Professor Philip Hazell
Thomas Walker Hospital/Sydney University
Mental Health Pilot Study- 2010Professor Philip Hazell is a child and adolescent psychiatrist based at Thomas Walker Hospital in Concord, Sydney. He heads mental health services for infants, children and adolescents in the Sydney South West region of NSW, and holds academic appointments with the Universities of Sydney and Newcastle.
Philip completed his medical training in New Zealand before training in general psychiatry and child psychiatry in Adelaide. He then spent a lengthy period in Newcastle, first as Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry with the University of Newcastle, and then as Clinical Director of the Child and Youth Mental Health Service with the Hunter New England Mental Health Service. Significant achievements while in Newcastle included the establishment of a clinic for children and adolescents with disruptive behaviour, the commissioning of a 12-bed acute psychiatric inpatient unit for adolescents, and the maintenance of an extensive research program in child and adolescent mental health. Philip was awarded a PhD in 1997 for a thesis concerning information processing in ADHD. His other research output spans youth suicide, mood disorders, autism, children in out-of-home care, systematic review of treatment effectiveness, psychological sequelae of disaster, and the evaluation of medical education.
Philip is currently Chair of the Subcommittee for Advanced Training in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry for the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. He is co-author of recent College position papers on the mental health needs of children in out-of-home care, and prevention and early intervention for mental health problems in children and adolescents.
Philip has held three Australian Rotary Health research grants. The output from the first of these led to him receiving the Elaine Schlosser Lewis Award for Research in Attention Deficit Disorder from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2004. Other awards include the Hunter Children’s Research Foundation Community Award for Research Excellence- Achievement in Research in 2004, and the Hunter Children’s Research Foundation Research Mentor of the Year, 2005.
SUMMARY OF PROJECT:
Sleep, puberty and depression
There is justifiable concern that aspects of modern life interfere with the ability of adolescents to obtain adequate sleep. The Sleep, Puberty and Depression study will follow 40 adolescents for 9 months, gathering data about their sleep patterns, pubertal stage and mental health. The purpose of the study is to pilot the methods we intend to use with a much larger sample of young people from rural New South Wales who will be followed from before puberty begins until the late teenage years. The major study will examine the interaction between puberty hormones, environmental influences and mental and physical health during the teenage years. We want to know, among other things, whether specific changes in sleep pattern precede the onset of depression in the teenage years, and whether these changes are related to the stage of puberty.
Our study improves on previous research by using laboratory measures of puberty hormones to more precisely stage puberty, an objective measure of sleep using a body movement monitor worn on the wrist, and real time assessment of mood state using SMS texting. We will test these methods in teenagers aged 13 -16 years living in a rural community. Participants will be reviewed at three monthly intervals for 9 months. At each review measures of sleep will be obtained for seven consecutive nights, blood and urine will be collected for assessment of puberty hormones, and the participant will complete questionnaires about their mood.
The information we gather in the study will help us to further refine the methods we are using. In addition, the findings will give us the necessary information to calculate the sample size we will need in the major study to demonstrate statistically significant associations between sleep, puberty and depression. The study also affords an opportunity to gain insight into normal variation in the sleep patterns of Australian teenagers.