Tom Metherell

Me (in a blue jumper and at a lectern labelled "Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre) presenting at the 30th International Population Conference.

The panel of speakers in our session, smiling and posing for the camera behind the table.

Today I presented my work on data from the @unicefinnocenti.bsky.social Disrupting Harm survey at #IPC2025 in Brisbane! It was a great opportunity to engage with other researchers interested in investigating youth mental health in the population.

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

thanks to much-needed input from @jonathan-bartlett.bsky.social on how the hell to put together a principled missing data strategy for this thing

with the excellent @fassiluisa.bsky.social @jfhayes.bsky.social @georgeploubidis.bsky.social @dmorenoagostino.bsky.social and others not on Bluesky!

We have a ✨NEW PREPRINT✨! Using data from the @clscohorts.bsky.social Millennium Cohort Study and linked healthcare records, we tested the association between social media use and psychiatric diagnoses in secondary care in young people in England. This is still a work in progress - feedback welcome!

Happy to share my new study, publ. in Social Science Research 🎉 Bottom line: Yes, adolescents use their phones a lot 🤳 But I find no support for the notion that this use displaces reading, homework, hobbies, physical act., sleep... Instead: Changing media preferences 📺 ->📱. doi.org/10.1016/j.ss...

UK universities have failed to protect gender-critical academics, report finds Report’s author raises ‘stark concerns about barriers to academic freedom’

Shame on the Guardian for publishing this as if Sullivan is an independent expert. Sullivan is a well-known gender-critical campaigner, & advisor to Sex Matters, a prominent GC campaign group which is reported to be deeply entangled with anti-LGBTQ+ movements: yorkshirebylines.co.uk/news/home-af...

is starting the first conference session at 07:30 part of an experiment to test the effects of lack of sleep on the mental health of psychiatry conference participants?

The keynote session at SIPS 2025

Had a great first day at #SIPS2025! Don't miss our session tomorrow morning on the challenges of public engagement in a post-truth society 🗯️

(@sarahbakirci.bsky.social @zefreeman.com)

🚨New preprint 🚨

𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐬: 𝐀 𝐋𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞-𝐒𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐌𝐢𝐜𝐫𝐨-𝐍𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵

Using a novel micro-narrative method, we collected ~ 900 first-person accounts of social media harms from young people across the UK and US.

View of the "cinema space" at the Innovation Lab today

Today I was in Birmingham for the @popmhuk.bsky.social Innovation Lab in Children and Young People's Mental Health! It was really great to see researchers, practitioners, public institutions, community organisations and young people in one room to connect and identify areas for collaboration 📈🤓

Harming children: the effects of the UK puberty blocker ban This paper presents an analysis of data from trans children and young people and their parents following the imposition of a UK-wide ban on puberty blockers for this group. The consequences of this...

TW: harm to children.

My research into the effects of the UK government puberty-blocker ban has finally been published after peer-review.

It details the severe harm being caused to young trans people & children by the Starmer government's puberty-blocker ban.

Unlike Cass it is peer reviewed...

Front view of two young brothers at an outdoor adventure playground. They are sitting on a wooden bench, one boy is holding string cheese up in the air with his head back and his mouth wide open.

CLS to lead the UK Age 8 Pilot of Growing Up in Digital Europe @guide-cohort.bsky.social‬, a major European initiative to create internationally-harmonised data for research on child development and wellbeing. Find out more on the CLS website: buff.ly/gI6P3gA

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

📢 Job opportunity! 📢

I am recruiting a 2-year postdoc to join me at @clscohorts.bsky.social to work on a SUPER exciting project on the quantitative study of intersectional inequalities in youth mental health across time and place!

See www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... for more info and how to apply!

Excited (and a little nervous!) to be giving a talk on 30 June at the Turing’s CIIG seminar series. If you're interested in IPTW/propensity score methods, or in seeing some cat photos 🐾 (with the former obviously being more likely!), everyone’s welcome to join.

Even worse, my Android emoji suggestions directly REPLACE the word with its translation...

❌✍️👍☝️

It promises to be a very interesting discussion! What can we as scientists do to combat the misinterpretation (wilful and unintentional) of our findings? Come along to our #SIPS2025 unconference to see if we can find some answers 🤓

The meme in which a man skates down a stair railing on a rake, but ultimately ends up standing on it so it hits him in the face anyway. In the bottom left corner the words "word limit: 3000" appear. Along the man's path down the railing, the words "concise introduction", "briefly lay out limitations" and "additional results in the supplementary" appear. Finally, as he is hit in the face, the caption reads "1700-word methods section.

is it just me?

Thankfully I had found out about branching before I started this one, so it's "only" 1700 lines of code this time 😂

Key entry showing that the blue colour in my previous image refers to "outdated"

😬

(but the real answer is that the pipeline is locked up in a secure data environment and everything is fine, it just looks more complicated than I imagined)

The pipeline dependency graph from a {targets} project in R. It has more nodes than I can count. And lines all over the place.

this {targets} business is getting out of hand

(@brodriguesco.bsky.social this is your fault)

In a way, the social media consensus paper has formed a consensus. We all agree we don't like it

The fight to keep big tech in check: digital researchers are in ‘David and Goliath’ battle Resource constraints hobble analyses of how digital technologies affect mental health, and take a huge toll on the scientists working to make the online world safer.

Very good article by Amy Orben

"we propose that if there is inadequate safety information available about a digital product ... researchers and policymakers should lower the evidence thresholds needed to start testing interventions to address potential harms."

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Just out! Our peer-reviewed critique of the Cass Review has been published by BMC Medical Research Methodology. Please read and share. We show that the Cass Review is fatally flawed and should not be the basis for policy or practice in transgender healthcare.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Protest sign reading "private string Gender NOT public const bool Gender". The trans flag appears coloured in the background.

stolen from reddit

still never too late 😤😤😤

never too late - NSHD still going strong nearly 80 years in!!

I’ll have a hard time buying that these tiny “detox” effects are real improvements until we can find a way to rule out experimental demand characteristics. Who signs up for a study where they’ll be asked to shut off Instagram for several weeks? Probably, people who think it’s good for them.

It's never about the science. It's always about having a legal basis for your fear and hatred of other people.

4. The anatomy of a smear Comparing two news stories about an academic's view on school smartphone bans reveals just how easy it is to twist the narrative.

NEW | Analysing a story about an academic and smartphone bans…

THE ANATOMY OF A SMEAR

Comparing two news stories about an academic's view on school smartphone bans reveals just how easy it is to twist the narrative.

brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/4-the-anat...

Times letters: Tariffs, free trade and international allies Write to letters@thetimes.co.uk Sir, Fraser Nelson is right that Britain should resist retaliation against Donald Trump’s tariffs (“This is our chance to be free-trade champions”, Apr 5). However, the

A lot of academics signed a letter to The Times in support of Dr Amy Orben, who was attacked as 'biased' last week. In fact, Amy does extremely meticulous and systematic research in the area of social media and adolescent mental health

www.thetimes.com/comment/lett...