A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
October is Anxiety and Depression Awareness month. To highlight the effect both depression and anxiety can have on young people’s lives beyondblue has created a series of fictional video blogs about young people experiencing depression and anxiety. They can be viewed on YouTube. The blogs were inspired by real stories posted on the Youthbeyondblue online [...]
By 2012 the government intends to ensure that all cigarettes sold in Australia are in plain packaging. However the tobacco industry is fighting back in an attempt to block their plans. The big tobacco companies are bank rolling a series of newspaper and television ads for an alliance of small retailers and have hired Melbourne [...]
70,000 Australians are reported victims of alcohol related assaults every year 24,000 women are victims of alcohol related domestic violence assaults 20,000 children are victims of alcohol-related child abuse The Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation (AER Foundation) recently commissioned a new report The Range and Magnitude of Alcohol’s Harm to Others, which has just been [...]
The International Year of Youth is an opportunity to give young people a say in the world around them and how it is being shaped. This is reflected in the theme “Our Year, Our Voice”. The 2010 International Youth Day celebrated on 12 August also marked the launch of the International Year of Youth. The [...]
We read the story – about an 11 year old girl in the US, Jessi Slaughter, who received a tirade of threats after posting a video of herself on YouTube. We saw the pictures - the freeze frame of what looked like a traumatised child in her bedroom in floods of tears. On the [...]
Both the medical and teaching professions are learning more about the damaging effects of ‘sexting’ and cyber bullying. They are also learning how to deal with the impact that new technologies are having on teenagers. Leading experts including Cyber safety expert Susan McLean, adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg and medical professional Dr Ramesh Manocha have come [...]
A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald by columnist Miranda Devine was a hard read; the very subject matter curdled the stomach and made the insides squirm in an effort to escape it. The subject matter was paedophiles and how easily they gain both the trust of parents and access to the innocent children [...]
140 million women and children worldwide have suffered female genital cutting* By 1997 the whole of Australia had outlawed female circumcision making it illegal to perform "any medical or surgical procedure or mutilation of the vagina or clitoris of any person" for reasons of "culture, religion, custom or practice". However with the growing number of [...]
For some time now experts have been warning about the dangers of social network sites and how some teenagers are being manipulated into situations they cannot handle by the people they are chatting to. Studies show that teenagers are often happy to provide their personal information to complete strangers. Many adolescents feel in control of [...]
The World Health Organisation (WHO) clearly states that the advertising of tobacco on social networking websites by employees promoting the product is prohibited. However there have been a growing number of employees who have taken to the likes of Facebook and are actively promoting the brands their company produces. This is all the more shocking [...]
