I work with teenagers, and their concerns can often sound like this:

‘What’s the point, Miss? I’m not going to get a job anyway, I’ll have this awesome education but I’ll be living in a cardboard box’

‘You guys have totally screwed up the environment for us – they’ll be nothing left to fix!’

‘If we’re the future, how come you don’t let us vote on it?’

Do we have to study the news? It's all so depressing!

Of course, this is all concerning. I worry about them. If this is the talk we hear in the classroom, how does it bode for their mental health? What kind of Earth do they they are inheriting they think they're inheriting, and if it's all doom and gloom, no wonder they feel such resistance against the world that's raising them. I see their anxiety as they approach exams, pinning everything on a score that they have been misled to believe dictates their future and their involvement in the world, but perhaps the state of the education system is for another time.

For the first time in the history of Mission Australia’s Youth Survey Report, mental health was on the top of the list:

Young people were asked to rank how concerned they had been about a number of issues in the past year. The responses were consistent with previous years, with coping with stress, school or study problems and body image ranked as the top three issues of concern. Over four in ten respondents indicated that they were either extremely concerned or very concerned about coping with stress. Around one third of young people were concerned about school or study problems and body image. Around one in five respondents were either extremely concerned or very concerned about depression. The proportion of females concerned about each of these issues was much higher than the proportion of males.

According to Beyond Blue, in any given year there are over a million Australian adults experiencing depression, and over 2 million have anxiety.

@eco-train's question of the week asks whether negative media and biases are responsible for depression.

My first response was a screaming yeeessss! Anecdotally, I watched my husband rage at the television and the radio and the headlines for a long time. I could feel my own anxiety rising as he argued uselessly about America's involvement with the Middle East while I myself became lost in rabbit holes about mining and the Great Barrier Reef or the plight of asylum seekers in detention on Manus Island. This news-diving was all as I was suffering terrible anxiety myself and the conversations about it just made it worse. We were just so helpless and powerless. The world was fucked and there was nothing we could do about it except for things that'll blot it out - another bottle of wine, a pill, a mind numbing show on Netflix, sex and drugs and rock and roll. Or becoming a toucan.

And if all that fails, not getting out of bed for a week and constantly crying can be an option too. Depression often arises from a lack of control - a powerlessness due to circumstance or belief in one's own powerlessness. Consider, for example, the depression that can arise surrounding the loss of a loved one. What can we do against the permanence of death? Consider more broadly our social circumstance - gender, poverty, social class - all contributing to how much power we have in the world.

Consider this in the tsunami of negative news that swamps us daily, it's little wonder we feel powerlessness, which logically can lead to depression. So yeah, if we're concerned about humanity at all, it's no wonder we can feel that negative media contributes to our mental health.

Yet... can we really say that they are responsible?

Not really. We're buying it. We're clicking on it. And they know that, of course, but they're in the business of selling news - it's a supply and demand thing. @likedeeler said that well in his answer to the question here.

Our brains are totally wired for negative news. We are far more likely to remember, say, where we were on 9/11 because of the negative imprint it makes on our mind. We're far more likely to say that the week has been a shocker even though we've had lots of lovely moments. A bad day lasts into our week longer, affecting our mood. We process negative data faster and more thoroughly. This is a basic amygdala response, the flight or fight instinct - we have to process bad shit fast so we can survive. A garden hose is a snake before it's a garden hose. Therefore, in terms of responsibility, maybe we've trained journalists to report more on the bad than the good.

Trussler and Soroka's study invited volunteers for a 'eye tracking study', asking them to read from a news site and to read articles and watch videos based on the kind of political news they'd like to read.

The results of the experiment, as well as the stories that were read most, were somewhat depressing. Participants often chose stories with a negative tone – corruption, set-backs, hypocrisy and so on – rather than neutral or positive stories. People who were more interested in current affairs and politics were particularly likely to choose the bad news. And yet when asked, these people said they preferred good news. On average, they said that the media was too focussed on negative stories.

So it’s us that has the negativity bias. Bad news is a signal, perhaps, that we have to change what we’re doing to avoid danger. In research, flashes of negative words like ‘terrorist’ make us react far faster than a word like ‘holiday’. Thus, we pay more attention to negative words in headlines anyway. Trussler and Soroka also believed that possibly, we think the world is better than it is – we expect a positive outcome so the bad news is actually surprising and interesting. Maybe this is why I find dystopian fiction so intriguing – my life is nothing like the apocalypse that entertains me.

However, if we are consuming negative news at a rate far faster than we can process it, or are focussing on it far more than is healthy, then we risk dangers to our mental health. If it's all we are consuming, if it's all we are fed (and I think of my students again, truly believing that a bad future is inevitable in a media onslaught reporting the death of coral reefs, high rates of unemployment and so on) then we're bound to get depressed. We're bound to feel powerless against all of that.

Surely, then, it's up to us to be a little more aware of what we focus upon? There is a huge drive to bring mindfulness into schools (again, a conversation for another post) and I've talked about awareness and consciousness before as a way to access joy by bringing us into the present moment. If students are aware of where they're being misled and manipulated, and can choose to make choices about what they are consuming and believing, then they have more power in their lives. If they are conscious that they are focussing on the negative, they can then make the right choices to empower themselves.

I've watched students time and time again be inspired by celebrities endorsing positive social action, or underdogs achieving brilliance. The more we can teach them to turn away from negative bias toward more useful media, the more empowered they are going to be. Whether that's enough to ward off depression, I don't know. There's a whole heap of social issues that influence our state of mind. However, it's a useful strategy. We know that mindful thinking can help check us when we are going down well worn paths that don't serve us (I'm a failure, I panic when I go into an exam, I'm never going to be popular) and help rewire our brains, so the same logic applies when digesting media.

Thus, I propose educating with a focus on our inner ducks.

If we can channel our inner ducks, we can choose to focus on the good things that serve us well. We can choose to focus on our power to effect good change in the world. We can focus on nurturing our heartspace, loving those around us, creating the world we want to live in. Listen to the good stuff. Pay attention to the beauty in the world and all that negative bollocks fades into the background.

All images come from the very loved and very brilliant Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig. Do yourself a favour and check out his brilliant work here