window for targeted screening and early prevention and intervention in adolescence.
The potential solution could be looking at whether psychotic-like experiences are persistent. If persistence indicates clinically harmful psychotic-like experiences, we can identify at-risk adolescents early and flag them for targeted screening, prevention, and intervention.
Here, we looked at a longitudinal cohort of adolescents from Southeast London and investigated whether persistent psychotic-like experiences are associated with mental health problems and biological risks – for example, structural MRI, which I present on my poster.
The benefits of fixing this: finding adolescents with harmful psychotic-like experiences could help us conduct targeted screening, early prevention, and intervention to potentially prevent psychotic disorders more effectively, and support mental well-being before symptoms escalate.
We can improve resilience in young people with psychotic-like experiences, for example, by educating them on the experiences to de-stigmatise them and thereby potentially reduce distress. To find out about this more, come to poster S55 on Sunday, 12:00 to 2:00 PM. Thank you!
