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Early learning services and schools provide unique settings for mental health promotion and early intervention due to the potential for population-level dosage and reach in terms of reducing multiple risk factors and enabling protective factors among young people. Educators play a key role in supporting children and young people's experiences of, and access to mental health promotion opportunities, and hold unparalleled opportunity in terms of creating mental health–promoting learning environments. In 2018, the Australian National Mental Health in Education Initiative, Be You, was launched. Be You is a multi-million-dollar Australian government–supported initiative, freely available to all 24,000 early learning services, primary and secondary schools throughout Australia. The potential for subsequent population reach is proposed to potentially exceed that of any mental health promotion initiative for children and young people previously observed in Australia. Be You aims to foster mentally healthy learning communities across Australia through building capacity among educators to embed mental health promotion strategies. The Initiative was developed based on a review and integration of previous national mental health promotion frameworks, with an overall alignment to existing state and territory education, social and emotional well-being frameworks, and the Australian Curriculum. In delivering facilitated support from specialised consultants to early learning services and schools participating in the initiative, Be You draws on professional learning principles designed to build capacity in educators and educational systems relating to mental health promotion. It uses an updated, multi-module online platform providing interactive, evidence-based resources. This paper presents the Be You framework, describes the evidence sources used to inform the underlying principles and objectives, discusses the specific components that form the initiative, details the professional learning modules and content, and discusses potential implications for population mental health and prevention efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the concept of catastrophic experience, its relationship to the range of acute and prolonged stressors to which women may be exposed and the broad impacts on their mental health and well-being. It identifies catastrophe in terms of multiple accumulated stresses including death, loss, victimization, demoralization, shame, stigmatization, helplessness and identity. Catastrophic experiences include personal violence in domestic circumstances of intimate partner abuse, sexual assault and child physical and sexual abuse. Women's experiences of loss through the violent deaths of children and loved ones may also have such enduring impacts. Terrorism victimizes men and women in this way, with the enduring impacts for women in terms of threat of ongoing attacks as well as acute effects and their aftermath. The catastrophes of war, conflict, genocide, sexual exploitation and refugee status differentially affect large numbers of women, directly and through their concerns for the care of their children and loved ones. Ultimate catastrophes such as Hiroshima and the Holocaust are discussed but with recognition of the very large numbers of women currently experiencing catastrophe in ongoing ways that may be silent and unrecognized. This is significant for clinical care and population impacts, and in the losses for women across such contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to critically evaluate reports from the Australian-wide National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing of very low rates of ICD-10 anxiety and depressive disorders in community resident older Australians. Data from the National Survey, which relied on the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) were re-computed and re-analysed to address concerns about population sampling, interview response patterns and alternate measures of mental health. Rates of anxiety and depressive disorders fell to low levels after 65 years and continued to fall thereafter. This is at odds with findings from gerontological surveys that used assessment tools better suited to frail older people. Scores on mental health scales, together with diagnostic algorithms that obviated CIDI skip patterns, showed much less change in mental wellbeing across generations. It is argued that sampling and case ascertainment bias combined to reduce rates of anxiety and depression in very old people, especially when adjustments are made for the high morbidity levels encountered in aged residential facilities. Functional mental disorders almost certainly rise in frequency in advanced old age, often in conjunction with dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the paper "Recovery is about a focus on resilience and wellness, not a fixation with risk and illness" by T. Wand published in a 2015 issue of the journal which shows that recovery is main goal of psychiatrists and focus on resilience and wellness. The author states that Wand provide an overview of evidence based biological treatments in psychiatry and also details side effects of antipsychotic treatments of psychotic symptoms.