Mental Health

View some of our key mental health research.

Generation Scotland volunteers have allowed researchers to study very important mental health issues, such as loneliness in the digital world, depression (also known as major depressive disorder), schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and many more.

These projects often involve studying how our genes and environment influences our mental health.

This area of research is hugely important so we can better understand and treat mental health in our generation and in the future.

Researcher looking at brain scans

Depression is a complicated disorder, so Generation Scotland (along with other international researchers) are bringing together large samples, brain images (MRI) and new machine learning models (AI) to identify brain markers of people with depression and develop individual treatments.

Researchers based at the University of Edinburgh found that longer-term inflammation was related to changes in brain structure, which may help shed light on causes of depression.

Ongoing study: Loneliness in the Digital World

Read about our study co-produced with young people: Loneliness in the Digital World (Information coming soon).

Coloured letters

Synaesthesia is a condition where people associate letters and numbers with specific colours. Researchers found this condition to share some biology with schizophrenia.