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Americans living in a state that favours the losing candidate of the US Presidential election might experience a decline in their mental health. A study from researchers at UC San Francisco and Duke University used data from 500 thousand people during the 2016 Presidential election to examine mental health indicators. Americans who lived in states that favoured Hillary Clinton experienced an extra half-day of poor mental health on average during the month after the election. [More]

A new memoir by environmental journalist Jeremy Leon Hance, incorporates travel, humor and mental illness. “I didn’t want to write a book about mental illness that was a downer or defeating, but rather I wanted to tell the story of how people actually live with chronic mental illness day by day, because so many of us do,” author Hance told us. “And sometimes, especially when you’re ten thousand miles from home, chasing endangered species through rainforests, it can be funny. I don’t shy away from some of the dark places our mental health struggles can take us, but try to tell a story of how a person moves forward, even if hesitantly, and does what’s important to them.” [More]

Teenagers experienced less anxiety and felt more connection to school during lock down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A study from the University of Bristol examined how 1000 teenagers across 17 schools in the South West of England coped during lockdown when they weren’t attending school in person. [More]

About 55 million women in the United States use oral contraception and 98 per cent of U.S. women have used birth control at some point. Most women use oral contraception as their method of birth control. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers oral contraception as an essential medicine. Some women stop taking birth control because it affects their moods. A new study recently published in Scientific Reports aimed to look at the effects of oral contraception on hormones and how that may affect mood. [More]

Teenagers who sleep poorly may be more likely to experience mental health challenges in later life. In research recently published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry researchers from the University of Reading, together with Goldsmiths and Flinders University in the UK found that there was a significant link between poor sleep and mental health issues. [More]

The large majority of young people who experience suicidal thoughts or self-harm experience only mild or moderate mental distress. Researchers from Cambridge University found that young people who thought about suicide or engaged in self harm were at medium risk for mental distress, rather than having obvious symptoms from a diagnosable disorder. [More]

A new study published in the Journal of Pediatrics looked at the number of times children visited emergency departments in the U.S. for mental health care. The purpose of the study was to describe the trends in pediatric mental health emergency department visits on a national scale. We know from other studies that often times, low pediatric volume and/or emergency departments located in non-metropolitan areas tend to be less prepared to treat children, as they may only see a few children a day. [More]

The pandemic pushed much of medical care to online, virtual platforms, virtually overnight. But is Internet-based health care, particularly mental health care, a safe and viable option? A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry looked at the effects of Internet versus face-to-face cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for health anxiety. [More]

A new study published in the BMJ looked at infant sleep and child mental health. “We wanted to find out if infants with very persistent sleep difficulties had increased odds of experiencing mental health difficulties during childhood,” study author Falin Cook told us. “We wanted to know if there were specific types of mental disorders that they were more likely to experience.” [More]

Imagine this: You’re five years old and you've just been given your favorite treat. Maybe it's a marshmallow or maybe it’s a lollipop. Whatever it is, you want to devour it instantly but are told that if you wait a certain amount of time and don’t eat it until that certain amount of time is up, you’ll get another treat of the same variety, thereby increasing your tally to two treats. What would you do? What would you say a five-year-old would do? And why does it matter? [More]