A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Sex offenders are increasingly using live online streaming platforms to exploit children, police have warned. Children need to be educated on the risks associated with streaming sites, the National Crime Agency said. It said offenders were learning how young people communicated online and "using this knowledge to abuse them". In one week, authorities identified 345 [...]
Nearly a third of teenage girls have been sexually harassed online by children their own age, a study from charity Childnet suggests. Some 31% of girls aged 13-17 have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention, compared with 11% of boys. One in 10 of the 1,559 teens interviewed reported receiving threats of sexual violence, including [...]
Emily Joyce was at a yoga retreat when she realised her memory was not what it used to be. "I was with a group of friends and we were trying to remember the name of a restaurant," says Joyce. "None of us had our phones and it took us so long to remember it." For [...]
I never realised just how damaging our obsession with smartphones and our switched-on lifestyle was, nor how addictive screen time was, until I put my teenagers on an extended digital detox. The results were swift and shocking, raising the question of just what is happening to the selfie generation and whether we have more to fear [...]
Here’s a phrase that psychiatrists will either love or hate: “State-space temporal analysis suggests that onset of depression may be detectable from Twitter data several months prior to diagnosis.” Indeed, a team of researchers from the University of Vermont, Stanford, and Harvard found that depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can often be detected by [...]
All through her VCE year, Emma Missen felt like she was drowning. A high achiever, Ms Missen had won a scholarship to her private school and felt under pressure to perform well in the exams. Those close to her knew what she was going through, but most friends at school had no clue. "I think it would [...]
Angela Reynolds's daughter Ashley was a high school freshman in 2009 when a stranger calling himself "Captain Obvious," with a profile that made it look like he was a teenager, messaged her through social media. He claimed to to have nude pictures of her. Ashley ignored him at first, but he became more insistent, threatening [...]
The researchers found no child experienced serious deterioration in their eyesight. However, in two cases their stereo-acuity – the ability to detect differences in distances – was disrupted, while another child showed a “drastic worsening” of balance immediately after finishing the VR game. These effects were short-lived but were nevertheless noticeable, even though the children [...]
An app that allows teens battling mental health issues to send an alert to a personalised support crew is set to launch. Wellington firm Melon Health, formerly Social Code, has designed and developed Code Blue to encourage youth struggling with bullying, anxiety or depression to reach out in their time of need. The app has been years in [...]
In past decades, teenagers struggling to deal with their emotions might have coped by taking a razor blade to their forearm or extinguishing cigarettes on their skin. Today’s teens, products of the internet era, have found an additional outlet. Approximately 6% of adolescents between 12 and 17 years old engage in a practice known as [...]
