Cambridge Conversations: How the COVID crisis is affecting our mental health and that of children

COVID-19 has caused millions to surf waves of emotion from fear to grief to profound loneliness. The resulting lockdowns have deprived us of our usual lifestyles, removing us from the company of family and friends or — sometimes — intensifying contact. Our daily routines have disappeared as we work or study from home, “meet” people on screens and forego many of the pastimes we enjoy. Professor Ed Bullmore, Head of the Department of Psychiatry, and Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, an expert in adolescent mental health, will be joined by facilitator Dr Chris Smith of The Naked Scientists to analyse the effects of COVID-19 and the world’s reaction. How do we — and our children — adapt mentally to a crisis of this scale, and what are the long-term ramifications?

Cambridge Conversations webinars allow you to listen, connect and engage with current Cambridge thinking, wherever you are.

[craig]

As someone who went to Cambridge whose life has been torn apart by ME, it was great to hear you talking about the possibility of learning more about ME. I fight ignorance about ME so often on top of a very severe illness I would love to hear about some ME research taking place at Cambridge. There seems to have been very little research done into ME in the UK in the last 30 years and yet there are about 250, 000 people in the UK with the illness. I'm aware of research hubs being started at Harvard and Stanford in the past 5 years and Professor Morton at Oxford is doing good work but do we have anyone at Cambridge looking at ME? Ron Davis is leading the charge at Stanford and there are Nobel laureates on the board but when will Cambridge take ME seriously? Or perhaps a fairer question would be, can Cambridge get funding for such a project? I'm sure the CureME biobank at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine would be interested in supporting via blood samples etc. I'd hope the government would support such important research but if patients had to fund it how much would we need to raise? (edited for spelling)