Most mental health disorders first emerge during youth. Those with childhood/adolescent onsets tend to be more severe and are frequently undetected early.

Youth Mental Health Problems (MHPs) accrue additional comorbidity and have an economic cost 10 times higher than adult-onset illnesses.

Despite the best efforts of clinicians and researchers, we still do not fully know why some people develop mental disorders and others do not.

However, changes in the brain are very likely to best reveal clues about mental health outcomes. The adolescent brain is particularly important in this pursuit as changes during this period are rapid and dynamic, sculpting individual uniqueness.

Mental Health Problems likely stem from aberrations/exaggerations in normal maturational brain changes.

Such anomalies act in concert with other biological, psychosocial, and environmental factors which can then manifest as emerging mental disorders, if left unchecked.

The Youth Mental Health & Neurobiology (YMHN) program at UniSC’s Thompson Institute pioneered multiple new brain-based ways to better understand the early manifestations and trajectories of mental illnesses in young people.

This was done by using neuroimaging to identify those at risk of mental disorders and study brain changes due to interventions.

Our flagship project, the Longitudinal Adolescent Brain Study (LABS), is a long-term study that tracked the development of mental health problems in young people during their secondary school years.

The program also explored cyberbullying, inattention/anxiousness, anorexia nervosa, and offers neuroscience-based workshops for high school students.

One key aspect of LABS is its 'brain fingerprinting' research that conducted multiple brain scans using functional brain imaging (fMRI) on participants starting at age 12 and continuing every four months for five years.

By doing multiple brain scans over a short period of time for each participant, we were able to make our important ‘brain fingerprinting’ discovery that unique 'brain signatures' predict distress.

LABS has provided the first evidence that individual brain signatures are idiosyncratic and provide unique information we cannot otherwise get.

It was previously thought that brain signatures may be predictive of mental disorder, well before the emergence of symptoms.

The LABS study has proved this to be true, finding that the uniqueness of adolescents’ brain fingerprints predicted subsequent psychological distress (four months later).