A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Pexel Images When girls come in for their physical exams, one of the questions I routinely ask is “Do you get your period?” I try to ask before I expect the answer to be yes, so that if a girl doesn’t seem to know about the changes of puberty that lie ahead, I [...]
Flickr Images Burnout occurs when a person has experienced prolonged and excessive stress. It builds up over time, and the individual may find themselves: Feeling overwhelmed Physically and emotionally exhausted Isolating self from others Forgetting why you do your job, de-motivated Questioning themselves Experiencing an increase in illness/aches and pains Having an increasingly [...]
Flickr Images The US reels from the senseless slaying of close to 50 individuals… the UK is shocked to the core by the callous shooting and stabbing of a politician …. Australia searches for answers to the Lindt Café siege. The mass media provide mass coverage of these horrific events: we all want [...]
Pixabay As many young adults now own a smartphone or tablet, there is a wealth of information at their fingertips and a limitless supply of social media messages, games, music and TV intruding into the sleep cycle. Evidence suggests that social media and smartphones can have a negative impact on our health with [...]
Getty Images A recent piece in The Australian (“Technology’s effect on children’s brains isn’t black and white” 25/5) by journalist John White canvassed many views about the impacts of screen experiences on children’s brains. The sometimes conflicting views produced a confusing picture. There’s obviously an urgent need for continuing research (and a study on social media use and teen brains released [...]
Getty Images As a parent/carer it can be almost impossible to be aware of all the apps and sites that kids are on. As soon as you are on top of one, it is oh so yesterday and there is a new app on the block. It is not so much the name of the [...]
By overcoming fears, children achieve a measure of independence, and may inoculate themselves from adult phobias. (Hanna Rosin) It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the [...]
Getty Images The same brain circuits that are activated by eating chocolate and winning money are activated when teenagers see large numbers of "likes" on their own photos or the photos of peers in a social network, according to a first-of-its-kind UCLA study that scanned teens' brains while using social media. The 32 teenagers, [...]
Getty Images One of the most common questions I get asked by parents about gaming addiction is ‘How can I tell if my child has a problem?’ While there are well documented physical, behavioural and psychological symptoms of gaming addiction, the risk of reading through these checklists is that parents can sometimes become unnecessarily worried about fairly normal [...]
Maisie Williams struggled with mental health problems as Casey in Cyberbully. Credit: Channel 4 A quarter of TV viewers suffering from mental health problems have been prompted to seek help after following mental health storylines, according to a new poll by mental health charity Mind. The survey asked over 2,000 British adults how [...]
