Lecture series by the Centre for Urban Mental Health
Mental health research and care have become increasingly successful at identifying and targeting individual components of mental disorders. Yet mental health itself does not reside in any single component. It emerges over time from interactions between biology, development, behaviour, relationships and the social and physical environment.
This lecture explores what changes when we take this ecological and developmental perspective seriously. Drawing on work in child and adolescent psychiatry, precision medicine and Donut Psychiatry, I will argue for a shift from asking primarily “What disorder does this person have?” towards understanding “What is happening in this person, in this context, at this point in time?”
This also changes how we think about interventions. Rather than simply adding interventions at single levels, the challenge is to identify where in a dynamic system change may have the greatest effect, how effects propagate across levels, and how these processes evolve over time.
Using examples from our work at the N=You Center for Development at Amsterdam UMC, I will discuss how such an approach can be translated into clinical practice, measurement and intervention design, and what it may offer for studying mental health in complex urban environments.
Please sign up by sending an e-mail to assistent.umh@amsterdamumc.nl.
Hilgo Bruining is a Professor of Neurobiological Developmental Disorders and child and adolescent psychiatrist at Amsterdam UMC and Emma Children’s Hospital. He leads N=You, the Ecological Center for Development, where clinical care and research focus on understanding individual developmental trajectories through the interaction of biological, psychological and environmental factors. His work spans neurodevelopment, sensory processing, neurophysiology and precision psychiatry, with an increasing focus on ecological and systems approaches to health and development. In his 2024 book Donutpsychiatrie, he explored how principles from Doughnut Economics can be translated to mental health and developmental care.