Minneapolis St. Paul Mental Health Blog

Mental Health and germs | warm hand dryers are not always a safe alternative

If you're a germophobe who wants to use a public bathroom ever again, you might want to stop reading this.

Because it turns out, while bathroom hand dryers can be more environmental than paper towels, they can also be a whirlpool of faecal matter.

Mental Health for students | Delaying high school start times by about an hour increased the amount adolescents slept on school nights, and also reduced their catch-up sleep on weekends, according to results from a cohort study.

For their research published in JAMA Pediatrics, Rachel Widome, PhD, of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and colleagues followed a cohort of students at five public high schools in suburban and rural Minneapolis, randomly selecting 455 (225 girls; mean age, 15 years) for wrist actigraphy to track sleep and activity.

Mental / Physical health matters | COVID-19 is spread person-to-person through close contact.

We aimed to investigate the effects of physical distance, face masks, and eye protection on virus transmission in health-care and non-health-care (eg, community) settings.

Mental Health | A survey from the American Psychiatric Association provides a glimpse into the mental well-being of Americans amid the COVID-19 pandemic:

48% are anxious about the possibility of getting the coronavirus,
40% are anxious about becoming seriously ill or dying from COVID-19,
and 62% are anxious about the possibility of a friend or loved one getting the infection.

Mental Health | Adolescent psychiatric inpatients who were cyberbullied had significantly higher scores….

Mental Health | Teens with positive family relationships may be less likely to develop depression ....

It's the latest study to show that food can influence mental health.

Adolescents who were bullied within the past month were approximately 3 times more likely to report having attempted suicide,

....compared with peers who did not experiencing bullying, according to a study of 12- to 15-year-olds across 48 countries published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Exposure to artificial light was associated with higher average BMI.

Improving Mental Health | Spending just 2 hours a week in green spaces ....

....such as parks, woodlands and fields has been linked with people feeling healthier and happier.