A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
We’ve all seen it and heard it - and many of us have experienced it first-hand - a child melting down in a store or restaurant. Sometimes the cause is easy to figure out - the child is overly hungry or tired, overstimulated, or being told no. Other times the cause is much more complex. [...]
A weighty issue… Last week there was a call from prominent Australian doctor for schools to include students’ Body Mass Index (BMI) scores on their report cards. The idea behind this is to “stimulate discussion” between parents, teachers and – presumably – kids about their health and in particular, their weight. I [...]
http://tvnz.co.nz/close-up/monday-november-26-5239471/video
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 [...]
People who suffer a traumatic brain injury as a child are more likely to commit offenses as adults, researchers say. Professor Randolph Grace of the University of Canterbury, and Dr Audrey McKinlay from Melbourne's Monash University, studied Canterbury children who had experienced a brain injury as a child from birth to 17 years old. The [...]
It seems that for boys ‘risk taking’ is all part of growing up and is needed to test their skills, strengths, weaknesses and independence in the world. Andrew Fuller, child psychologist and Generation Next speaker, says "We have a world that sanitises away risk, so that means risk becomes even more alluring. Boys are going [...]
NAPLAN to blame for teacher, student stress: study - ABC News Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The publication of a new study in the BMJ on 6 June triggered a flurry of headlines suggesting that "exercise doesn't help depression". However, reducing the study's specific, detailed findings to a media-friendly sound bite has run the risk of misleading people, because the researchers did not set out to test the effect of exercise [...]
As the Fairfax media reports that more parents than ever were withdrawing their kids from the annual NAPLAN tests I wonder if these tests are even assessing the right things in school. Now I realize the importance of literacy and numeracy – of course I do. But, these tests only measure outcomes. [...]
The incidence of depression has skyrocketed in children and adults since World War II; depression affects about 10 percent of the population in the United States, and the World Health Organization predicts that by 2030, more people will suffer from depression than any other medical condition. Antidepressant medication use has also increased (to the tune [...]
