Electroencephalography (EEG) Laboratory Project
There has never been a greater need for the kind of specialist help that the Anna Freud Centre offers. The mental and emotional problems of children and young people are the focus of constant media attention. The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2020 mental disorders will become one of the five most common causes of serious ill-health among children if present rates of growth continue.
The Anna Freud Centre has already developed a world-class set of observational techniques for assessing the quality of children's relationships with their caregivers which can help us to make appropriate decisions about what is in the best interests of the child and to guide parents and carers in developing less damaging ways of interacting with their child.
But external observation alone can never tell the full story of a two-year old's experience. Extending that observation to seeing into the brain activity of an infant, a two-year old, a preschool child or an adolescent, is the promise of electrophysiological brain imaging (electroencephalography or EEG).
This technique non-invasively maps changes in brain function in response to outside stimuli, displaying the results in a graphic form that gives experts insight into the individual's brain behaviour.
With this in mind, the Anna Freud Centre intends to raise £500,000 to establish a cutting edge research laboratory and expand its training facilities. £350,000 will be required for building extension and refurbishment and £150,000 for the purchase and installation of the brain imaging equipment. A detailed budget with full costs is available on request.
The laboratory will help being us closer to the fullest possible understanding of a child's past and present picture of the world. Together with our traditional external observation techniques, brain imaging technology can help us get closer to an understanding of how a child is experiencing the world.
Why is it important to do this? The impact that neglect and abuse can have on a child's developing brain tends to be overlooked: neglect and abuse replicate across the generations because of the indelible scars left by maltreatment on the infant and young child's developing brain.
We now know that maltreatment affects not just a child's psychological make-up; it causes lasting changes in brain function. However, removing a child from his or her parents and taking them into care is a difficult decision. Children in care are ten times as likely to be violent and/or take drugs.
The very few facilities currently doing this kind of work in the UK are committed to pure science rather than clinical explorations to directly improve the lives of children. The Anna Freud Centre's high density EEG laboratory will be the first where this complex technology will be put to direct clinical use.
This equipment will improve our understanding of brain functioning associated with the quality of parent-child relationships, to help us identify maladaptive patterns earlier, to detect problems and intervene before temporary difficulties turn into permanent disability.
The Future
Once the lab has successfully been created, it will help to improve the services that the Anna Freud Centre has to offer.
The Centre already holds a large contract with a Social Services department to provide assessments where children are the subject of care proceedings. There is scope to expand this work, particularly with the additional information for brain imaging - and part of the costs of the running of the lab will be funded by commissioned work from social services around the country.
The first three years of the new laboratory's operation will also be linked to a major collaboration with eight leading European universities (the DISCOS project). Through this collaboration, the Anna Freud Centre has just been awarded a European Union Marie Curie Research Award.
The laboratory will also play an integral role in our new Masters in Psychodynamic Developmental Neuroscience, run in collaboration with University College, London and Yale University in the US. (Students spend the first year of this programme at the Anna Freud Centre, the second at the Yale Child Study Center).
An identical laboratory will be established at the Yale Child Study Center, and students trained in the London lab will be able to further develop their skills in New Haven.
The laboratory will encourage other collaborations and research initiatives with clinical and scientific teams in London and around the UK and will be a focus for research funding from national research councils and foundations.
If you are interested in joining the Anna Freud Centre's (homepage) EEG project as a patron, then please contact us.