Professor Cathy Creswell
About
Professor Creswell's research mainly focuses on the development, maintenance, prevention and treatment of anxiety disorders in children and young people. Her team in The Oxford Psychological Interventions for Children and adolescents (TOPIC) research group apply a broad range of methods (including experimental, longitudinal, clinical trial and qualitative methods and systematic reviews) with children, young people and families in both community and clinical settings, with the ultimate aim of improving access to and outcomes from psychological treatments for these common conditions.
Professor Creswell is committed to increasing research capacity in child and adolescent mental health and to meaningful involvement of families throughout our research programmes.
Expertise
- Child and adolescent mental health
- Anxiety disorders in children
- Psychological interventions, particularly cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
- Digital/online interventions for child and adolescent mental health
- Supporting parents and families in treatment of child and adolescent mental health
Selected publications
- Digitally augmented, parent-led CBT versus treatment as usual for child anxiety problems in child mental health services in England and Northern Ireland (The Lancet, 2024)
- Helping Your Child with Fears and Worries (Robinson, 2019)
- Parent-led cognitive behaviour therapy for child anxiety problems: overcoming challenges to increase access to effective treatment (Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 2022)
- Anxiety disorders in children and adolescents: A summary and overview of the literature (Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2023)
- Systematic review and meta-analysis: risks of anxiety disorders in offspring of parents with mood disorders (Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2023)
- Examining children and adolescent mental health trajectories during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Findings from a year of the Co‐SPACE study (JCPP Advances, 2023)
Media experience
Professor Creswell has been widely quoted across print and online media.
She has also appeared on major broadcast outlets, including BBC Radio 4’s flagship programmes Today, Woman’s Hour, and All in the Mind, as well as on BBC1’s Breakfast and BBC2’s Newsnight, among others.
Recent media work
- The Guardian: New online therapies could help at least twice number of people recover from anxiety
- The Guardian: Why 140,000 pupils are ‘severely absent’ from school in England - and what we can do about it
- The Guardian: Cathy Creswell: The government has failed children and young people in this pandemic
- BBC Radio 4: All in the Mind, Anxiety and children