http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli
Related: Mental Health News • Interesting ArticlesThe roots of mental illness I’m going to delve into that topic that no one wants to talk about: suicide. It seems strange to me that one of the leading causes of death for young people is kept so far away from our eyes and ears. There may be a lot of sensational coverage of suicide, but maybe it’s not touching on the right issues. 40 Life Hacks That Will Change Your Life There are always these pesky little obstacles in life that make everything so difficult – pot always boiling over, zipper constantly unzipping itself or ice cream melting on your clothes. All these first world problems can easily ruin your day. Luckily, internet is full of handy life-saving tips that can help you! Show Full Text Stop externalising your life Recently the Barbican museum in London held an exhibition called the Rain Room. It was an installation in which water poured from the ceiling, but sensors detected where people were standing and would turn off the taps above their heads so they didn’t get wet. It was a clever and engaging piece of interactive art and was immensely popular. During the time this installation was open, my Twitter stream was filled with photos of people standing in the Rain Room, accompanied by the caption ‘Rain Room @ The Barbican!’
Why Suicide Has Become an Epidemic WHEN THOMAS Joiner was 25 years old, his father—whose name was also Thomas Joiner and who could do anything—disappeared from the family’s home. At the time, Joiner was a graduate student at the University of Texas, studying clinical psychology. His focus was depression, and it was obvious to him that his father was depressed. Six weeks earlier, on a family trip to the Georgia coast, the gregarious 56-year-old—the kind of guy who was forever talking and laughing and bending people his way—was sullen and withdrawn, spending days in bed, not sick or hungover, not really sleeping. Joiner knew enough not to worry. He knew that the desire for death—the easy way out, the only relief—was a symptom of depression, and although at least 2 percent of those diagnosed make suicide their final chart line, his father didn’t match the suicidal types he had learned about in school.
50 Life Hacks to Simplify your World Life hacks are little ways to make our lives easier. These low-budget tips and trick can help you organize and de-clutter space; prolong and preserve your products; or teach you something (e.g., tie a full Windsor) that you simply did not know before. Most of these came from a great post on tumblr. There is also a great subreddit ‘r/lifehacks‘ with some fantastic tips as well.
This Hilariously Enormous Infographic Shows That Sharks Don't Kill You, You Kill Sharks Despite their reputation as the ocean’s most deadly creature, sharks may have to cede that title to a creature that doesn’t even live there--humans. Consider the following facts: sharks kill just a handful of humans every year. Humans, on the other hand, kill tens of thousands of sharks every hour, or about 100 million per year, as a study published this March revealed. That information is convincingly displayed in an infographic collaboration between content marketer Joe Chernov and the design studio Ripetungi.
How to Land Your Kid in Therapy - Lori Gottlieb If there’s one thing I learned in graduate school, it’s that the poet Philip Larkin was right. (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.”) At the time, I was a new mom with an infant son, and I’d decided to go back to school for a degree in clinical psychology. With baby on the brain and term papers to write, I couldn’t ignore the barrage of research showing how easy it is to screw up your kids. Of course, everyone knows that growing up with “Mommy Dearest” produces a very different child from one raised by, say, a loving PTA president who has milk and homemade cookies waiting after school. But in that space between Joan Crawford and June Cleaver, where most of us fall, it seemed like a lot could go wrong in the kid-raising department.
Economics of Blogging and Huffington Post When The Huffington Post announced earlier this week that it was being acquired by AOL for $315 million in cash and stock, one group felt slighted: a set of unpaid bloggers for the site, identifying by the Twitter hashtag #huffpuff, which claims that The Huffington Post has “built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists.” Some analyses in the mainstream media have echoed these sentiments. “To grasp The Huffington Post’s business model,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Tim Rutten, “picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.” I have enormous sympathy for anyone writing about public affairs, whether as a hobby or as a career. And I’d encourage people to think very carefully about where they are doing their writing, and what they are getting paid for it.
Suicide is a gender issue that can no longer be ignored Each time suicide reaches the headlines our attention is directed at particular groups – middle-aged men, people in deprived areas or in certain professions. This is splitting hairs. The latest statistics underline the message that Calm (the campaign against living miserably) has maintained for years; gender runs through UK suicide statistics like letters in a stick of rock. Four hours of concentration As I’ve blogged about before, and mentioned again in my previous post, the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré put in two hours of work in the morning and two in the evening. Apparently this is a common pattern. Cal Newport mentions this in his interview with Todd Henry.
Sanity in a culture of mass murder (Icarus Project Facebook page) The mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 young school children and seven adults (including the shooter himself) has not only reignited the debate over gun control in the United States, but also a discussion over how communities deal with madness in their midst. Adam Lanza showed signs of mental illness before the killing spree — as have other recent perpetrators of mass shootings. Psychiatrist Lynne Fenton of the University of Colorado says her patient, James Holmes, alerted her of his plans before strolling into a packed movie theater in Aurora, Colo., this July and spraying the crowd with bullets. Fenton informed school officials, but she says they did nothing because Holmes was in the process of dropping out.