A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Last week I was followed around the Internet by a pair of shoes. I had looked at them online as a gift for my father-in-law, but he didn’t like them, and neither did I. Yet no matter what site I visited, there they were, staring at me in their full moccasin glory. Digital advertising can [...]
Cyberbullying peaks when students are on summer break, but parents are leaving teachers to deal with the fallout when the school year resumes, educators and experts say. Melbourne teacher Joel Hamilton* has had enough of your children. Specifically, he's had enough of you. "Teachers are fighting a losing battle against parents," the primary school educator [...]
The American Psychological Association has issued its first official warning against toxic masculinity. The new “Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men,” marks the first-ever report published by the association aimed at helping practitioners care for their male patients “despite social forces that can harm mental health.” Citing more than 40 years of [...]
With grief, sadness is obvious. With trauma, the symptoms can go largely unrecognized because it shows up looking like other problems: frustration; acting out; difficulty concentrating, following directions, or working in a group. Often students are misdiagnosed with anxiety, behavior disorders, or attention disorders rather than understood to have trauma that’s driving those symptoms and [...]
Smartphones. Facebook. Reality TV. It’s easy to look at our changing world and come to the following conclusion: we’re all getting stupid. That’s not the case. In fact, over the last century, the average Australian IQ has dramatically increased. Compared to Australians who lived 100 years ago, we’re a nation of geniuses. But now, some [...]
We know from new research that children whose mothers are depressed may respond differently to stress, have altered immunity and be at greater risk of psychological disorders. This work adds to the body of research showing children can be affected in negative and long-term ways by their mothers’ mental ill-health. But what about dads? Men’s [...]
I care deeply about young people and have done since I too was a moody, often confused adolescent who made some big, sometimes life-threatening, mistakes. The development of the physical body together with sexual urges, novelty seeking behaviours, rapidly changing moods and emotional states make adolescence a very interesting time. The developing pre-frontal lobe affects [...]
Young people “laugh” at vague warnings issued by the police or politicians about the dangers of drugs even as five of their peers have died at music festivals in the past five months. Paul Dillon, the founder of Drug and Alcohol Research and Training Australia, said it was incredibly difficult to change people’s minds about [...]
When Celina Pereira watches videos of people slurping food and drinks, tapping their nails and whispering into a microphone, she breaks out into goosebumps and a chill travels down her spine. It might sound bizarre, but she's experiencing ASMR – an autonomous sensory meridian response – and she's not alone. There are now more than [...]
The video showed the woman in a pink off-the-shoulder top, sitting on a bed, smiling a convincing smile. It was her face. But it had been seamlessly grafted, without her knowledge or consent, onto someone else's body: a young pornography actress, just beginning to disrobe for the start of a graphic sex scene. A crowd [...]
