Marjorie Pay Hinckley Lecture with Terrie Moffitt - 3 February 2022

Surprises About Mental Health Revealed by Following 1,000 People for Decades
Mental-health professionals typically encounter a patient at one point in his or her life. This cross-sectional snapshot view fosters intense focus on the current presenting diagnosis. But what happens outside the clinic, and what happens across decades of a life?
Repeated mental-health assessments in a birth cohort of 1,000 babies followed to midlife revealed that mental disorder eventually affects virtually everyone. The most extensive life-histories included adolescent onset of mental disorder followed by a succession of different diagnoses emerging over the next decades. Mental-disorder life-histories could not be adequately characterized by diagnosis at one point in time, because each patient will have different diagnoses in their past, and still different diagnoses coming in their future.
The research also uncovered that people who have mental disorder in the first half of their lives are at elevated risk in the second half of their lives for rapid biological aging, multiple physical diseases, and Alzheimer’s dementia. This connection raises new possibilities for early mental health treatment to prevent later unhealthy aging.
This lecture will challenge our field’s over-reliance on researching and treating individual mental disorders one at a time, at one point in time. A longer view encourages us to teach people skills for managing stress and maintaining mental health and wellbeing - skills that should last a lifetime. Helping young people maintain mental health might yield a large return on investment decades later in optimal healthy aging.