Mental health – an issue of importance

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Posted on 16th May 2012 by admin in health news

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Some new from across the Atlantic today, but its message is universal.

According to this post on the Time blog, various mental illness related issues make up four of the five top ‘non-combat’ causes for hospitalisation of US troops. When you consider the in terms of personnel, the US Army is a very big organisation, then it follows that this is a pretty big problem.

It’s amazing to think that it’s not all that far back into the past when we lived in a time where mental illness was seen either as a weakness, or a sign that the sufferer was somehow different from the rest of us. Certainly in military circles the  focus has always been – necesarily – on resilience and toughness, but one of the biggest things we’ve learnt over the past few decades is that resilience and toughness aren’t about bottling things up – it’s all about communication and getting the right treatment.

According to UK mental health charity MIND (mind.org.uk), 1 in 6 workers in the UK is experiencing depression, anxiety or stress at any one time. They refer to the issue as “the elephant in the room”. And if things in the office can sometimes be difficult to cope with, there is a good set of resources online at Mind’s site for people who want to find out more about the organisation and how it can help.

Do you think mental health is an ‘elephant in the room’ when it comes to the workplace?

Let us know your views in the comments.

Tea and weight loss

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Posted on 28th March 2011 by admin in diet and fitness

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Theaflavins and thearubigins? Me neither, but apparently according to this report in the Telegraph, they’re compounds found in tea that possibly help prevent obesity – but only if there’s no milk in the tea.

As time goes by it seems more and more as if tea’s some kind of superfood. Normally it’s green tea you hear about – they’re both made from the same kind of plant, the difference in them being down to how they are processed. Black tea is fermented – (an oxidisation process rather than an alcohol making one) whereas white and green teas aren’t. It’s this that is believed to increase the amounts of the compounds in the drink that prevent the gut absorbing fats, so the story goes.

I wouldn’t start relying on tea as a diet aid just yet though – the findings so far have come from tests on rats.

Health and wellbeing on the internet

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Posted on 2nd March 2011 by admin in follow health recommends

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There are a lot of good health sites out there in cyberspace. But it always pays to be cautious about what you decide to read – for every good health site there’s probably one somewhere trying to sell snake oil and miracle powder.

So what follows is a list of the sites we follow – all trustworthy:

Guardian health pages – very good indeed. Clearly laid out, with content relating to just about every area of health and wellbeing you could wish for, from mental health to NHS news, to more general health blogs. Highly recommended.

NHS Choices – a very nice resource indeed, like having your own medical encyclopedia except it takes up no shelf space.

The Independent newspaper’s health and wellbeing pages are always worth a look, same with those at the Telegraph.

AXA nutrition and fitness – wide selection of resources from videos on diet, fitness and the mind to healthy eating recipes and healthy living guides.

Mental Health Foundation – mental health isn’t something that’s talked about as much as maybe it should be, but we’ve come a long, long way over the years. Mental illness is also reasonably common with about 5% of people suffering from it at any one time. This means that most of us will either have suffered from it, or known someone who has suffered from it during our lives.

Anyway, these are the health sites that we peruse regularly.

If you’ve got any suggestions for sites that we can add to our list of must -reads, please let us know in the comments.

Until our next post – be healthy, take it easy.