DURATION
OF THE STUDY
5
YRS
The ultimate goal of CALM is to improve clinical care for youth with mental health disorders with a focus on multiple mental health conditions (MMHC). In youth (11-24 years), mental health disorders are common and can lead to poor mental, physical, and social outcomes that persist across adult life. Unless properly treated, they derail normal adolescent development, often leading to impairment, self-harm, substance use, and physical illness. Youth need precision interventions tailored to addressing multiple mental health conditions, for both the short and long term.
WHY IS THIS STUDY
BEING DONE?
Youth aged 11-24 have been found to have an average of 3.5 mental health diagnoses at one time. This can lead to mental, physical, and social challenges that continue throughout adulthood. Most treatments are designed to target specific conditions rather than multiple conditions, which may lead to less treatment responsiveness.
The purpose of this study is to better understand mental health in children and youth and to figure out how to identify mental health conditions earlier. We want to understand who may have a higher likelihood of developing multiple mental health conditions (also called mental health multimorbidity) so that we may better understand how to help people with these challenges later on.
The CALM study is a longitudinal study that will take place over 5 years. The goal is to better understand multiple mental health conditions in children and youth, so that we can improve clinical care for these children and youth in the future. We will do this by collecting large amounts of data from a 3,200 people over time, a strategy that we call a Master Observational Trial (MOT). The MOT will help the CALM network develop future studies, called clinical trials, which will help us develop new treatments and improve care. We will do assessments of mental and physical health, behavior and functioning, and biological/genetic samples to learn how these influence mental health over time. Earlier detection may lead to improved mental health care and quality of life for youth during the transition from childhood and adolescence into early adulthood, and over the longer term.
The Deep Phenotyping Cohort is a sub-study of the larger CALM study. The aim of this study is to create a large database that can be used to answer research questions about the relationship between the brain, thinking processes (i.e., cognition) and mental health symptoms. We will do assessments of brain structure and function, mental health symptoms, thinking processes and day-to-day functioning, to learn how these influence mental health over time.
© 2024 CALM Study
© 2024 CALM Study
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Contact information for the CALM study CALM.Project@camh.ca
ONTARIO BRAIN INSTITUTE