Puberty studies as a discipline?

[lanadelgrey]

I’m very far from being a medic or psychologist but it seems obvious that the body and brain are doing a huge amount of work over this period and the interactions are vitally important. We are intended as a species to go through puberty so it would be interesting to be able to explain why. Prompted by a sentence in that Economist article and the sense that one of the subjects resolved her dysphoria as a later teen.

I agree. There's been a huge amount of research on development in the early years particularly the first 3 years but I'm not aware of the same body of research on puberty.

Off the top of my head, I would expect academics in the following areas to be doing research on aspects of puberty in humans:

Psychiatry
Psychology
Neuroscience
Endocrinology
Paediatrics
Gynaecology/obstetrics
Lots of other medical disciplines, including oncology, as that sudden surge in hormones must be a possible trigger for various problems
Physiology
Pharmacology
Sports Science
Education/Child Development
Nursing (Child, Mental Health, possibly other branches)
Sociology
Anthropology
Social work
Criminology
Gender/women's studies

Bound to be more. It's not something I'd given a lot of thought to until all the recent focus on puberty blockers, but the more I think about it the more uneasy I feel at the idea of deliberately preventing a child from going through a normal developmental stage.

It does seem that an interdisciplinary project to bring various aspects together would be v interesting