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🌳🌤️🍄 A very warm woodland welcome to the September edition of The Mental Elf Monthly — our new email newsletter for mental health professionals, researchers, and policy people who care about making mental health evidence more useful and accessible.

Each month, in this email update, we bring you:

• The most popular Mental Elf blogs
• Research highlights from our community
• Updates on what we’re working on (and how you can get involved)

If you find this useful, please hit Subscribe, and feel free to share it with a colleague or two. We’ll keep it short, sharp, and relevant — no fluff, no hype, just helpful content.

📈 Top 5 blogs this month

Here’s what caught the most attention this month:

1. Apples and oranges? Rethinking the evidence behind young people’s depression treatments

NICE says start with therapy. But what if the evidence doesn’t actually support that? This new analysis asks a provocative question: Are trials of therapy and medication for youth depression too different to compare? It shows where cognitive behavioural therapy works well and where the evidence is shakier.

🤓 Read the BLOG​

🗣️ Join the LinkedIn conversation​

2. Pragmatic prescribing: why GPs offer beta-blockers for anxiety, despite guideline gaps

Beta-blockers like propranolol are being prescribed more often for anxiety in UK primary care, even though they don’t feature in national anxiety clinical guidelines. This new qualitative study explores GPs’ reasons, including: pragmatic prescribing for physical symptoms; safety-driven choices vs antidepressants or benzos; patient-driven demand for fast relief & stigma avoidance. The findings highlight a gap between evidence, guidelines, and practice — and a need for trials to clarify safety and effectiveness.

🤓 Read the BLOG​

🗣️ Join the LinkedIn conversation​

3. When helping hurts: potential harms from CBT and mindfulness in schools

We don’t talk enough about the potential harms of school-based mental health programmes.This new scoping review is a wake-up call. The review raises crucial questions about the ethics and effectiveness of a one-size-fits-all approach to wellbeing in schools. We urgently need more research into who benefits, who doesn’t, and what alternatives could work better.

🤓 Read the BLOG​

🗣️ Join the LinkedIn conversation​

4. Core beliefs in psychosis: new insights from a systematic review

What if our deepest beliefs about ourselves and others shape psychotic experiences? This major review of 79 studies found that negative self- and other-beliefs are tied to voices, paranoia, and suicidality. It raises big clinical questions: should therapy explicitly target these schemas and help build positive ones to support recovery?

🤓 Read the BLOG​

🗣️ Join the LinkedIn conversation​

5. Prescribing in borderline personality disorder: Evidence, relationships, and the realities of practice

Why do so many people with borderline personality disorder get prescribed meds, when guidelines recommend therapy instead? This systematic review shows it’s not simple: prescribing often happens in crises; relationships & patient expectations influence choices; other mental health comorbidities affect decisions; and service pressures leave few alternatives. A thoughtful read for anyone working in 'personality disorders'.

🤓 Read the BLOG​

🗣️ Join the LinkedIn conversation​

👩🏽💻 Free webinar: Difficult-to-treat depression – 11am BST, Mon 6 Oct

Difficult-to-treat depression (also called treatment-resistant depression) affects up to half of people with depression. It causes major distress, long-term disability, and heavy costs for individuals, services, and society.

Despite evidence for medication, psychological therapies, neuromodulation, diet and exercise, many patients still get limited support, especially in primary care. Access to specialists is patchy, stigma persists, and recovery often remains out of reach.

This free one-hour webinar from The Mental Elf (run in partnership with colleagues at King's College London) brings you up to date with the latest evidence and practical guidance. Our panel will:

• Summarise the most promising treatment options
• Highlight gaps in UK care and access
• Explore new approaches, from psychedelics to neuromodulation
• Offer clear recommendations for policy and practice

Join us to refresh your knowledge, reflect on your practice, and reimagine what good care could look like.

🎟️ Tickets are limited. Book yours now!

​https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/new-hope-for-difficult-to-treat-depression-the-evidence-you-need-now-tickets-1615289597669​

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🌳🌤️🍄 Commission the Mental Elf to help share your research

Is your latest paper reaching the audience you want to reach? We can help by turning your mental health research into real-world impact.

We help researchers share evidence through social media, podcasts, videos, webinars and more. Right now we're working with research groups from London, Oxford, Bristol and Sheffield to disseminate their new papers and maximise their reach and impact.

You can commission our expert team or write us into your next grant application as your dissemination partner.

🎗️ Contact us now and get yourself some #ElfHelp.

🔗 elfi.sh/help​

📧 andre.tomlin@nationalelfservice.net​

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