LEAD Pittsburgh hosted its first speaker series for FOCUS (For Our Children and Us) this month, addressing topics concerning children’s mental health to the adults that have a presence in their lives. Continue reading Why Your Physical Space is Important for Recovery
According to Grateful, researchers at Harvard Medical School report, “Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” Continue reading Gratitude Prompts
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is the United States’ largest grassroots mental health organization. NAMI is dedicated to building better lives for millions of American’s affected by mental illness through education, advocacy, listening, and awareness.
You know those moments when you’re hanging out with your family and all of a sudden you look around and everyone is on their phones, not talking or looking at each other? It can be amusing, but also a good reminder to put down our phones and be present. And while we all need to check ourselves from time to time, the reality is we depend on our phones a lot.
In the world of balancing our schedule, health, well-being, work, family, commitments, errands, intentions and more there are definitely some apps out there that serve as reminders and help keep us organized and on top of it all. Whether its scheduling, keeping up on our health or a useful tool for work, there’s no doubt apps can serve as a reminder and help us live a healthier life.
However, if not careful, we can become overly attached to our phone (and the apps we use). Read more about nomophobia here.
What apps do you and your child(ren) rely on the most? If you were doing an app cleanse, which ones would you get rid of from your phone? Leave a comment below!
The SOVA Project is happy to feature this blog post written by one in our team of fantastic SOVA Ambassadors—these are young people who help create meaningful blog posts from adolescents’ perspectives.
Expressing your thoughts and feelings can be difficult. It is sometimes hard to find the right words that really say what we’re experiencing. Even more difficult, though, can be finding the right person to say them to.
One of the greatest causes of stress in adolescents is feeling like that they have to do well in school. A significant contributor to this, and what determines a good portion of grades, are tests. This also includes larger tests like AP exams and standardized tests like the ACTs and SATs.
If your child finds themselves having anxiety attacks or feel that anxiety symptoms heighten as exams approach, they’re not alone.
Sometimes all people want to do when going through a hard time is to run away from all their problems. This can be especially true when dealing with a mental illness, when thoughts and stressors keep building up and are impossible to escape from because they’re trapped in their heads. Continue reading Learning to Run
Though people are constantly on their computers, sometimes they need to have a brief distraction from whatever task that they’re currently focusing on, whether to jump start their motivation or calm any stress that the assignment is causing. The reasons we’re working or need a distraction may vary, and just like needing distractions for different reasons, the things people seek out to relax and ease their anxiety differ from person to person.
So often, we hear about the damage that social media is having on our mental health, from isolating ourselves to avoiding face-to-face human interaction to experiencing FOMO. A recent study however, tried to see how social media wasn’t affecting mental health, but instead how it can help diagnose mental illnesses, specifically with depression.
We recently talked about how mental health treatment can be extremely inaccessible for adolescents both here in the United States and across the pond in England. We also talked last week about World Mental Health Day and how it’s theme centered around young people’s mental health in the changing world. Even so, the Earth is large, and these are just glimpses at how much (but mostly how little) treatment adolescents receive worldwide, not just with mental health, but as a whole.
Continue reading Global Funding and Adolescent Mental Health