News

A Year in Review: FAMILY in 2024

As the year comes to an end, we take the opportunity to look back at some great achievements FAMILY and its dedicated team made during the past 12 months.

The year began on a high note with our first Stakeholder Dialogue Event in January. This online event brought together 42 participants from across Europe to discuss the views and needs of mental health care professionals on ethical aspects and social consequences of prediction of risk of mental illness. The event was a great success, providing valuable insights that informed the development of the FAMILY survey for healthcare professionals. Read the full event report here.

Next, we launched the FAMILY Spotlight Interview Series. This engaging series features interviews with our FAMILY members, now available on YouTube – be sure to watch and learn more about the amazing people driving this project!

Another highlight was the release of several important publications, including the consortium paper, “Running in the FAMILY: Understanding and Predicting the Intergenerational Transmission of Mental Illness,” published in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (ECAP). Find all our publications, with short summaries of key publications, here.

Engaging the Scientific Community: In April, FAMILY members participated in the EPA Congress in Budapest, contributing to the symposium “Can familial high-risk studies help us prevent mental illness?”. September was equally exciting, with FAMILY hosting an inspiring session at the 21st Biennial Congress of the EPA Section Epidemiology & Social Psychiatry in Lausanne, Switzerland, focusing on “Early Risk and Protective Profiles Assessed before the Onset of Psychopathology among Offspring at High Familial Risk of Severe Mental Illnesses.” Shortly afterward, FAMILY was well-represented at the 37th ECNP Congress in Milan, Italy, with talks, posters, and an exhibition area presence by EUFAMI and concentris.

We are particularly proud of supporting secondments for early career scientists this year. For example, Parisa travelled to Oslo, Norway, and Patricia visited Aarhus, Denmark, collaborating on the Danish High Risk and Resilience Study. These secondments provide young researchers with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience, build their networks, and collaborate on cutting-edge studies in their fields.

In October, which marked Mental Health Awareness Month, we published our first layman’s paper, explaining the FAMILY project and our research goals in an accessible way for the general public. The month also saw our team gather in Riga, Latvia, for the 3rd General Assembly Meeting, where we reviewed project progress and developed new ideas for the upcoming year.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributed to FAMILY’s successes this year! Your dedication and hard work have made all of this possible.

We are excited to continue this journey together in the coming year. Stay connected and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X for the latest updates, events, and breakthroughs from FAMILY!

News

FAMILY Spotlight – Interview Series

Meet Charlotte Cecil, associate professor in the Departments of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. As a co-leader of work package 4 in the FAMILY project, she focuses on epigenetics. In this interview, Charlotte discusses her role in the FAMILY project, highlights its most exciting aspects, offers valuable advice for early-career scientists, and reveals her strategies for maintaining balance in the demanding world of research.

News

FAMILY Spotlight – Interview series

Meet Lennart Oblong, a FAMILY PhD student in the Psychiatry and Neuroimaging Genetics group at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, supervised by Emma Sprooten. His PhD research focuses on uncovering how genetic variation influences brain function and behavior, particularly in the context of intergenerational transmission of mental health-related traits. In this brief interview, Lennart shares insights into his role in the FAMILY project, what inspired his journey into science, and the most surprising discovery he has encountered in his research so far.

About

Mental illness runs in families.
The FAMILY consortium aims to improve the life of mentally-ill persons and their families:

  • firstly focus on better understanding the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of mental illness from parent to child.
  • studying the family context, we will try to build models to predict whether mental illness will be transmitted across generations or not.
  • FAMILY will also address key ethical and social issues raised by risk prediction for clinical use, such as the right not to know, and the risk of stigma.
  • Lastly, together with the family advocacy and support organisation EUFAMI and the not-for-profit association ESCAP, we will try to increase awareness and foster active engagement of families, and translate new discoveries to patients and mental health care professionals.

Read more
Theme 1

Understanding intergenerational transmission of risk

  • Estimate the contribution of genetic and environmental routes of intergenerational transmission of risk from parent to offspring throughout the life course.
  • Identify causal factors underlying genetic and environmental routes of risk transmission and resilience.
Theme 2

Predicting risk of mental illness in a familial context

  • Identify and validate genetic, epigenetic, and brain imaging biomarkers for risk or resilience to mental disease in the family.
  • Develop and validate a multimodal risk prediction model and a normative modelling framework to predict, at the individual level, who is at risk of developing a mental disorder.
Theme 3

Creating societal impact and end-user engagement

  • Map and evaluate social and ethical consequences of risk prediction for clinical use.
  • Increase awareness and foster active engagement of families and translate new discoveries to patients and mental health care professionals.

New breakthrough scientific discoveries on the intergenerational transmission of risk of mental illness and risk prediction within a family context, pushing the field forward towards first clinical implementation of family-based prediction tools by 2035.

Ethical considerations regarding risk prediction support mental health care professionals and patients and their families in clinical decision-making. Awareness on the role of transmission of risk of mental health problems stimulates the integration of child/adolescent and adult mental health care services, leading to improved care for high-risk families.

Improved mental health literacy in vulnerable high-risk families, resulting in increased engagement with their own mental health and earlier recognition of mental health problems, leading to earlier identification and preventive intervention. Improved quality of life of vulnerable high-risk families because of earlier recognition of emerging problems, earlier and focused preventive interventions, and less stigma and discrimination.

Earlier identification and preventive intervention of mental health problems prevents exacerbation of these problems, resulting in reduced mental health care cost in the longer term.