A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
How does it make you feel when someone close to you tells you they feel fat? As one of a group of women from around the world who recently joined with Endangered Bodies to ask Facebook to remove the body shaming ‘I feel fat’ and ‘I feel ugly’ status options and emoticons from all versions [...]
Youth suicide is an immensely complex interplay of social, psychological, neurological, biological and cultural variables. The problem is that these variables carry unequal weights and no single one has been demonstrated to be necessary or sufficient to cause an individual to take their own life. This makes it very difficult to predict whether a young [...]
Europe's biggest prison for sex offenders is in Nottinghamshire. How does it try to rehabilitate the inmates, asks Rex Bloomstein. "Whatton's a great leveller," says Lynn Saunders, governor of HMP Whatton, the largest prison for adult male sex offenders not just in the UK, but in Europe. "We've got everybody here you could imagine," she [...]
In Australia, anxiety is even more common than depression. In fact, about one in four of us suffer from it. The general belief is that stress or circumstances cause it. But, this might not necessarily be the case. Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, says some of us have a feel-good [...]
There are two different sides to human nature. Both are important, but the balance between them has huge implications for our wellbeing, culture and future. One side of our nature is self-interested. This is our in-built instinct to do whatever we can to survive and thrive, often at the expense of others. The other side [...]
Instant jail terms, or flash incarceration, for perpetrators who do not comply with court orders is one of a range of recommendations to break the cycle of family violence outlined in a major new RMIT University report. Australian of the Year and anti-domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty launched the report in Melbourne today. The RMIT [...]
A controversial program that offers paedophiles friendship and support in an effort to reduce offending is being trialled in Australia for the first time. I appreciate not everybody will want to spend their Saturday morning having a coffee with an offender, but I think we need to get over that. QUT criminologist, Dr Kelly Richards [...]
More Americans are on psychiatric medications than ever before, and in my experience they are staying on them far longer than was ever intended. Sales of antidepressants and antianxiety meds have been booming in the past two decades, and they’ve recently been outpaced by an antipsychotic, Abilify, that is the No. 1 seller among all [...]
Negative thoughts crowd your mind, making you feel as though you’re spiraling into an unescapable hole. When you’re depressed, you constantly feel like you’re trapped and there’s no way out. This may be because depression can control your mind and mood to the point that it will leave you with little room to think of [...]
So when parents findut their child is being bullied, they are right to be concerned. But what exactly should they do about it? Should they tell the school, approach the parents of the other child, or just let their child deal with it? It can be difficult to weigh up the sometimes conflicting advice given [...]
