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Keywords: Mental Health

  • AUSTRALIA

    Secretly suicidal: Why prisoners need access to Medicare

    • Damien Linnane
    • 27 July 2022

    Two months into a 10-month prison sentence, I was placed in solitary confinement after having a nervous breakdown. I’d originally made a fruitless attempt to keep my breakdown to myself, because I’d been told what would happen if Corrective Services found out I was having mental health issues. One of the first friends I made in prison, like many of the inmates, was suicidal. ‘The best advice I can give you if you’re struggling with your mental health’, he told me, ‘is to do everything you can to keep it from the officers.’

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The right to a healthy environment

    • Cristy Clark
    • 21 October 2021
    7 Comments

    On 8 October, at its 48th session, the United Nations Human Rights Council formally adopted a resolution recognising the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. It emphasises that ‘environmental degradation, climate change and unsustainable development constitute some of the most pressing and serious threats to the ability of present and future generations to enjoy human rights, including the right to life’.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What we talk about when we talk about mental health

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 19 October 2021
    2 Comments

     Millions of Australians are slowly emerging from another lockdown and it’s again reported our mental health has suffered. The Victorian Government recently announced 93,000 hours for mental health clinicians to work across the state, and the delivery of 20 pop-up community mental health sites.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Children don’t need counselling for climate anxiety, they need climate action

    • Cristy Clark
    • 13 September 2021
    7 Comments

    It was reported recently that Coalition MPs have been calling for an expansion of the government’s school chaplaincy program in order to reduce the mental health impacts of climate change ‘activism and alarmism’ on children. Yes, that’s right, they want to address the mental health impact of activism, not the impact of the actual, visible effects of climate change itself, or the very real threat that it poses to children’s futures.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The fight for the future of the NDIS

    • El Gibbs
    • 18 March 2021
    5 Comments

    Right now, there is a fight on for the future of the NDIS. On one side is the Federal Government, determined to have total control over the Scheme, and to change its very fundamentals. On the other side are disabled people across Australia, disability advocacy organisations, allied health workers and disability service providers, urgently telling them to stop.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Focus on human relationships needed for aged and mental health care

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 March 2021
    10 Comments

    The Royal Commission was right to insist on a human rights focus to aged care. It should also be insisted on in care for people who experience mental health issues. For that focus to remain sharp, however, it must be based in attention by people at all levels of responsibility, political and managerial included, to the concrete human relationships of the people whom programs serve.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    True friendship

    • Barry Gittins
    • 04 February 2021
    2 Comments

    All three of us are parents, we’ve all been adversely impacted by COVID-19, and prior to that we’ve shared the usual rough and tumble dynamics of male friendships and bridal party affiliations. We have been in and out of each other’s good books, hard conversations, interpersonal dynamics and orbits. We’ve been through a lot as mates. COVID-wise, though, that affinity has been at a remove.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A very varied Christmas

    • Barry Gittins
    • 17 December 2020
    5 Comments

    What does Christmas mean for you? What does it have in store? Preceding and in the midst of the annual celebration of life and hope that is Christmas, we will always have those, as H L Mencken noted, are obsessed with the ‘haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    More therapy isn't a cure for climate anxiety

    • Leo Mares
    • 29 October 2020
    6 Comments

    Such a profound lack of action from our own government on an existential issue of this magnitude certainly doesn’t inspire hope. So when it comes to climate anxiety as a clinical issue, this is not only a risk factor, but also a barrier to treatment.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    No joke: OCD is not a punchline

    • Anonymous
    • 15 October 2020
    7 Comments

    ‘You’ve got a bit OCD about all this handwashing, haven’t you?’ People say things like this all the time, to mock others’ habits and the routines they follow a little too closely. Usually, it’s not meant to be offensive. Just harmless teasing. But when I hear someone say something like this, it hurts. Because I actually have OCD.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Support after Suicide report: 'Fighting the system as well as the illness'

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 September 2020
    4 Comments

    A recent report from Jesuit Social Services’ Support after Suicide program reflects on the experience of people who have accompanied a friend or family member before, through and after their suicide. At the heart of the report is its insistence on the importance of the human face in health care.

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  • RELIGION

    Mental health as a gift

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 September 2020
    10 Comments

    The Catholic Social Justice Statement embodies this generous vision. Its title emphasises the gift that each human being is, and the blessing that is mental health. Health is not to be taken for granted as an entitlement but accepted and nurtured as a gift.

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