Identifying pathways for the emergence of mental health functioning in young adults from prenatal adversity, genetic susceptibility, the early environment, and intervening life stress - Leveraging hypotheses generated from an international birth cohort consortium to test specific mechanisms about anxiety, depression, and wellbeing.

Research indicates that adult mental health (illness and wellbeing) has its roots in early life. Being exposed to an adverse environment during pregnancy and early childhood, experiencing major life stressors during childhood and adolescence have been linked to mental illness in late adolescence and early adulthood. However, not all exposed children develop mental illness in adulthood. Our goal is to model the developmental pathways between exposure to adversity in pregnancy and childhood and adult mental health functioning by examining individual genetic risk and emotional and cognitive functioning during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Using the Mental health in Adulthood: VAriability in Neurodevelopment and Resilience (MAVAN-R) cohort and the Development Research in Environmental Adversity, Mental health, BIological susceptibility and Gender (DREAM BIG) developmental consortium, we will ask the following questions: 1) Do early adverse environments and child genes predict emerging psychopathology/positive wellbeing? 2) Do major life events experienced by children/adolescents influence these relationships? And 3) Does emotional and cognitive functioning during childhood and adolescence interact with major life events to influence the above associations? This study is ideally situated to answer these questions by i) engaging community members; ii) using an established genetically informed database of fine grained assessments of mothers and children from pregnancy to six years of age, with follow-up assessments at age 13 years and during the COVID pandemic; iii) having an established international consortium (DREAM BIG) of 6 similar studies; iv) having an established Knowledge Users committee; and v) using advanced statistical analyses.