A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
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 [...]
Raise your hand if this scenario sounds familiar at all: You’re supposed to meet a friend for coffee at one, let’s say. It’s now 1:10 and she’s not there, and she hasn’t answered your text, either. You know, objectively, that she’s probably just stuck on the subway or something, but you still can’t help running [...]
Parents often notice the first signs of autism in their children at around 12 to 18 months. Maybe a child isn’t making eye contact, or won’t smile when mom or dad walks in the door. But a new study suggests there is evidence of autism in the brain even earlier—well before a child’s first birthday—and [...]
