*** Everyone Welcome! No need to book in advance ***
Date: Thursday 1st December
Time: 12:00-13:00
Room: Town Hall Committee Room 2
Professor Ellen Townsend (University of Nottingham)
Temporal Dynamics Underpinning Patterns of Clinical, Psychological and Social Factors in Adolescent Self-Harm
Abstract: Self-harm is a significant clinical issue in
adolescence and is strongly linked to death by suicide. There is little
research on the dynamic interplay of key factors in the months, weeks, days and
hours leading to self-harm which is a significant gap in current
knowledge. In this talk I will present data from studies in which we have
taken a sequential approach in order to determine the key transitions in
factors leading to self-harm. We have developed the Card Sort Task for
Self-Harm (CaTS) to investigate the patterns of thoughts, feelings, events and
behaviours leading to self-harm. Young people (aged 13-21 years) with recent
repeated self-harm completed the CaTS to describe their first ever/most recent
self-harm episode. Lag sequential analysis determined significant transitions
in factors leading to self-harm. A significant sequential structure to the card
sequences produced was observed demonstrating similarities and important
differences in antecedents to first and most recent self-harm. Life-events were
distal in the self-harm pathway and more heterogeneous. Of significant clinical
concern was that the wish to die and hopelessness emerged as important
antecedents in the most recent episode. First ever self-harm was associated
with feeling better afterward, but this disappeared for the most recent
episode. A crucial finding here is that the factors most proximal to self-harm
(negative emotions and cognitions, impulsivity and access to means) are
modifiable with existing clinical interventions.
Biography: Professor
Townsend is a Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of
Nottingham and PI leading the Self-Harm Research Group (SHRG). The group researches psychological factors
associated with self-harm and suicidality, and interventions that promote
recovery, especially in young people using a range of techniques including
sequence analysis, the Card Sort Task for Self-Harm (CaTS), experiments,
questionnaires, epidemiology, interviews and systematic reviews. This work has been funded by the NHS, NIHR
and the ESRC. The work has influenced
policy – earlier versions of their systematic review of interventions for
self-harm were included in the 2011 NICE Guidance on the Longer Term Management
of Self-Harm.
Professor
Townsend also led a national Clinical Research Group on self-harm funded by the
Mental Health Research Network (NIHR) and is a Fellow of the Institute of Mental Health. She is a collaborator on the Multicentre Study of Self-Harm in England and is
co-leading the development of INTERACT -
a new research initiative for participatory research and public engagement
working with colleagues from across the university. She is PI on a Wellcome Trust People Award
supporting the development of the Café Connect model of public engagement. They were finalists in the UoN Knowledge
Exchange and Impact Awards 2016 for this work.
She
is PI on a project investigating self-harm in looked-after young people funded
by the Department of Health Policy Research Programme. She is a Fellow of the International Academy of Suicide Research and a
member of the BPS Expert Panel on the Psychology of Suicidal Behaviour. She was a participant in the Nottingham Research Leaders Programme 2015-16. She has recently been awarded a Miegunyah
Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at
the University of Melbourne, Australia which will take place in April 2017.
In
2016 a publication co-authored with Dr Katie Glazebrook received the Institute
of Mental Health ‘Best Overall Publication Award’ - Glazebrook K, Townsend E, Sayal K (2015). The role of
attachment style in predicting repetition of adolescent self-harm: a
longitudinal study. Suicide and
Life-Threatening Behavior. DOI: 10.1111/sltb.12159.
