A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
In a WA-first, virtual reality goggles are helping children feel less anxious when they have blood tests and other painful procedures. The technology is being used as a pilot program at St John of God Health Care hospitals and takes children on an underwater adventure to distract them. St John of God Health Care group [...]
In western culture death, and diseases such as dementia and cancer, seem to be hidden away, not generally discussed – because ‘it won’t happen to us’. Inevitably, though, the unthinkable will occur. How can we help our children cope with loss and grief, when a loved one starts to fail in mind or body, or [...]
Flickr Images A new theory is challenging the way psychologists understand mourning. For something so fundamental to being human, there’s still a great deal we don’t know about the grieving process. It wasn’t until the 20th century that psychologists and psychiatrists claimed expertise over our emotions, including grief. The conventional wisdom about grieving [...]
If your back is aching, you are not alone. Back pain causes more ill health than any other condition, including heart disease and malaria, a major international study has found. An analysis of the health of 188 countries found lower back aches cause more years lived in pain than anything else. - Fiona Macrae, Science Editor [...]
Depression. Anxiety. Pain. Stress. Fatigue. Below, I've plotted the past year’s worth of daily Google search interest in these five terms, which I've aggregated into a index of misery. - Christopher Ingraham via The Google misery index: The times of year we’re most depressed, anxious and stressed - The Washington Post.
To seek happiness as a permanent state derives from two primitive evolutionary impulses: avoiding pain (which we associate with danger and the risk of death) and seeking gratification (which helps ensure that our genes get passed on). But it also turns out that pain and discomfort are critical to growth, and that achieving excellence depends [...]
Deliberately inflicting pain or injury by cutting oneself or some other form of self-mutilation seems incomprehensible to many people. But it’s a common, typically secretive, experience for about 8% of adolescents and young adults. People who intentionally harm themselves aren’t always easy to identify or categorise and recent research indicates they are equally likely to [...]
For many people, race does matter, even if they don’t know it. They feel more empathy when they see white skin pierced than black. This is known as the racial empathy gap. To study it, researchers at the University of Milano-Bicocca showed participants all of whom were white video clips of a needle or an [...]
