By: Yohan Callen, Youth Radio EATS
Here's another installment to our 7x7 series. In this video you will see Melody, a project associate in our health department. She researched headaches, and eye problems. These symptoms generally effect ones intuition, awareness, clear sight, and concentration. Like an investigator Melody discovered the Bates method ,an alternative approach to eyesight improvement and maintenance. It is based on the belief that errors in visual accommodation are due to mental strain, and that vision may be improved by appropriate relaxation techniques. After this breakthrough she went straight to the cook book in search of a recipe that could be used as a pain reliever. Blueberries surprisingly have a chemical called antioxidants. This chemical works as a secret agent that's main purpose is to neutralize negatively charged cells. Here's a recipe for a simple blueberry smoothie that should knock that headache right Out!!!!!
To read the full story go to Youth Radio EATS
New research shows that sex-ed is a lot more valuable in high schools than we thought it was. A recent article in the Huffington Post reveals recent survey results that shed new light on the effectiveness of sexual education in among youth. The Guttmacher Institute used data from the 2006-’08 found from 4,691 youth (aged 15-24) in their Nation Survey of Family Growth. Of all of their findings, here’s just a breakdown of some of the data that I found most shocking…
• Two-thirds of young women and 55 percent of young men received some sort of sexual education surrounding birth control or abstinence prior to their first sexual experience. One- fifth of participants said they only learned about delaying sex, while 16 percent of females and around a quarter of males received no sexual education.
•Of those that did receive any sex education, 77 percent of women and 78 percent of men had intercourse before turning 20. For those without any sexual instruction, those rates were much higher, at 86 percent and 88 percent, respectively.
• Students that had access to sex education were far more likely to use contraception at the time of their first sexual experience compared to those who had never received instruction. The survey also reveals that those with sex-ed, for the most part, were parts of "healthier partnerships," meaning they were less likely to lose their virginity to one more than three years older or younger in age.
I am a seventeen year-old female student, and I’ve had access to Sexual Education classes since the 7th grade. When I saw the results of this survey, what initially shocked me was the absolute lack of adequate instruction in contraceptives and STI’s among other youth. After going over the results in more detail, however, what was even more surprising was to see the correlation between abstinence-only education or no sex-ed at all and teen pregnancy OR higher rates of “[un]healthy relationships.”
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Find yourself waking in the night to update your Facebook status? Get agitated when Twitter is down? Are you maybe…addicted to social networking? Rest those Twitter-weary thumbs and bleary eyes. The first internet and technology rehabilitation center, reSTART, is here.
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When I was younger I used to go to an afterschool tutoring center to get help with math. Now, I’m 19, I’m still terrible at math and I despise the idea of tutoring. If “AutoTutor”—a new software developed by three professors from University of Norte Dame, University of Memphis, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology—had been around, maybe I’d be a math whizz or at least have passed some of those tests.
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According to a recent study by the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, “Obesity prevalence among youth is at a historic high, with 16%of 6- to 19-year olds overweight and 19% obese,” and the key to addressing this problem, might not require parental involvement.
The results of the study show that a weight loss intervention program that is developmentally tailored to teenagers and based on peer interactions instead of family interventions, may be more effective in facilitating teen weight loss. Adolescence is generally a time when teenagers are pushing their parents away, and researchers hypothesized that parental influence, when it comes to losing weight, might be counterproductive.
The study, which was published in Pediatrics on February 13, included 208 girls between the ages of 12 and 17, who were all classified as obese based on their body mass index.
The girls were divided into two groups. One received normal nutrition and weight loss advice from their primary care physicians, and the other group participated in a behavioral peer and counseling program. As part of the behavioral program, the girls met weekly at the beginning of the study. They discussed eating, portion sizes, meal patterns, and kept food and exercise diaries. The program also recommended 15 minutes of yoga every day, exercising five days a week, and less tv and computer time.
The girls that participated in the peer behavior intervention program showed, “Significant and sustained decreases in BMI z scores among obese adolescent girls compared with those receiving usual care,” according to the study. According to the Atlantic, this is the first study to show that a teen weight loss program can be effective without including parents.
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Even the President is talking about the school-to-prison pipeline these days -- the term used to describe the slippery slope that students face when they are kicked out of school and often leads to being incarcerated. This focus is causing schools to re-examine their discipline policies and practices.
Some experts, like Dr. Jenna Saul, a child and adolescent psychiatristy, say that getting suspended actually causes more damage than just affecting one’s future options. She says it affects a young person’s psyche, sometimes to the point of sending them over the edge.
Check out Youth Radio's interview with Saul below.
Youth Radio: What were you seeing in your child psychiatry practice that led you to get involved with school discipline policies?
Saul: I was seeing kids with no real history of on-going negative social interactions, make bad decisions, and finding their entire futures in terms of their education be completely destroyed. Youth who struggled to manage socially, did their best to survive academically, and who really dreaded being in the school setting because of the social stressers, would make a decision like giving another student their ADHD medication in the hopes that that would lead to the other person liking them, and as a result they were expelled.
Youth Radio: What did you see happening to the children that got kicked out of school?
Saul: The effects went beyond just the psychological to completely altering their developmental trajectory. They weren’t able to attend school, they couldn’t get a good education through homeschooling their families perhaps didn’t have the means to help them do after-high school planning, so even if they intellectually had the makings of a college student, they never got there. Several of them now are struggling to find unemployment, and still struggling in social relationships because those issues were never worked on. A few of them are pregnant or young parents, with little skill in managing inter-personal relationships.
Youth Radio: Aren't schools expelling students to keep the rest of the school safe?
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By Venus Morris
When I was younger, I was a little fat light skinned girl from a small town by the name of Clearlake. I befriended a skinny black girl who became my best friend in sixth grade. When we would argue she would always hit below the belt and tease me about how fat I was. My counter-reaction was to talk about how she had no hair on the sides of her head because I knew that was one thing she could never tease me about. Even though we couldn’t share clothes, we were inseparable.
In middle school I was always constantly teased about my weight. It got to the point where I wouldn’t get lunch and I would sit alone during lunch and recess. I refused to go to pizza parties because I knew that I would 'fasho' eat three pieces. I hated P.E. because I knew that I couldn’t do a pull up. At that point in my life I honestly hated school, people, food and most of all myself. A lot of self destruction was what I was moving toward but I didn’t understand that I was doing so. I would be so hungry when I got home from school I would either steal something from the store or sneak a piece of bread out of the cabinet. So as I got older I didn’t eat as much as I used to. I would starve myself as long as I could, sometimes go days without eating, just drinking water.
But once I got hungry enough to eat I held back with no remorse and attacked whatever was placed in front of me, then go back to starving myself. I wanted to be skinny, or at least have a flat stomach. That’s all I ever wanted and I was determined to get to my goal. This went on for almost a year, until one day I was on my way to my Spanish class and I passed out from dehydration two doors away from the classroom.
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Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News
Tracking 11 million undocumented persons in a country is tough. But one professor, Dr. Roberto Gonzales, tried to do exactly that. And he found some surprising trends.
"They recounted numerous instances of not being able to get out of bed, having ulcers, being stressed out, worrying all the time about getting caught, toothaches, headaches, problems sleeping, trouble eating and thoughts of suicide, attempted suicide," Gonzales said in an interview with Turnstyle News.
The mental and emotional health of undocumented people is slowly making its way into the national immigration conversation. In recent cases, lawyers have tried to use mental health concerns as grounds for a judge to permit a client to stay in the U.S.
One of these cases involved 22-year-old Yanelli Serrano Hernandez, an undocumented young person, who attempted suicide twice in the U.S. Her defense lawyers argued that not only was she not a threat to her community, but that sending her back to Mexico put her life at risk. Nevertheless, she was deported on January 31, 2012.
Marco Saavedra, 22, is also undocumented and struggled with depression growing up, as did his mother and sister. But he was inspired by Hernandez's case to get involved in immigration rights issues. He is currently a youth organizer at the National Immigration Youth Alliance (NIYA) in Ohio, in a neighboring county to where Hernandez was detained.
Saavedra found that organizing with other youth actually helps him deal with his depression. "It's true of me and a lot of our youth organizers at NIYA, that we suffered depression because we couldn't wrap our minds around what our futures looked like. Through organizing I found a way to address the preoccupation of depression. By just living in the struggle day to day you get lost behind your own needs... you forget to see the bigger picture," said Saavedra.
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At Youth Radio, we’ve been looking into the issue of mental health concerns that undocumented people face in the United States--something that is slowly creeping into the national immigration conversation because of recent high-profile cases of undocumented people committing suicide.
The National Immigrant Youth Alliance even launched a site, Undocuhealth.org, in honor of 22 year-old Yanelli Hernandez Serrano, who attempted suicide twice in the United States and then was deported back to Mexico. The site tries to connect undocumented people to resources, and to build a network for people to share resources and success narratives.
For young people in particular, transitioning from childhood into young adulthood can trigger mental health problems, because as a child, one often does not realize the barriers that they will face as an undocumented adult.
Youth Radio spoke with two undocumented young people who have internships with the organization 67 Sueños, in San Francisco, CA, which highlights the voices of migrant underprivileged youth. These young people shared their stories about struggling with mental health.
Lucia, 25, came to the U.S. from Mexico City at age 9, with her family. They came on a visa, but it expired.
Being undocumented didn’t affect me a lot [as a kid] because I was sheltered from a lot of things growing up. But when I wanted to go to college is when it really hit me. I can’t do certain things, I can’t get my license, I can’t afford to pay a four year institution because my parents don’t have the money.
It made me mad. It depressed me to a point. I felt like I was limited from pursuing things that I wanted to do. I wanted to study abroad, but I can’t do that either. Some of my friends, they went to Spain, or they went to Central America, and they had really good experiences and I always wanted to have that. But I haven’t had the opportunity.
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