Maree Teesson

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Managing Director at The University of Sydney

Objective This study investigated the rates of workplace trauma exposure, probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol and other drug use among Australian public safety personnel (PSP). It also identified factors associated with hazardous or harmful alcohol and other drug use. Method Data were collected through an online survey distr...

Objective: Rising rates of mental illness in young people over recent decades are a trend that represents a wake-up call across the globe. The causes of this increase are not known. We also know little about effective interventions or implementation strategies to prevent depression in either youth or adults. The need for the prevention of mental il...

Background Preventure is a selective school-based personality-targeted program that has shown long-term benefits in preventing student alcohol use, internalising and externalising problems when delivered by psychologists. In this first Australian randomised controlled trial of school staff implementation of Preventure, we aimed to examine i) accept...

Background: There is growing recognition of the physical and mental health impacts of climate change and the attendant burden on health care systems, including from the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, and national governments. However, the repercussions on 'social health'— our access to meaningful social connections and the health an...

In response to the question ‘what is the place of universal, selective and indicated prevention strategies for depression and other mood disorders’ posed by Hickie et al. (2024) we examine the role of school-based strategies for universal and targeted (including selective and indicated) prevention of depression. Schools represent a unique opportuni...

In this article, we evaluate the current state of universal school‐based mental health prevention. We argue that the field is at another pivotal turning point, with many unanswered questions. As youth mental health issues rise in prominence and prevalence, schools increasingly adopt mental health and well‐being programmes. However, recent large‐sca...

There is strong evidence for a general psychopathology dimension which captures covariance among all forms of psychopathology, yet its nature and underlying association with personality remain unclear. This study examined the co-development of general psychopathology and four high-risk personality traits: anxiety sensitivity, negative thinking, sen...

This cost-utility analysis adopted societal and health sector perspectives evaluating combined and individual approaches to universal prevention of substance use, depression, and anxiety in 6,386 high school students within the Climate Schools Combined cluster randomised trial. Costs included program delivery, self-reported healthcare utilisation,...

Early onset of alcohol consumption among Colombian adolescents highlights the need for effective and accessible preventive interventions. This project aimed to conduct formative work to inform the adaptation of an effective eHealth alcohol use prevention program originally developed in Australia, the OurFutures Alcohol Module, to the Bogotá context...

Intervention Health4Life: a school-based eHealth intervention targeting multiple health behaviour change (MHBC). Research question Does Health4Life impact secondary outcomes of self-reported intentions regarding six lifestyle behaviours in adolescents (alcohol use, tobacco smoking, screentime, physical activity, discretionary beverage consumption,...

Introduction Childhood traumatic experiences (CTE) have been identified as a robust risk factor for a range of substance use behaviours. However, little is known about their association with adolescent vaping. We explored prospective associations between CTEs and vaping among a sample of Australian adolescents. Methods The sample comprised 2234 ad...

The objective of this paper is to summarise the policy implications of key findings from the 2020–22 Australian National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing (NSMHWB). We provide an analysis of policy implications of four papers in this issue of the journal from the 2020–22 NSMHWB ( N = 15,893) and the 2007 NSMHWB ( N = 8841). The 2020–2022 NSMHWB...

Background Previous estimates from 2007 found that co-occurring mental and/or substance use disorders were a pervasive feature of Australia’s mental health. Since that time there have been shifts and improvements in the conceptualisation and incorporation of co-occurring disorders in research and treatment settings. The current study provides up-to...

Background Digital, or eHealth, interventions are highly promising approaches to help adolescents improve their health behaviours and reduce their risk of chronic disease. However, they often have low uptake and retention. There is also a paucity of high-quality research into the predictors of eHealth engagement, and a lack of studies that have sys...

This study aimed to examine the efficacy of school-based e-cigarette preventive interventions via a systematic review and meta-analysis. We searched Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, Scopus, CINAHL, Cochrane, and clinical trial registries for studies published between January 2000 and June 2023 using keywords for e-cigarettes, adolescents, and school. Of...

Objective Mental and substance use disorders are the leading causes of disability worldwide. Contemporary estimates of prevalence, severity and impairment are essential for service planning. This study provides estimates of prevalence, severity, impairment and demographic correlates of mental and substance use disorders in 2020–22 and changes in pr...

Introduction Heroin dependence is a public health concern in Australia. High mortality rates, increased risk of physical/mental health comorbidities and increased risk of social issues contribute to a high personal and societal cost. The aim of this paper is to understand the societal cost of heroin dependence in an Australian population. Methods...

Objective: Mental and substance use disorders are the leading causes of disability worldwide. Contemporary estimates of prevalence, severity and impairment are essential for service planning. The current study provides estimates of prevalence, severity, impairment and demographic correlates of mental and substance use disorders in 2020-22, and chan...

Objective To summarise policy implications of key findings from the 2020-22 Australian National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing (NSMHWB).Methods: Analysis of policy implications of four papers in this issue of the journal from the 2020-22 NSMHWB (N=15,893) and the 2007 NSMHWB (N=8,841). Results: The 2020-2022 NSMHWB reported a lifetime prevale...

Background Mental disorders are the leading cause of disease burden among youth. Effective prevention of mental disorders during adolescence is a critical public health strategy to reduce both individual and societal harms. Schools are an important setting for prevention; however, existing universal school-based mental health interventions have sho...

More comprehensive modeling of psychopathology in youth is needed to facilitate a developmentally informed expansion of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) model. In this study, we examined a symptom-level model of the structure of psychopathology in children and adolescents—most aged 11 to 17 years—bringing together data from larg...

Introduction Barriers to help‐seeking for illicit drug use cross psychosocial (e.g., knowledge of where to seek help, attitudinal beliefs like being afraid of what people will think) and structural (e.g., service availability) domains. Along with people who use illicit drugs, it is important to consider the perspectives of other key groups who are...

Objectives To prospectively assess rates of QT prolongation, arrhythmia, syncope, and sudden cardiac death (SCD) in a cohort of people with heroin dependence. Methods To estimate rates of QT prolongation, arrhythmia, and syncope, a subcohort (n = 130) from the Australian Treatment Outcomes Study, a prospective longitudinal cohort study of 615 peop...

Purpose Adolescence and emerging adulthood are key developmental stages with high risk for trauma exposure and the development of mental and substance-use disorders (SUDs). This study aims to compare the clinical profiles of adolescents (aged 12–17 years) and emerging adults (aged 18–25 years) presenting for treatment of posttraumatic stress disord...

Background - Amidst a rapid growth in youth participation initiatives globally, such as government-initiated advisory groups, local representative councils, and youth-led activism groups, it is important to understand how being involved in youth participation roles can affect youth mental health and wellbeing. This scoping review comprehensively sy...

Issue Addressed Substance use and mental illness remain critical issues for young Australians, however, engagement with evidence‐based health resources is challenging among this age group. This study aimed to develop engaging, useful digital health resources, underpinned by neuroscience principles, to build awareness of the harms of electronic ciga...

Background In recent years, psychological distress in Western countries has rapidly increased among older adolescents while alcohol use has declined, though little is known about younger adolescents. It is also unclear if and how these trends relate to co‐occurring alcohol use and distress. This study sought to examine temporal changes in the preva...

Mental disorders are a leading cause of disease burden worldwide. As onset typically occurs in adolescence, prevention during this period is critical. The Health4Life-school-based multiple health behavior change (MHBC) intervention targets six lifestyle risk factors: diet, sleep, physical activity, screentime, alcohol use and smoking. Health4Life h...

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise in anxiety and depression among adolescents. This study aimed to investigate the longitudinal associations between sleep and mental health among a large sample of Australian adolescents and examine whether healthy sleep patterns were protective of mental health in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We used t...

Objective: There have been no well-controlled and well-powered comparative trials of topiramate with other pharmacotherapies for alcohol use disorder (AUD), such as naltrexone. Moreover, the literature is mixed on the effects of two polymorphisms-rs2832407 (in GRIK1) and rs1799971 (in OPRM1)-on response to topiramate and naltrexone, respectively....

Background Addressing aggressive behavior in adolescence is a key step toward preventing violence and associated social and economic costs in adulthood. This study examined the secondary effects of the personality-targeted substance use preventive program Preventure on aggressive behavior from ages 13 to 20. Methods In total, 339 young people from...

Objective: Being a mother of a young child may be protective against alcohol misuse for some, but not all, women. This is the first paper to identify the mental health and psychosocial correlates of alcohol misuse among postpartum mothers. Methods: Mothers with a child under 12-months (n=319) were recruited via social media to complete a cross-s...

Objectives To investigate the effectiveness of a school‐based multiple health behaviour change e‐health intervention for modifying risk factors for chronic disease (secondary outcomes). Study design Cluster randomised controlled trial. Setting, participants Students (at baseline [2019]: year 7, 11–14 years old) at 71 Australian public, independen...

Background Mental health and alcohol and other drug use problems consistently dominate the top causes of disease burden in Australians. eHealth stands to be a key tool in addressing these issues but is not routinely well-integrated into service provision models. This study will evaluate the uptake of the digital ecosystem and website, eCliPSE [elec...

Parenting practices such as parental monitoring are known to positively impact dietary behaviours in offspring. However, links between adolescent‐perceived parental monitoring and dietary outcomes have rarely been examined and never in an Australian context. This study investigated whether adolescent‐perceived parental monitoring is associated with...

Despite decades of research demonstrating the effectiveness of treatments for heroin dependence, rates of heroin use, dependence, and death have dramatically increased over the past decade. While evidence has highlighted a range of risk and protective factors for relapse, remission, and other outcomes, this presents clinicians with the challenge as...

Background: This review evaluated the existing literature exploring the effects of arts-inclusive programs (AIPs) on the mental health and wellbeing of young children. AIPs include activities, programs, or interventions containing creative arts. Methods: Literature searches were conducted across three databases (SCOPUS, psycINFO, and ERIC). The...

Across high-income countries, adolescent emotional concerns have been increasing in prevalence over the past two decades and it is unclear why this is occurring, including if and how substance use relates to these changing trends. On the other hand, substance use has been generally declining, and little is known about the role of emotional concerns...

Objective Evidence suggests that young adults (aged 18–34) were disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but little is known about their longer-term mental health changes beyond the early pandemic period. This article investigates heterogeneous trajectories of mental health among Australian young adults across 2 years of the pandemic a...

Objective: To examine the efficacy of school-based e-cigarette preventive interventions via a systematic review and meta-analysis. Data sources: We searched MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, Scopus, CINAHL, Cochrane and clinical trials registries for studies published between January 2000-June 2023 using keywords for e-cigarettes, adolescents, and school....

Lifestyle risk behaviours—physical inactivity, poor diet, poor sleep, recreational screen time, and alcohol and tobacco use—collectively known as the “Big 6” emerge during adolescence and significantly contribute to chronic disease development into adulthood. To address this issue, the Health4Life program targeted the Big 6 risk behaviours simultan...

Objective: Cannabis use is common among individuals with opioid use disorder, but it remains unclear whether cannabis use is associated with an increase or a reduction in illicit opioid use. To overcome limitations identified in previous longitudinal studies with limited follow-ups, the authors examined a within-person reciprocal relationship betw...

Background This study examined cross-sectional associations between e-cigarette use and (i) perceived peer use of e-cigarettes and (ii) bullying (perpetration and/or victimisation) in Australian adolescents. Methods Data were collected in 2022 as part of a cluster randomised controlled trial. Logistic regressions examined associations between e-ci...

Background Interpretation bias modification (IBM) and approach bias modification (ApBM) cognitive retraining interventions can be efficacious adjunctive treatments for improving social anxiety and alcohol use problems. However, previous trials have not examined the combination of these interventions in a young, comorbid sample. Objective This stud...

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise in emotional problems among adolescents. Improving young people's mental health is a public health priority, and examining protective factors throughout the pandemic can offer insights on targets for prevention. This study aimed to investigate longitudinal trajectories of depressive and anxiety sym...

There is growing recognition that young people should be given opportunities to participate in the decisions that affect their lives, such as advisory groups, representative councils, advocacy or activism. Positive youth development theory and sociopolitical development theory propose pathways through which youth participation can influence mental...

More comprehensive modelling of psychopathology in youth is needed to facilitate a developmentally informed expansion of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) model. This study examined a symptom-level model of the structure of psychopathology in youth—most aged 11-17 years—bringing together data from large clinical, community, and r...

Objective: The goal of this study is to investigate the cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between clustered lifestyle risk factors (sleep, physical activity, body mass index [BMI], and screen time) and neurodevelopment over the early adolescent period. Method: Data from the ABCD Study Data Release 3.0 consisted of 11,878 participants (...

Background: Substance use disorders negatively affect global disease burden. Effective preventive interventions are available, but whether they provide value for money is unclear. Aims: This review looks at the cost-effectiveness evidence of preventive interventions for cannabis use, opioid misuse and illicit drug use. Method: Literature searc...

Background Mental health and substance use disorders typically emerge early in life with impacts extending into early adulthood. Longitudinal studies are well-placed to investigate the progression of mental health and substance use disorders in adolescents. However, a significant challenge of longitudinal studies is sample attrition, or failure to...

Background: Parents play a critical role in delaying adolescent initiation of alcohol and other drug use. However, the majority of prevention programs focus on adolescents only. This study tested the acceptability and effectiveness of an eHealth universal program for students and parents to prevent adolescent alcohol use. Methods: A cluster rand...

This study explored age, period, and cohort effects associated with trends in psychological distress and risky alcohol consumption. Data came from 108,536 Australians aged 14-79 years old from birth cohorts between 1925-2005, endorsing past year alcohol use in the 2004-2019 Australian National Drug Strategy Household Surveys. Risky alcohol consumpt...

Background: Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for death and disability worldwide. Aims: We conducted a systematic review on the cost-effectiveness evidence for interventions to prevent alcohol use across the lifespan. Method: Electronic databases (EMBASE, Medline, PsycINFO, CINAHL and EconLit) were searched for full economic evaluations and...

This study aimed to examine the effect of a personality-targeted prevention program (Preventure) on trajectories of general and specific dimensions of psychopathology from early- to mid-adolescence. Australian adolescents (N = 2190) from 26 schools participated in a cluster randomized controlled substance use prevention trial. This study compared s...

Background: Internalizing and externalizing personality traits are robust risk factors for substance use and mental health, and personality-targeted interventions are effective in preventing substance use and mental health problems in youth. However, there is limited evidence for how personality relates to other lifestyle risk factors, such as ene...

Mental disorders have significant impact on the health and well-being of young people in Australia and worldwide. Intervention during adolescence is critical for reducing immediate harm and preventing the development of chronic mental disorders. This paper describes the protocol for a randomised controlled trial designed to evaluate the effectivene...

Co-occurring cannabis use is common among those with opioid use disorder (OUD), but the extent to which it is harmful may be due to its preparation and concentration of various cannabinoids. The current study aimed to examine the prevalence of, and long-term associations with, the use of varying cannabis products among a naturalistic longitudinal c...

There is a significant degree of heterogeneity in scales that purport to measure depression and generalized anxiety in adolescent samples, which makes it difficult to directly compare scores across studies. The aim of the current study is to develop a common metric that facilitates the comparison of scores from different but related scales of depre...

Objective The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered social determinants of health including work, education, social connections, movement, and perceived control; and loneliness was commonly experienced. This longitudinal study examined how social determinants at the personal (micro), community (meso), and societal (macro) levels predicted loneline...

Background Effective and scalable prevention approaches are urgently needed to address the rapidly increasing rates of e-cigarette use among adolescents. School-based eHealth interventions can be an efficient, effective, and economical approach, yet there are none targeting e-cigarettes within Australia. This paper describes the protocol of the Our...

Background Crystal methamphetamine (‘ice’) use is a large and growing worldwide problem, yet few research studies have explored the impact of crystal methamphetamine use on affected friends and family members. We explored the experiences and narratives of family members and friends of people who use methamphetamine to inform the development of a Fa...

Objective: Research shows highly palatable foods can elicit addictive eating behaviours or 'food addiction'. Early adolescence is theorised to be a vulnerable period for the onset of addictive eating behaviours, yet minimal research has examined this. This study explored the prevalence and correlates of addictive eating behaviours in a large early...

Background: Parents play an influential role in the health behaviors of their children, such as physical activity, dietary intake, sleep, screen time, and substance use. However, further research is needed to inform the development of more effective and engaging parent-based interventions targeting adolescent risk behaviors. Objective: This stud...

Background: Lifestyle risk behaviours are prevalent among adolescents and commonly co-occur, but current intervention approaches tend to focus on single risk behaviours. This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of the eHealth intervention Health4Life in modifying six key lifestyle risk behaviours (ie, alcohol use, tobacco smoking, recreational sc...

Introduction Systemic chronic inflammation (SCI) is implicated in the aetiology of life-limiting diseases in later life, such as cancer, T2 diabetes and mental health disorders. However, global estimates of adolescent inflammation, indexed by biomarkers such as C-reactive protein (CRP), are unknown. We conducted the first study to establish the ove...

Background: Opioid use disorder is a public health concern in Australia. Opioid agonist treatment (OAT) is effective at treating and minimising harm from opioid use disorder, yet is underused in Australia due to client barriers. Although these barriers have been reported, the barriers that are most important to clients is unclear. The aim of this...

BACKGROUND: Being a mother of a young child may be protective against alcohol misuse for some, but not all, women. This is the first paper to identify the mental health and psychosocial correlates of alcohol misuse among postpartum mothers, after accounting for the influence of established sociodemographic factors. METHODS: Mothers with a child und...

Background The mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic remain a public health concern. High quality synthesis of extensive global literature is needed to quantify this impact and identify factors associated with adverse outcomes. Methods We conducted a rigorous umbrella review with meta-review and present (a) pooled prevalence of probable d...

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Background Effective and scalable prevention approaches are urgently needed to address the rapidly increasing rates of e-cigarette use among adolescents. School-based eHealth interventions can be an efficient, effective, and economical approach, yet there are none targeting e-cigarettes within Australia. This paper describes the protocol of the Our...

The present study examined high-risk personality traits and associations with psychopathology across multiple levels of a hierarchical-dimensional model of psychopathology in a large adolescent, general population sample. Confirmatory factor analyses were run using data from two randomized controlled trials of Australian adolescents (N = 8,654, mea...

BACKGROUND Interpretation Bias Modification (IBM) and Approach Bias Modification (ApBM) cognitive re-training interventions can be efficacious adjunctive treatments for improving social anxiety or alcohol use problems. However, previous trials have not examined the combination of these interventions among a young, comorbid sample. OBJECTIVE This s...

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a unique concern regarding the potential for pandemic-related increases in alcohol use. However, most studies which have measured pandemic-related changes to date utilise self-attribution measures of changes in alcohol use using cross-sectional designs, which rely on accurate self-attributions for val...

This study aimed to investigate the long-term patterns and predictors of heroin use, dependence, and psychiatric health over 18–20 years among a cohort of Australians with heroin dependence, using a prospective longitudinal cohort study conducted in Sydney, Australia. The original cohort consisted of 615 participants, who were followed up at 3 mont...

Adolescence is considered an important period of neurodevelopment. It is a time for the emergence of psychosocial vulnerabilities, including symptoms of depression, eating disorders, and increased engagement in unhealthy eating behaviours. Food addiction (FA) in adolescents is an area of study where there has been substantial growth. However, to da...

Importance Alcohol consumption is one of the leading preventable causes of burden of disease worldwide. Selective prevention of alcohol use can be effective in delaying the uptake and reducing harmful use of alcohol during the school years; however, little is known about the durability of these effects across the significant transition from early a...

Several universal school-based prevention programs, notably the Australian Climate Schools program, have proven efficacious at reducing and maintaining a lower level of harmful alcohol consumption relative to a control condition. Yet, there are limited studies investigating the potential mechanisms that account for the reduction in harmful alcohol...

Introduction: Adolescent onset substance use is associated with neurodevelopmental, social and psychological harms. Thus, alcohol and other drug prevention programmes are essential to promote health and well-being during this period. Schools are uniquely positioned to deliver such prevention programmes. The last decade has seen a large expansion o...

Employee alcohol and other drug use can negatively impact the workplace, resulting in absenteeism, reduced productivity, high turnover, and worksite safety issues. As the workplace can influence employee substance use through environmental and cultural factors, it also presents a key opportunity to deliver interventions, particularly to employees w...

Gaming activities among adolescents have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing with it a growing concern for the potential harms of excessive gaming and its risk factors. Anxiety is frequently linked with gaming disorder, but studies investigating this association were mostly cross-sectional in design. Longitudinal studies that explore r...

Background Stepped-care is a commonly recommended and implemented care model across health care domains, including substance use. Despite their presumed efficient allocation of treatment resources, a current and robust evidence synthesis is needed on the efficacy, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of stepped-care for substance use. Methods This...