A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
As a trained Health & Physical Education teacher I’ve always been interested in innovative training methods to enhance heart health. On Wednesday last week I learnt of scientific research that demonstrated what Buddhist monks have told us for years – that meditation is good for your heart. The West hasn’t always been keen to embrace [...]
"It's a completely different mechanism. And the focus is on really rapidly helping someone get out of a depressive episode." This new mechanism isn't the result of a recently discovered chemical compound but the reapplication of an existing drug – ketamine. Used in both human and veterinary science as an anaesthetic agent, it's also taken [...]
ONE in five Australian prep students is getting a daily caffeine hit from consuming soft drinks after school, a shock new study has found. Parents have been called "lazy and neglectful" for giving children as young as five regular doses of caffeine-laden cola drinks, sports drinks and energy drinks. A Murdoch Children's Research Institute study [...]
Neuroscience exploded into the education conversation more than 20 years ago, in step with the evolution of personal computers and the rise of the Internet, and policymakers hoped medical discoveries could likewise help doctors and teachers understand the "hard wiring" of the brain. That conception of how the brain works, exacerbated by the difficulty in [...]
In last month’s newsletter we looked at how the powerful chemicals that drive stress responses in the mind and body can be very detrimental to young people. Before looking at how to combat stress and at the risk of appearing repetitive it is pertinent to reiterate a few points; Stressors are highly individualistic in nature [...]
While high levels of emotional intelligence can help individuals navigate the ups and downs of daily life, the perception of high emotional intelligence (EI) can cause them to overestimate their ability to detect deception. EI refers to the ability to perceive, control and evaluate emotions. Some researchers suggest that emotional intelligence can be learned and [...]
Someday your phone or laptop might truly be smart: It could diagnose your depression based on your Internet surfing patterns. According to researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology, people suffering from depression tend to spend more time chatting and sharing files with others. Two hundred and sixteen undergraduate students were monitored over a [...]
10 tips for parents around teen binge drinking. By Collett Smart The wrestling that occurs in the mind of a teenager when they feel the pressure of peers to drink is enormous. However, when an adult serves up alcohol at a teenage party, this communicates to teens that the adult is both condoning and [...]
EMOTIONAL stress caused by last year's tsunami resulted in part of some survivors' brains shrinking, according to scientists in Japan who grasped a unique chance to study the neurological effects of trauma. On a quest to better understand post-traumatic stress disorder, the researchers compared brain scans they had taken of 42 healthy adolescents in other [...]
When the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy or NAPLAN was introduced in 2008 I thought it was about addressing this inequality. So, when my child sat the test I joked that we should have given the kids chocolate for breakfast so they did badly and the school would get more money. Some mothers [...]
