A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Living with a severely unsettled baby has been described as a form of torture. For Laura Conway, it’s an experience still seared into her memory. When her youngest was an infant, the reflux-troubled child went through months of sleeping only in 45-minute stints. The little boy would wake up screaming, emitting a noise that Laura [...]
Data released this week through Headspace’s National Youth Mental Health Foundation revealed 32 per cent of young Australians report high or very high levels of psychological distress. Headspace Kalgoorlie manager Ashley Cridland said those levels had tripled in the last 10 years. “Young people face a unique set of challenges compared to previous generations and [...]
Sleep deprivation is a growing problem in schools, with pupils struggling to concentrate in lessons due to lack of sleep, MPs have been told. Edward Timpson, minister for children and families, highlighted the issue while being questioned by MPs who are investigating the role of education in preventing mental health problems in children and young [...]
Pixabay Images Reports show that kids’ burgeoning screen use is hurting their imaginations, their ability to interact with each other and their attention spans. It is also keeping them up at night. According to a new meta-analysis from King’s College, London, the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets is reducing the amount of sleep [...]
Flickr Images There are few people who would willingly tuck into a bowl filled with 21 teaspoons of sugar just before sitting an exam. And yet teenagers and young people that throw back a standard 500mL energy drink are doing just that. As a teacher at a co-ed private school in Sydney last [...]
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 [...]
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 Sleep deprivation in teenagers as a result of early school start has been a topic of concern and debate for nearly two decades. So, are teenagers just lazy? I have been researching the impact of later high school start times for 20 years. Research findings show that teens' inability to get out [...]
Flickr Images Anyone who has ever experienced insomnia will know how hellish it can be. Lying in bed and willing yourself to drift off, while your mind refuses to shut down, is frustrating but also incredibly anxiety-inducing. It’s a catch-22: the more you can’t sleep, the more you worry about it and the [...]
A 2014 combined project by Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Manchester and Surrey Universities declared, ‘Society has become supremely arrogant in ignoring the importance of sleep’. The researchers cite living in a 24hour society coupled with technology overuse as part of the issue. The National Sleep Foundation in the US found that more than half of the parents [...]
