A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
By Lucas Walsh, Professor, School of Education Culture and Society The pandemic has amplified feelings of uncertainty in young people’s lives. Its spectre looms over their ability to plan, be it for travel, finding and securing affordable housing, attending a wedding (perhaps their own), or whether their small children are going to school. Uncertainty is [...]
By Lisa Wheildon and Asher Flynn “If anything comes out of this, I want it to be a lesson to everybody that family violence happens to everybody no matter how nice your house is, no matter how intelligent you are. It happens to anyone and everyone.” These simple, grief-stricken words and the accompanying images of [...]
The harmful impact Instagram has on teenage girls and their negative body image perceptions may just lie in the essence of the platform itself. Dr Jasmine Fadouly, a Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, says that Instagram being an image-based platform, makes it ‘difficult to not be appearance-focused’. An internal Instagram [...]
By Dr Monika Raniti, Dr Ruth Aston and Professor Susan Sawyer The idea of health-promoting schools is not new. Defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), these are schools that are “constantly strengthening their capacity as a healthy setting for living, learning and working” for all members of the school community. A health-promoting school [...]
By Jane Nursey, Professor Helen Cahill, Professor Jim Watterston and Professor Lisa Gibbs Since early 2020, Australia’s bushfires and then the pandemic have rapidly altered our ways of living and learning. As time goes on, the one thing that is certain is unpredictability, requiring flexibility and constant adjustments. It isn’t helpful to catastrophise. As Professor [...]
By Associate Professor Kim Dalziel, Dr Li Huang , Dr Natalie Carvalho and Xiuqin Xiong One thing that most families learn at some point – particularly during lockdown – is that balancing a child’s screen time with physical activity isn’t an easy task. Although research and parental guides tell us that time on screens, sleep [...]
By Emily Berger, Monash University There has been a reported spike in young people attending emergency departments for self-harm and suicide during the pandemic. In New South Wales, presentations to emergency departments for self-harm and suicidal thoughts are reportedly up by 47% since before the pandemic. In the year to July 29 2021, there were [...]
By Katrina McLean, Bond University and Natasha Yates, Bond University Last year in the COVID-19 pandemic, children were not catching or spreading the virus much. The main focus was on protecting our elderly and vulnerable. But the Delta strain has changed things. Children around the world are contracting Delta in high numbers and some frontline [...]
By Paul Harpur, The University of Queensland and Peter D. Blanck, Syracuse University Should universities require students to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before attending campus once vaccines are readily available in Australia? Professor Iain Martin, vice-chancellor of Deakin University and former dean of the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of [...]
This article was co-authored with Rebecca Patrick, a climate-health researcher. As leading scientists call on the world to avert an impending climate catastrophe, Prime Minister Scott Morrison responded with this: “There is not a direct correlation between the action that Australia takes and the temperature in Australia.” Effectively, Scott Morrison is reasserting his already refuted [...]
