Far more children need mental health support than the current system can reach. How do we redesign care so it works for every child? Join us virtually on December 3 for our 16th annual On the Shoulders of Giants Scientific Symposium. Honoring Peter Szatmari, MD, and his influential research, the event will examine how more personalized care, community-based supports, and emerging technologies could help more children get effective help. A roundtable led by Mark Ghaly, MD, MPH, will then consider how these insights can be put into practice without compromising quality. Registration is free. CME and CE credits are available to eligible registered participants.

By studying thousands of de-identified conversations in partnership with @crisistextline, Child Mind Institute and MIT researchers are gaining new insight into how people communicate distress during moments of crisis and how that knowledge may support future suicide prevention research. Daniel M. Low, a research scientist at the Child Mind Institute, and Satrajit Ghosh at @mcgovernmit, developed a library of thousands of words and phrases linked to known suicide risk factors, then created a language-processing tool that uses those patterns to estimate risk levels in text conversations. The researchers are now exploring how these language patterns appear in other settings, such as social media and electronic health records. With further research and validation, tools like this could one day help experts recognize warning signs more quickly and make informed decisions when time matters most. Learn more:

Our recent research shows: Most kids aren't reporting harmful online experiences. 26% of youth with mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions reported an unwanted negative online experience in the past year, yet 80% of them never reported the experience to the platform involved. Researchers found process, policy, and emotional barriers keep kids from speaking up, revealing a gap between what platforms say is in place and what young users actually experience. But measuring online risk isn't one-size-fits-all. It has to account for differences across kids and differences in how, when, and how much they're exposed to harmful content. This comes from one of our panels at @sxswlndn, Beyond the Average: Understanding Vulnerability in the Digital Childhood Era. Speaking is Dr. Michael P. Milham, Chief Science Officer at the Child Mind Institute.

Autism subtypes. Al trained on synthetic brain data. New insights into brain development. Highlighting more discoveries from the Child Mind Institute team at the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (@OHBM) 2026 in Bordeaux: 🎙️ Shinwon Park looked at a part of the brain that often receives less attention in autism research: the thalamus. The way the thalamus connects with the cortex over development may help identify distinct neurobiological subtypes of autism that align with different symptom profiles. 🧠 Bosi Chen tracked excitation/inhibition balance in the brains of sleeping preschoolers. In typically developing kids, the balance in the motor cortex shifted with age as expected. In autistic kids, it remained unchanged, hinting that motor cortex maturation may diverge early in autism. 🧠 Thomas Funck introduced CAPS, a tool that outlines the cortex in brain images using models trained entirely on synthetic data. It works across species and scan types and even generalizes to animals it wasn't trained on, including sea lions, cats, and pigs. Together, these projects are helping us better understand how the brain develops, why neurodevelopmental conditions can vary so widely from person to person, and how new tools can accelerate discovery.