Australian Politics
How mindfulness and therapy may be making our children MORE depressed and anxious
In a time when mental health is talked about more than ever, there is a camp of experts who are afraid we may have gone too far.
Schools across the country are implementing mental health awareness campaigns and pushing mindfulness and meditation techniques in classrooms.
But, there is some evidence heightened awareness and focus on mental health is having the opposite effect and isn't helping children at all, but is making anxiety and depression worse.
The My Resilience in Adolescence, or MYRIAD, trial followed thousands of students who practiced mindfulness exercises in schools and results showed not only did the exercises not improve teens' mental health, but those at higher risk of mental health problems fared worse after training.
Researchers attributed the results to multiple reasons, but said one explanation was that mindfulness brought 'awareness to upsetting thoughts.'
However, the study did find that mindfulness practices had a positive effect on teachers in the school.
Researchers pointed out there are many things that can impact the mental health of a younger person still developing, including their environment, socieconomic status, family dynamics and parenting, genetics and schooling, such as homework, exams and social aspects.
In a similar Australian study, researchers found students who had taken a course on cognitive behavioral therapy reported higher levels of depression and anxiety symptoms six and 12 months later.
In both studies, researchers were concerned with something called co-rumination, which is when a person repeatedly discusses problems with others rather than searches for solutions.
This excessive dwelling on problems appeared to be higher among females.
Dr Jack Andrews, who led the Australian study and is a fellow at the Wellcome Trust - a UK-based health research organization - told The New York Times: 'It might be that they kind of get together and make things a little bit worse for each other.'
He added that he believes schools should proceed cautiously with mental health curriculum until 'we know the evidence base a bit more. Doing nothing is better than doing something.'
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 13.8 percent of children and adolescents ages five to 17 received counseling or therapy in 2022.
Colorado-based psychologist Dr Shawn Smith previously told DailyMail.com therapy may be harming America's youth by 'encouraging kids to spend, frankly, too much time staring at their own belly button, and not being involved in the world and developing meaningful relationships and activities.
NHS psychiatrist Max Pemberton explains characteristics of those who’ve had too much therapy - and says Harry should turn difficulties into something positive
'To whatever extent, therapy contributes to that. It's a problem.'
Dr Smith added: 'The way we know people are depressed is, there's this turning inward... and usually, you will see a relentless scrutiny of the self, of one thoughts, and one's feelings and one's presentation.'
Over-therapizing can contribute to this: 'If we have kids, just pointlessly scrutinizing themselves, then we are setting them up to turn inward and collapse within, collapse in on themselves and become depressed. '
Despite the hesitancy by some, Dr Jessica Schleider, an associate professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University, argued it should be a priority for public health agendas to address mental health issues in young people.
She told the Times: 'The urgency of the mental health crisis is so clear.
'In the partnerships that I have, the emphasis is on the kids truly struggling right now who have nothing — we need to help them — more so than a possible risk for a subset of kids who aren’t really struggling.'
She cautioned against interpreting study results as a reason to 'forget all of it.' Instead, she said experts should be asking 'What about this intervention was unhelpful?'
Dr Schleider said experts should move from the 'universal, school-assembly-style approach' to more individualized and targeted interventions, which research has shown can be effective at helping improve mental health.
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Middle School Girls Banned for Taking a Stand
The woke Left loves protesters who do so in favor of opinions and ideologies with which they agree. However, as has become patently clear over the last several years, the Left has a double standard when it comes to the right to protest. Indeed, the Left has a double standard when it comes to most civil rights.
Recently, we observed the story of five brave girls from Lincoln Middle School in West Virginia. These five girls, who are on their school’s track and field team, engaged in a silent protest over having to compete against a boy who identifies as a girl.
Their protest occurred during the shot put competition, with each stepping into the thrower’s circle at their turn and then stepping away without an attempt, thereby registering an intentional scratch. It was their way of expressing their objection to the boy’s presence in the girls’ competition. To no one’s surprise, the gender-bending boy won the competition, but the girls’ protest was caught on video and spread on social media.
Unfortunately, the girls’ protest was not well received by the Harrison County Board of Education, which proceeded to ban them from any future competition. One of the girls’ parents also said the track coach informed them that she had been barred from meets because her job was to “score points for the track team.”
Four of the girls’ parents have since filed a lawsuit against the board of education, alleging that its decision to ban the girls amounted to punishing them for “exercising their rights to freedom of speech and expression under the Constitution of West Virginia.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is joining the parents in the lawsuit. The girls’ actions “were not disruptive or aggrandizing,” he noted. “They were the quiet demonstration of the student-athletes’ evident unhappiness with the competitive consequences of a federal appellate court’s decision.”
Morrisey added: “The only thing this decision does is teach these children to keep their mouths shut and not disagree with what they saw as unfairness. That is outrageous and it tramples these students’ rights to freedom of speech and expression.”
Former SEC champion swimmer and women’s rights activist Riley Gaines has also registered her support, posting on social media: “These girls stood up for what they believed and their coach barred them from competing. Insane.”
The girls’ objective is simply fair play in girls’ sports, and Morrisey seems willing to take the issue to the Supreme Court if necessary. “I will do everything in my power to defend these brave young girls,” he promised. “This is just wrong. We must stand for what’s right and oppose these radical trans policies.”
Indeed. Thankfully, we are seeing more of these types of protests. Fighting for what’s right is not always easy or comfortable, which is why we need to encourage everyone who dares to do so.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/106466-middle-school-girls-banned-for-taking-a-stand-2024-05-02
*********************************************Coddled Kids Become Depressed, Anti-Social College Students
The narcissism and unruly protests of today’s college students have been recent topics for us. But why are the kids not alright? What happened along the way? Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement, has some answers.
She starts with reports that college students “are so lonely, sad, and socially anxious that they grab their dining hall food to go — preferring to eat in their rooms.” They’re attending sports events less frequently, and they’re reducing participation in class and completing assignments.
It’s no surprise that mental health on campus is reportedly decreasing. One in seven students has considered suicide this past year, according to a Healthy Minds study cited by the [Wall Street] Journal. In fact, so many students are demanding therapy that hundreds of colleges have contracted with a telehealth company that promises to find students a therapist within five minutes of their call.
Experts are debating the cause of all this misery, and there are plenty of potential culprits: COVID-19 closures, political extremism, and even the advent of the “like” button. But could one unnoticed factor be the fact that this generation spent so little time unsupervised as kids?
A recent University of Michigan study found that the majority of parents of kids ages 9 to 11 will not let them walk to a friend’s house, play at the park with a friend, or trick-or-treat unchaperoned. Only half will let their kids go to another aisle at the store by themselves.
It’s easy to see how a generation that was never allowed to play, walk around the neighborhood, or even drift over to the dairy section without anxious adults watching and assisting them…might just be unprepared for the real world — or even eating in the dining hall.
She continues and concludes with a solution:
When kids play unsupervised with other kids of different ages they learn important skills: creativity, communication, compromise, compassion, and leadership. When they successfully complete tasks on their own, they understand that they are helpful, capable, and resourceful.
When young people lose out on those experiences as kids, they become socially awkward and afraid as adults.
Until we give kids back some independence to run around, play, explore, and expand, they will arrive on campus unprepared — clinging to the rope like a toddler, because that’s how they have been treated all their lives.
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Frat Boy Summer is this year’s backlash against an epidemic of arrogant, entitled women
Behold the “frat boys” unapologetically saving Old Glory, singing the national anthem, chanting “USA, USA, USA,” and rudely ridiculing the campus freaks who parade around in Hamas colors and barricade themselves in university buildings.
God forbid! They look like Trump voters.
This display of irrepressible masculinity erupting in Gen Z is an affront to the grand societal feminization project of the left, which has only itself to blame.
Frat Boy Summer is this year’s backlash against an epidemic of arrogant, entitled women who have been coddled all their lives and think they’re smarter and more important than they really are.
It is a manifestation of the growing political divide between men and women that has been evident in opinion polls for some time. There is a 10-point gap on most issues between men and women.
Young unmarried women, in particular, skew very left, while young men are becoming markedly more conservative.
It’s a nightmare scenario for Biden, who has been counting on the youth vote to win him the election like it did in 2020. Hence his desperate pandering to Gen Z.
The president is splashing around billions of taxpayer dollars on student debt relief, relaxing cannabis legislation, championing “trans kids” as the greatest heroes of their generation and inviting gender-fluid young TikTok influencers to VIP events at the White House. This is not your granddad’s Joe Biden.
But none of it can close the growing ideological gulf between the sexes, which has its roots in the unjust treatment of boys and young men in recent decades.
The college gender gap was a crisis when men outnumbered women up until the 1980s, but now that there are three women for every two men in college, we must rejoice. You go, girl!
Now there are 1 million fewer men in college than in 2011, according to Pew Research, with one-quarter of male Ivy Leaguers identifying as LGBT. It’s sexual reparations in which nobody had a say.
There is a cohort of women who are giving the fairer sex a bad name. These toxic femmes gobbled up the unjust privileges of affirmative action and the punitive fakery that the #MeToo movement became and then found they were more miserable than ever.
So they doubled down, offloading blame onto the patriarchy or toxic masculinity or whatever excuse they could find to avoid looking in the mirror.
During the pandemic, they were given the name “Karen” as they marched around in masks enforcing petty rules or flew into aggressive rages during minor parking lot encounters.
When accountability occasionally finds them, they are flabbergasted beyond belief, while the rest of the world quietly revels in their comeuppance.
Karine Jean-Pierre is the avatar of the entitled female.
The White House press secretary is simply horrible at her job. She’s not on top of her material and never provides a coherent answer to reporters’ questions.
But instead of showing a little humility and upping her game, she does interviews boasting about how awesome she is at “the hardest job in the White House … I’m an historic figure and I walk in history every day.”
The current campus protests have showcased the narcissism of these delusional damsels on social media for all to see:
The females at the University of Virginia whining, “It’s raining!” when finally told to pack up their tents.
The campus radical who held a press conference to demand that Columbia University supply food and water to her comrades who had barricaded themselves inside a building. “This is like basic humanitarian aid,” said Johannah King-Slutzky, a PhD student who sported the latest in terrorist chic, a keffiyeh around her neck.
The academic at Emory University who screamed, “I am a professor!” when she was arrested for assaulting a cop. “I hit him on the head very lightly to get his attention and they grabbed me, threw me to the ground and arrested me,” Caroline Fohlin whined as she was carted away.
The activist in California who stood up at a city council meeting and threatened to kill councilors who opposed a Gaza cease-fire resolution: “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you,” she fiercely vowed. Next time we saw Riddhi Patel, she was bawling her eyes out in court after being arrested and charged with threatening state officials.
These are not people anyone can admire. They believe they are entitled to privileges and protections they did not earn and do not deserve.
The losers in the equation have been young men, especially if they are white and heterosexual and wish to remain male with their genitalia intact.
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Art gallery heads to Supreme Court in fight to keep Ladies Lounge for women
Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art has lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court of Tasmania in its fight to keep its women-only Ladies Lounge open.
Last month, Mona was ordered to close the lounge after a man launched an anti-discrimination case against the museum, as he objected to being refused admission to the space.
The NSW man, Jason Lau, won his case in the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal and Mona was given 28 days to stop refusing entry to men. That deadline ended today (Tuesday) and the Ladies Lounge will be closed until further notice.
But the lounge’s creator, artist Kirsha Kaechele, who is married to Mona founder David Walsh, is not giving up on the lounge’s right to exist and lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court of Tasmania on Tuesday. Her motives go beyond the lounge itself – she wants to challenge the law’s very relationship to and understanding of the arts.
“I think it’s worth exercising the argument, not only for Ladies Lounge, but for the good of art, and the law,” Kaechele said.
“We need to challenge the law to consider a broader reading of its definitions as they apply to art and the impact it has on the world, as well as the right for conceptual art to make some people (men) uncomfortable.
“Ladies love the lounge – a space away from men – and given what we have been through for the last several millennia, we need it! We deserve both equal rights and reparations, in the form of unequal rights, or chivalry – for at least 300 years.”
Secluded behind green silk curtains, and featuring art by Sidney Nolan and Pablo Picasso, the opulent Ladies Lounge has welcomed about 425,000 visitors since it opened on Boxing Day in 2020.
The hearing at Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal last month was a highly theatrical event with Kaechele arriving with some 20 supporters, uniformly dressed in officious navy suits, hair pulled back, and donning red lipstick, a la 1988 Robert Palmer music video Simply Irresistible.
Inside the hearing room, the group performed a silent choreography and read feminist texts – behaviour that the tribunal member overseeing the case, Richard Grueber, later described as bordering on contempt.
In defending its case at tribunal, Mona’s counsel Catherine Scott argued that the Ladies Lounge provided equal opportunity to a group of people – women – who had been historically discriminated against and excluded from many spaces.
Scott relied on the exception provided by Section 26 of the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Act 1998, which states: “A person may discriminate against another person in any program, plan or arrangement designed to promote equal opportunity for a group of people who are disadvantaged or have a special need because of a prescribed attribute.”
But the argument did not fly with Grueber, who ruled that while the Ladies Lounge “may have a valid or ethical or pedagogical purpose … it cannot reasonably be intended to promote equal opportunity”.
Mona’s appeal will be lodged on the grounds that the tribunal took too narrow a view of women’s historical and ongoing societal disadvantage and did not recognise how the experience of the Ladies Lounge could promote equal opportunity.
In typically mischievous fashion, Kaechele added: “I am grateful to have received so many wonderful ideas for the future of the Ladies Lounge, and possibilities for its reformation. This encouragement has reassured me that I am indeed appealing.”
A sign saying “closed for reform” now sits at the reception desk of the lounge.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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