Did you know that knitting and other crafts are proven to help your mental health? Mental health is very important to us here at Cerebra as anxiety and low mood is a widespread problem for children with genetic syndromes and intellectual disability more common than it is for the general population.

The problem

However, most diagnostic tests for anxiety involve people being able to communicate how they are feeling to doctors and other professionals. For children with these disabilities, its incredibly difficult for them to firstly identify that what they're feeling is anxiety and, as many are minimally verbal, to communicate this to someone else.

If we cant accurately identify that a child is feeling anxious then we cant put in place measures to help them so many children are continuing to struggle with unrecognised, debilitating feelings of anxiety.

Our solution

Our research at the Cerebra Network of Neurodevelopmental Disorders is tackling this problem head on. Dr Hayley Crawford and Dr Jane Waite are leading a ground-breaking study of children with genetic syndromes and intellectual disability to understand what anxiety looks like in these children and to therefore improve assessments for anxiety.

They will also use experimental techniques to identify and understand the risk factors and characteristics that place a child at higher risk for experiencing mental health problems.

This research will help the team to develop and pilot an intervention that will improve the negative impact of mental health problems for children with genetic conditions and intellectual disability.