Changes in Adolescents’ Brains and Behaviors: Implications for Mental Health

Dear Colleagues,

It is a pleasure for us to invite you to cooperate on this Special Issue entitled “Changes in adolescents’ brains and behaviors: implications for mental health”.

While the most rapid and dramatic brain changes occur during the first years of life, adolescent brains are still highly plastic. White matter connections are locally strengthened or weakened in response to environmental stimuli, while gray matter asynchronously decreases in different cortical regions due to neuronal loss (‘pruning’) and/or intra-cortical myelination. Sleep plays a fundamental role in such a complex and delicate re-wiring process, which makes adolescence a highly vulnerable life period and the breeding ground for major chronic psychiatric disorders.

With rapid changes occurring in our society (including the advent of Internet and related technologies, the COVID-19 outbreak and the potential threaten of other pandemics, the awakening of gender minorities’ awareness and the multiplication of social disparities among ethnic minorities), the risk range for developing a psychiatric condition, especially substance abuse, mood, anxiety and self-harm has widened. This is having a detrimental impact on adolescents’ global health, with an increase in suicidality and in DALYs (disability-adjusted life years), and about one third of adolescents suffer from at least one psychological, behavioral and emotional disorder. Novel research and social services and policies are needed to prevent the worsening of this trend, and hopefully, reverse the course of these conditions.

This Special Issue focuses on adolescents’ mental health and aims to deepen both biological and environmental factors predisposing the emergence of psychopathology during adolescence, with a specific attention on sleep as a mediating factor and on new therapeutic strategies.

Therefore, we invite colleagues to present original research, case reports and series and review papers on this essential research topic.

We are looking forward to your contributions.

Dr. Anna Castelnovo
Dr. Sara Uccella
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Children is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• adolescent psychiatry
• behavioral neuroscience
• sleep
• mood disorders
• self-harm