A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
If you’ve ever been befuddled by a dream, take heart: You’re following a 4,000-year tradition of confusion. Over that time, humanity — in the form of religion, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience — has actually come to somewhat understand what exactly the mind is doing in its slumbering states. To that end, here are five of the [...]
Mental-health experts say there is no question that social media is becoming a platform for public suicide. The concern is that people who are planning to take their own lives can broadcast their own deaths in real time — which is not only devastating for those who die but also for those watching it happen online. Facebook said Wednesday that it is bolstering [...]
Even after weeks of treatment and considerable weight gain, the brains of adolescent patients with anorexia nervosa remain altered, putting them at risk for possible relapse. The study, published last week in the American Journal of Psychiatry, examined 21 female adolescents before and after treatment for anorexia and found that their brains still had an [...]
Depression is now the leading cause of disability across the globe, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has revealed. More than 4% of the world’s population lives with depression - with young people, pregnant or post-partum women, and the elderly being most affected. According to the United Nations (UN), the mental illness costs more than $1 trillion [...]
Social media monitoring apps targeting programs like Facebook and Instagram are revealing alarming habitual behaviour and extreme levels of smart phone use. You may not realise it, but you are probably reaching for your smart phone with high frequency. It just takes a free app to give you the cold, hard statistics. "If you ask [...]
Parents of teens know how tricky it is to keep their kids physically safe while balancing their need for greater independence, but when it comes to keeping them safe online, it can be even trickier. Horror stories of social media harassment and exposure to explicit content leading to teen suicide or even murder abound. Yet [...]
Experiencing severe deprivation and neglect in childhood can have a lasting psychological impact into early adulthood, finds a unique study which has followed the mental health of a group of children adopted from Romanian institutions to UK families in the 1990s. Despite living in strong and supportive families for over 20 years, many children exposed [...]
One in six teenage boys who drinks excessive amounts of soft drink is also more likely to be watching too much television and not getting enough sleep, a survey of Australian high school students reveals. Teenagers who drink at least a litre of soft drink each week, considered "heavy consumers', are also more likely to skimp [...]
Fitness trackers and mental health apps could be doing more harm than good because they are not based on sound science, researchers have warned, comparing some health app developers to “snake oil salesmen of the 1860s”. Greg Hager, professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said that in the absence of trials or scientific [...]
For much of her life Anne Dalton battled depression. She seldom spoke with people. She stayed home a lot. The days dragged on with a sense of “why bother?” for the 61-year-old from New Jersey who used to work at a Wall Street investment firm. After trying more than a dozen combinations of antidepressant drugs [...]
