My son Jake has participated in Destination Imagination (DI) for the last eight years. DI is a team-oriented creative problem-solving competition. Each year in October, teams (comprised of five to seven kids) must choose one out of five long-term challenges...

I will be coming out of retirement for a couple of hours to speak at the THINK! 2007 Seminar along with a slew of world class presenters. The dates are September 25-27, 2007 and the place is Amsterdam, Netherlands. Here's...

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are affected by mental, behavioural, neurological and substance use disorders. About 877,000 people die by suicide every year. In addition, one in four patients visiting a health service has at least one mental, neurological or behavioural disorder but most of these disorders are neither diagnosed nor treated. For example, estimates made by WHO in 2002 showed that 154 million people globally suffer from depression and 25 million people from schizophrenia; 91 million people are affected by alcohol use disorders and 15 million by drug use disorders. Mental health is how we think, feel and act as we cope with life. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others and make choices. Like physical health, mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood. Everyone feels worried, anxious, sad or stressed sometimes. But with a mental illness, these feelings do not go away and are severe...

Mental, neurological and behavioural disorders are common to all countries and cause immense suffering. People with these disorders are often subjected to social isolation, poor quality of life and increased mortality. These disorders are the cause of staggering economic and social costs. Most of the people take our mental health for granted. We get on with our lives, eat and sleep, laugh and cry, work, talk to our friends, travel, shop and cook. But there may come a time, perhaps very briefly, when the ordinary patterns of living become oddly distorted. Perhaps we cannot sleep or we feel anxious, we may be afraid to go out, lose all feeling of hope and optimism or swing wildly from peaks of furious activity to periods of deep gloom. It is very common for mental health to be disturbed now and again. Most people have experienced an occasional attack of the 'blues'. It is part of being human. Sometimes these attacks come in cycles, affected by menstruation, or by the seasons. ...