Tag: children and youth

Interview: How Does Climate Change Affect Youth Mental Health?

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Psychiatric epidemiologist Jennifer Barkin talks about her research on the traumatizing effects of extreme weather events on youth and how caregivers can help them build resilience.

Healing Youth with Nature and Connection: An Interview with Peter Mayfield

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An interview with Peter Mayfield, founder and Executive Director of the Gateway Mountain Center. Peter talks of his journey from mountaineering to his role as an educator and mentor, and how enabling children and adolescents to connect with nature has such a profound effect on their health and wellbeing.

Helping Children to Overcome OCD: 6 Creative Strategies for Parents

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Here, Dr. Ben Furman offers a creative approach to helping children who struggle with OCD. Explaining why behaviors like reasoning, reassuring, and superstitious rituals don’t work, he suggests engaging alternatives that teach kids how to manage their “worry monster” and make sense of their distressing experience.

“I’m Not Going, You Can’t Make Me!”: A Community Approach to...

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Consider an imaginary child called Jack who has been avoiding school as much as possible for a month. Standard practice would be cognitive-behavioral therapy or psychoactive drugs to help Jack deal with his anxiety. But what if Jack's social network instead mobilized to help him regain the role of student?

Helping Children With Angry Outbursts

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Finnish psychiatrist Ben Furman reviews various non-drug therapies for children with aggressive outbursts of anger, including the Kids' Skills approach that he and social psychologist Tapani Ahola developed. These approaches focus on helping children come up with their own ideas for overcoming their problems with the help of family and friends.

Challenging the Relentless Rise of Depression in Young People

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In this piece, Dave Traxson discusses the social and cultural factors contributing to the rise of depression among young people in Britain, arguing that...

Kids Perform Better When Dressed as Batman

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From World Economic Forum: A recent study found that children aged 4-6 maintained better focus and were less easily distracted while performing boring tasks when dressed...

How to Really Help LGBT Teens Thrive

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From The Atlantic: Although acceptance of LGBT individuals is growing, LGBT teens still on average experience lower life satisfaction and more depression than their straight peers,...

The Social Consequences of a Diagnosis on the Autism Spectrum

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It’s time to change how we think about and relate to people whose makeup is or appears to be different from the norm. Currently, the dominant way in research, practice and the general public is to think of what’s different—let’s say a biological or neurological difference—as the source of disability and difficulty, and to relate to and treat (in various ways) that biological or neurological difference. But there’s another way to go, and more and more researchers and practitioners are taking it.

Upon Further Review: Did the Black Box Warning on SSRIs Lead...

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A study that appeared online in the British Medical Journal suggests that the FDA’s warning in 2003 that antidepressants increase the risk of suicidal ideation in youth paradoxically  led to an increase in suicide attempts in this age group. Media reports on the study tell of how the black-box warning “backfired.” But is this conclusion warranted by the study? Or is the study flawed? And how did the media report on this story?