Users say harmful content from accounts they do not follow appears even after
requests to block it
Debbie was scrolling through X in April when some unwelcome posts appeared on
her feed. One showed a photo of someone who was visibly underweight asking
whether they were thin enough. In another, a user wanted to compare how few
calories they were eating each day.
Debbie, who did not want to give her last name, is 37 years old and was first
diagnosed with bulimia when she was 16. She did not follow either of the
accounts behind the posts, which belonged to a group with more than 150,000
members on the social media site.
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Tag - Mental health
Rob Minnick uses the platform to detail the dangers of gambling in an effort to
tackle content that normalizes it
Rob Minnick was in a bathroom in Paris when it dawned on him that he might need
some help. Having flown 3,700 miles to explore the French capital, he kept
disappearing for 10 or 15 minutes at a time.
“People must have thought I had the worst stomach problems in the world,” he
said of his trip, in February 2022. While his stomach was fine, he was not.
Minnick had developed an addiction to gambling.
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Guidance comes after calls for a total ban for under-16s and a statuary ban on
mobile phone use in schools
Primary school children should not be given smartphones by their parents, one of
the UK’s largest mobile phone operators has warned.
EE is advising parents that children under 11 should be given old-fashioned
brick or “dumb” phones that only allow them to call or text instead.
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Gig economy workers for Deliveroo and Uber Eats in the city are living in
appalling conditions, while putting in long hours, earning low pay and facing
mental health problems
Two lines of dirt-encrusted, ramshackle caravans stretch along both sides of a
road close to the motorway that winds its way into the heart of Bristol. Rats
dart between water-filled concrete sluices to rubbish-flecked mounds of
vegetation. Drug users stumble out of the nearby underpass while lorries thunder
overhead.
This is the grim encampment where about 30 Brazilian delivery riders working for
large companies such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats are forced to live to make ends
meet.
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Exclusive: Four internet treatments developed by University of Oxford will be
rolled out across NHS trusts
New NHS-approved online therapies could help two to three times the number of
children and adults recover from anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder,
research suggests.
One in five children and young people in England aged eight to 25 have a
probable mental disorder and one in four adults in England experiences at least
one diagnosable mental health problem in any given year, according to NHS
England.
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I’m no expert, but knowing my neighborhood’s trees and flowers by name makes me
feel grounded
Eighteen months ago, I adopted a dog. Now I’m out on the streets of Brooklyn
with my hound mix for at least an hour a day, strolling and wrestling discarded
chicken bones from her jaws. You notice a lot when you visit the same few blocks
over and over: which avenues are the quietest, or when the rusty scaffolding
around a nearby building vanishes overnight.
Most of all, I love to admire neighborhood greenery. I’m an adoring fan of the
tulips, peonies and dogwood flowers that burst forth in the spring. Yet I
quickly realized how limited my plant vocabulary was. Yes, I knew that was a
silver birch, because of its papery bark. But what was that taller tree, glossy
and looming, or that pale shrub with tiny, ornate leaves? I grew up in
Australia, where the vegetation is pretty different from that of the US
north-east, and I really hadn’t made an effort to learn about the locals. It
felt disrespectful, to say the least.
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We criticise children for not going outside – while curtailing their freedoms
and closing their spaces
On Sunday the Observer magazine published a sensitive piece about video game
addiction, speaking to therapists working in the sector and one affected family.
Genuine, compulsive, life-altering addiction, whether to video games or anything
else, is of course devastating for those affected by it. Since the WHO
classified gaming addiction as a specific disorder in 2018 (distinct from
technology addiction), the specialist National Centre for Gaming Disorders set
up in the UK has treated just over 1,000 patients. Thankfully, the numbers
suggest it is rare, affecting less than 1% of the 88% of teenagers who play
games.
The article asked, “why are so many young people addicted to video games?”,
which no doubt struck a chord with many parents who despair at the amount of
time their children spend in front of computers and consoles. Speaking as the
video games editor and correspondent at the Guardian, however, we think that
many of us who are worried about how long our teenagers are spending with games
are not dealing with an addiction problem, nor with compulsive behaviour. If we
want to know why many teens choose of their own free will to spend 10 or 20
hours a week playing games, rather than pathologising them, we ought to look
around us.
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