Sleep, circadian rhythms and mental health in schools (SCRAMS)

Adolescence is a key developmental stage for the onset of mental illness. It is also a time when getting enough sleep becomes a major challenge. Disrupted sleep represents an important potential risk factor for mental ill-health in young people but this is an area that has not yet been properly investigated. This project will build on already well-established links with schools in Scotland (the Schools Health and Wellbeing Improvement Research Network, called SHINE) to develop a UK-wide research collaboration focused on investigating sleep and mental health within schools. Schools-based research of this kind offers many advantages in terms of the large-scale recruitment of young people to research studies, plus schools-based treatments have considerable potential to influence long-term mental health outcomes at a population level. With input from pupils, parents and teachers, we will design and carry out a programme of public engagement focused on sleep and mental health within schools. We will also conduct a series of small-scale feasibility studies that will help us to design more comprehensive studies in the future. These studies will find the most effective way to collect objective sleep and mental health data, light exposure data (both natural light and artificial light), and biological samples in adolescents within schools. Overall, this project has the potential to establish a new schools-based adolescent mental health research consortium focused on understanding the complex relationships between sleep, light exposure and mental wellbeing, with a view to developing better interventions for mental health in the future.

The overarching purpose of this consortium is to develop UK research capacity for investigating how sleep and circadian function impacts on mental health outcomes for adolescents, using the schools setting as a basis for recruitment and future intervention. The proposed activities are:

1. Three face-to-face engagement/collaboration meetings: at the beginning of the project (April 2020); at project mid-point (November 2020); and at the end of the project (March 2021). The first of these will be held in Glasgow but we anticipate hosting meetings two and three in Oxford and Guildford/London (where several co-applicants are based).

2. A regular series of monthly Skype/Zoom meetings to discuss scientific research questions, guide pilot/feasibility data collection, develop dissemination activities and co-design future research.

3. A series of co-designed feasibility and pilot studies in SHINE schools:
a) Testing the feasibility of a novel wearable sensor for light in adolescents
b) Collecting actigraph data and light exposure data for longer periods during the winter and summer months and at different latitudes
c) Feasibility work on sleep and cognitive functioning in adolescent pupils
d) Assessing potential facilitators and barriers to the collection of biological samples in schools.

4. A programme of engagement activities on sleep and mental health with pupils and schools.

This project will develop a UK-wide research consortium focused on understanding the complex relationships between sleep and mental health in adolescents, with a view to developing new treatment approaches for adolescent depression and anxiety disorders in the future. Much of the work during the 12-month project will build collaborations between researchers from different disciplines (including developmental psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, clinical psychology, chronobiology, vision science and epidemiology) alongside engagement activities with pupils, parents, teachers, schools, third sector organisations, educationalists and policy-makers within government. The feasibility and pilot data collections that we have proposed will be discussed in detail with these key academic and non-academic stakeholders so that the research questions can be developed further and modified, to ensure that the research activities are relevant and meaningful to end-users. In the longer-term, we expect our findings to shape educational policy such that an understanding of healthy sleep (and its relevance to good mental health) becomes a key component of the health and wellbeing curriculum in all UK schools.