A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 4.4 percent of the population of the United States will have bipolar disorder at one point in their lives. Another 16.2 million, or around 6.7 percent of all U.S. adults, will experience at least one episode of severe depression in their lives. While the precise causes [...]
It took government intervention for Netflix to warn Australian parents about "strong suicide themes" in the first season of 13 Reasons Why. The global streaming giant originally gave the confronting television series an MA15+ rating on the grounds it portrayed strong sex scenes and violence. However, the Classifications Board reviewed the decision and ruled 13 Reasons Why should [...]
Almost half of the poorer mental health we see in teenagers with a disability is due to bullying, our new research shows. If we could stop the high levels of bullying that adolescents with a disability experience, we could make a big difference to their health, learning and wellbeing. So school anti-bullying programs need to [...]
Canberra will not have enough school psychologists to meet the demand of students with mental health issues by the time it has finished hiring in 2020. Last year, the ACT Government committed to employ an additional 20 school psychologists over three years — one of the recommendations made in the Shaddock review, the report launched [...]
Children whose mothers are depressed are themselves at increased risk for depression, anxiety disorder, or other mental-health problems during childhood. New research shows that treating the depression of mothers can significantly alleviate children's depression. There is a lot of evidence that if a mother suffers from clinical depression that her children are at increased risk [...]
In an interview earlier this month, the stars of BBC drama series, Age Before Beauty, criticised programs such as Love island for promoting unrealistic beauty expectations and plastic surgery among younger people. One of the stars of the show, Lisa Riley, expressed concerns that reality TV risked being "treacherous" to young people over body image. [...]
The media frenzy is starting to settle after the tragic suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. Some of the coverage, I was happy to see, was sensitive and compassionate, while some was just plain irresponsible, sensationalistic, and full of specific details - all of which can put vulnerable people at risk, and perpetuate misinformation. [...]
Psychiatrists have issued a warning over the link between depression and video game addiction, after MRI scans revealed for the first time the potential damage caused to young brains. The images showed the signals between the different parts of gaming addicts’ brains were disrupted, driving them to continue playing but also worsening their depression. The “emotional” [...]
With the spread of photo-editing technology through applications like Snapchat and Facetune, the level of physical "perfection" previously seen only on celebrity or beauty magazines is now all over social media. As these images become the norm, people's perceptions of beauty worldwide are changing, which can take a toll on a person's self-esteem and can [...]
Are you afraid of spiders? You aren't alone. (Well, except when it's just you and the spider.) Across the world, somewhere between 3% and 15% of the population is afraid of something. That's the headline finding in a new review published in The Lancet Psychiatry. But they found so much more. The authors, led by [...]
