A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Thinkstock Images Very stressful events affect the brains of girls and boys in different ways, a Stanford University study suggests. A part of the brain linked to emotions and empathy, called the insula, was found to be particularly small in girls who had suffered trauma. But in traumatised boys, the insula was larger [...]
Flickr Images Children who suffer abuse, violence or other trauma at home are more likely to become seriously ill as adults, a report has concluded. The report, the first nationwide study of its kind produced by a public health body in the UK, argues that the reasons are not simply cyclical – that [...]
Flickr Images Reframing how we think about a situation is a common strategy for managing our emotions, but a new study suggests that using this reappraisal strategy in situations we actually have control over may be associated with lower well-being. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for [...]
Flickr Images Stressed HSC students are so wired on their prescription drugs that they are resorting to sleeping tablets and taking an artificial sleep hormone to get themselves to bed, a leading expert has warned. Chris Seton, a paediatric and adolescent sleep physician at the Woolcock Institute and Westmead Children's Hospital, also warned the US experience of [...]
Flickr Images For 15-year-old Zion Agostini, the start of each school day is a new occasion to navigate a minefield of racial profiling. From an early age, walking home from elementary school with his older brother, Agostini took note of the differential treatment police gave to black people in his community: “I [saw] [...]
Pixabay Images There's a dirty little secret about the year 12 exams, a secret only those who've lived through them know. It goes something like this: they don't define you, and they certainly don't define the life that's waiting for you afterwards. The subtle culture pressures that exists around this time not only [...]
Pixabay Images Soon after Nadine Burke Harris opened a pediatrics clinic in a low-income neighborhood in San Francisco, she began grappling with the high rates of asthma and other illnesses that she was diagnosing in her patients. She wanted to understand why so many of the kids she saw were so sick. “They [...]
Flickr Images One thing to keep in mind when you’re scheduling a doctor’s appointment: All signs point to morning as the best time to be a patient. It has less to do with the doctors and everything to do with the patients’ hormone levels. Past research has shown that levels of the stress [...]
Pixabay Images The demands of modern life and our penchant for resisting the universal, biological need for shut-eye mean we're squeezing more into our waking lives — but at what cost to our nightly slumber? Of the 20,000 people we surveyed for our recent sleep snapshot, just 12 per cent said they wake [...]
Pixabay Images Research has shown city dwellers are more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression – but could individual buildings have a negative impact on wellbeing? Screaming sirens, overcrowding, traffic; life in the city isn’t always relaxing. These stressors aren’t simply inconvenient or irritating, though; research has suggested that urban living has [...]
