A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
The Mediterranean diet is well known for its physical health benefits and it is now being hailed as the latest weapon in tackling mental health problems. Researchers at Deakin University have found the diet can help those suffering from severe depression. Professor Felice Jacka, director of Deakin University's Food and Mood Centre, said the Mediterranean [...]
If you can change the way you think, you can change your brain. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that challenging unhealthy thought patterns with the help of a therapist can lead to measurable changes in brain activity. In the study, psychologists at King’s College London show that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy strengthens certain [...]
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 Once upon a time, the future of mental health treatment was drugs. The advent of Prozac and whole class of similar medication in the 1990s gave doctors an easy option and big pharma easy money. But 20 years on, the problems have not gone away. In fact, mental illness is much more [...]
"Being in natural settings is intrinsically soothing and is shown to reduce unhealthy behavior," he says. "Exactly why isn't clear, but there is probably an evolutionary factor, as human beings and their predecessors were raised in, evolved in and likely designed for natural settings."This affinity to natural life forms, what researchers term "biophilia," is now [...]
Adolescents with mental health problems are particularly hard for therapists to engage. But a new computer game is providing a healthy conduit for effective communication between them. via The Computer Game That Helps Therapists Chat to Adolescents With Mental Health Problems | MIT Technology Review.
Dr Helen Mayberg at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, in the U.S., studied brain scans to look for clues about what happens in the brain when someone is depressed and how different treatments affect brain activity. She used PET scans to measure brain glucose metabolism, an important index of brain function, and found that scan [...]
1. Surround yourself with happy people Or surround yourself with people who surround themselves with happy people. A longitudinal investigationconducted over 20 years in collaboration with the Framingham Heart Study revealed that shifts in individual happiness can cascade through social networks like an emotional contagion (The researchers don't mean Facebook, btw, but physical, old-school networks — like live-in [...]
Leading mental health experts are calling for school children to be screened for risk of mental illnesses such as depression and have devised a test that reliably identifies those at high risk. The test can be done on a computer and could be used to alert doctors and psychologists to intervene early, said Barbara Sahakian [...]
