February 2009

Kids can be cruel- we all remember

 Tortured by taunts- the BBC takes a look at why kids can be cruel about mental illness.

Samantha Hilton remembers her friends literally walking away from her. She had started self-harming because of depression from the age of 13.

School was “hell” she says – a catalogue of rejection by teachers, friends and doctors, who put her behaviour down to “teenage angst” or hormonal changes.

Her account does not shock PhD student Emma Lindley, who has devised lessons to help teachers combat the stigma surrounding mental illness in children.  Continue reading

Emma herself has bipolar disorder, but manages her condition well and is a PhD student and works as a lecturer at the University of Manchester.  The mental health campaign group Time To Change surveyed more than 3,000 adults living with mental health problems – and a majority thought education to prevent negative attitudes should start in school. 

How would you react if someone you knew had a mental health issue?

Link to Time to Change to find out if you are a mental health helper or hinderance? 

Source: BBC, Time to Change

The philosophy of good intentions

This week the excellent All in the Mind   radio broadcast takes a look at good intentions.

Reading the minds of others can be darned hard. Are their intentions good, bad or indifferent? Whether we hold people accountable for their behaviour depends on the answer. Scientists probe questions like this through experiments. Philosophers traditionally appeal to intuition and argument. But now a young band of experimental philosophers are taking armchair philosophy to task, and digging for data. speaker_wh

Link to download podcast

angry-face.gifBefore flying off the handle the next time someone cuts you off in traffic, consider the latest research from Yale School of Medicine researchers that links changes brought on by anger or other strong emotions to future arrhythmias and sudden cardiac arrests, which are blamed for 400,000 deaths annually.

The study—led by Rachel Lampert, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine, and published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology—deepens our understanding of how anger and other types of mental stress can trigger potentially lethal ventricular arrhythmias. [continue reading…]

Sleep perchance to dream

Image credit:Domenico Gelermo

Image credit:Domenico Gelermo

What do dreams mean. less than we think

Many of us hold a general belief that dreams provide meaningful insight into both themselves and their world. John Cloud writes in Time magazine about recently published research which examines the significance that people place on their dreams and why.

According to the study, 74% of Indians, 65% of South Koreans and 56% of Americans hold an old-fashioned Freudian view of dreams: that they are portals into the unconscious.
 Link to continue reading 

Source: Time