Image: A slide from Nicola Grissom’s presentation at the NAMI research dinner on Feb. 28. “The long story short is that female mice tend to choose the high-value image, the better slot machine, a little more quickly than do males,” Grissom said while presenting the slide. (Courtesy of Nicola Grissom)
The virtual event explored mental illness and sex differences.
By Eitan Grad
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Minnesota and MHealth Fairview held their 20th annual research dinner virtually on Feb. 28. This year, the dinner covered the theme of “How Understanding Sex Differences in the Brain Gives Us New Insights into Mental Illness.”
“I liked the fact that each speaker talked about the overall theme about gender differences and how they impact mental health as a whole and had very different perspectives and approaches to looking at that overall theme,” Suma Jacob, one of the presenters and a professor in the University of Minnesota Medical School’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said.
NAMI, is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of children and adults with mental illnesses and their families.
Mariah Owens, president of NAMI Minnesota, and Sophia Vinogradov, the Medical School’s department head of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, opened the dinner with a brief word of introduction. Shortly afterward, Jacob and Christine Conelea, also an assistant professor in the Medical School’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, along with Nicola Grissom, an assistant professor in the University’s department of psychology, presented their research.
Jacob discussed differences between male and female brain development in terms of health and mental illness. During her presentation, she featured a timeline of the emergence of different disorders from birth to age 20.
“One really big difference between pre- and post-puberty is a lot more male onset disorders are striking before puberty,” Jacob said. “And then, often it becomes 50-50 – or more women after puberty, in certain disorders.”
In Conelea’s presentation, titled “Why girls are showing TikTok tics and what this tells us about their mental health needs,” the researcher cast doubt on popular theories that the social media site TikTok has caused tics among girls who use it.
“Just because views of tics go up on TikTok, it doesn’t necessarily mean TikTok is causing the tics to start,” Conelea said.
In an interview after the presentation, Conelea expressed concern about the impact of such rumors.
“I hope people take away that social media is complicated, and although there are some ways we use it that might negatively impact our mental health, there are also positive ways in that we really just need to figure out how to make it most beneficial for people,” Conelea said.“And how to make sure people with disabilities who are advocating on social media aren’t assumed to be faking it or doing it for attention or some of the things that scientists were claiming.”
Grissom discussed results of research that showed differences in learning between male and female mice when prompted by rewards. The results, she said, illustrate the “central idea that maybe sex mechanisms are a way of producing differences in cognition, enabling diverse strategies for coping with the world.” This might lead to differences in executive function, Grissom said during her presentation.
This was Grissom’s first time speaking at a research dinner for NAMI and M Health Fairview.“It was an honor to be asked to talk a little bit about this topic that’s been important to me and to my research, and to be able to talk to such an interested and committed audience,” she said.
A recording of the research dinner can be viewed at this link.