July 12, 2022

Can mindfulness in schools help young people? Results from the MYRIAD Project

With as many as one in five teenagers experiencing mental health problems, there is an urgent need to develop evidence-based interventions to support adolescent mental health and wellbeing.

The MYRIAD (MY Resilience In ADolescence) Project, funded by Wellcome, set out to examine whether schools-based mindfulness training is an effective, accessible, and easily scalable intervention to promote good mental health in those aged 11 to 14. The project has involved over 28,000 children, 650 teachers, 100 schools and 20 million data points.

Journalists came to the SMC to hear from the authors about what they have found over the seven years of their study and what the implications are for the use of mindfulness in young people.

Their results comprise seven new papers which have been published in a special edition of Evidence-based Mental Health, which is one of 70 specialist journals published by BMJ.

Speakers included:

Prof Willem Kuyken, Sir John Ritblat Family Foundation Professor of Mindfulness and Psychological Science, University of Oxford

Prof Mark Williams, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford (dialling in)

Prof Tamsin Ford, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Cambridge (dialling in)

Prof Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Professor of Psychology and leader of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Group, University of Cambridge

Dr Tim Dalgleish, Programme Lead for the Cognition, Emotion and Mental Health Programme and Director of the Cambridge Centre for Affective Disorders, University of Cambridge

This Briefing was accompanied by an SMC Roundup of Comments.