A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Flickr Images We keep our kids safe from stranger danger, and the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse. We understand, in part from our own experience, the inherent risks. Who has not felt relief that the kids were indoors in front of the computer screen, or plugged into their smartphone instead of out [...]
Pixabay Images Data released late last week reveal Australia’s gambling habit is growing as fast as ever. The Australian Gambling Statistics for 2014-15 show adult Australians, on average, lost A$1,242 a year on gambling. The amount varies dramatically by state: in New South Wales the average loss was $1,518; in Tasmania, $762. Most [...]
Pixabay Images Thousands of Australian teenagers may find their favourite shoot 'em up video games redefined as illegal gambling sites under a bill to be introduced by Independent Senator Nick Xenophon when Federal Parliament resumes in August. Children are being groomed for gambling through hugely popular multiplayer first-person shooter games such as Counter-Strike:Global [...]
Recovering pokie machine addict Sharon Hollamby. ABC: Ka-Ching! Pokie Nation Science backs up Ms Hollamby's feeling of being "hypnotised" or "hijacked" by pokie machines. Like Pavlov's dog, who learned to salivate at the sound of a bell, pokie machine players learn to associate reward with the sound of the machines, gambling researcher Dr [...]
The level of contributions made by clubs to community purposes is low as a proportion of poker machine revenue. Michael Coghlan One of the claims made by poker machine clubs in Australia is that they provide significant support to local communities. Usually this is signified by the support clubs provide to causes such as junior [...]
stokpic, Photo: Ed Gregory Australians lose A$20 billion on gambling every year, $11 billion of which goes on poker machines in pubs and clubs. Why, then, are pokies so attractive? And why do we spend so much on them? Ubiquity is one reason. The high intensity – the rapid speed of operation and [...]
wikimedia Gambling is good business, or at least a profitable one. According to the American Gaming Association, in 2012 the 464 commercial casinos in the US served 76.1 million patrons and grossed $US37.34 billion. Each year gaming revenues in the US yield more profits than the theatrical movie industry ($US10.9 billion) and the recorded music industry ($US7 billion) [...]
Most of us would recognize classic depression, with its heavy veil of sadness and hopelessness. But what if you just started getting stomachaches or were suddenly very snappy? Could you be depressed without knowing it? "Depression doesn’t always look like debilitating sadness," says Richard Kravitz, MD, MSPH, a professor of internal medicine at University of [...]
Perhaps even more popular than the online photo galleries of what the "celebrities" wore, are the galleries of the drunks and post-come-apart bogans as they unravel towards the end of a long day's drinking. The Instagram page "Drunk Girls of the Melbourne Cup" has more than 28,000 followers. It features women double-fisting booze bottles, accumulating [...]
Late adolescence is a period when many youth become involved in high-risk behaviors with adverse consequences. Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University studied the degree to which two such behaviors, adolescent sexual behaviors and gambling, affected African American youth in nine primary schools in Baltimore, MD. In [...]
