Ian Kilpatrick was the keynote speaker at the 2013 Fiji Human Resource Institute Annual Convention. His presentation covered the topic of “Is It Square Pegs into Round Holes or Round Pegs into Square Holes? The use of psychometric testing and personality profiling in industry”

The presentation was received well by all and Ian looks forward to being involve with the Fiji Human Resource Institute again in the future.

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Principal Ian Kilpatrick with the 2011 team.

Amy Corderoy – Sydney Morning Herald, September 1, 2010

Young people who get very little sleep are much more likely to become mentally ill, Australian research shows. Lack of sleep might help explain the puzzling increase in mental illness among young people over the past decades, said the research leader, Nicholas Glozier.

He suggested late-night internet use might be one reason young people were sleeping less. The study of about 20,000 people aged between 17 and 24 found those who slept less than five hours a night were three times more likely than normal sleepers to become psychologically distressed in the next year. Each hour of sleep lost was linked to a 14 per cent increased risk of distress.

“Sleep disturbance and in particular insomnia is a predictor of later development of depression and possibly anxiety,” said Professor Glozier. Less sleep was also associated with longer-term mental health problems. “A lot of mental ill-health comes and goes,” he said. “It’s the ones that don’t get better that we are particularly interested in.” Professor Glozier, who researches in psychiatry and sleep medicine at the University of Sydney, believed lack of sleep could contribute to increasing rates of depression.

“Older people and people in middle age have been sleeping longer but young people have not,” he said. “Large numbers of my patients are on Facebook or the internet or massive multiplayer games until one or two in the morning but are having to get up at 7am.” Sleep problems and mental illness could exacerbate each other.

“Many of these kids could have sleep problems as a result of previous disturbances,” he said. “But what we are seeing [are] young adults who tend to start off with anxiety and body clock problems [and] move on to problems like bipolar or major depression.” Along with researchers from the Woolcock Institute and the Brain and Mind Research Institute, Professor Glozier is pioneering methods to change the body clocks of sleep-deprived people. “Their body clocks are naturally out of kilter with the rest of society and [some] of them this really impacts on,” he said. Patients are treated with light therapy in the mornings as well as hormones such as melatonin to help them sleep earlier, which may help their distress. The study used data collected by the George Institute for Global Health, and was published today in the journal Sleep.

Nicky Phillips SCIENCE – Sydney Morning Herald, July 29, 2010

THE adage that friends can save your life turns out be true. Strong relationships with friends, family and colleagues can lower your risk of death by up to 50 per cent, a study has found. In comparison, low social interaction was just as harmful to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, or being an alcoholic, and twice as harmful as being obese.

An analysis of 148 studies, which combined studied the social relationships of more than 300,000 people, found the health benefits of relationships were consistent across age groups and both genders. “Relationships provide a level of protection across all ages,” said a study author, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University in Utah. There were many ways friends and family could influence health for the better, including regulating stress and encouraging healthy behaviours, she said.

Relationships provide a sense of meaning and purpose in people’s lives, which in turn encouraged better self-care and less risk taking, she said. ”[They] also have a direct influence on physiological processes linked to health including blood pressure and immune functioning,” said Professor Holt-Lunstad, whose study is published in the journal PLoS Medicine. While there was no magic number of relationships which could improve a person’s health, people fared better when they had a number of close friends, strong family relationships, and good interactions in the community. However, the review did not assess the quality of relationships, which meant the overall effect relationships had on health may be understated in the study, the authors said.

How people perceived the quality of their relationships was more important than the absolute number of friends or relationships they had, said Frances Quirk, a health psychologist and associate professor at James Cook University.

In addition to our East Gosford offices we also operate from the Kanwal Medical Centre. All appointments through our central phone number (4324 5400).

Ian Kilpatrick is registered with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and is able to see veterans and repatriation clients.

Sydney Morning Herald, June 3, 2009.

Princess Margaret had a naughty one. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that they were “sure to be present, abroad or at home, when children are happy and playing alone”.

Parents may fret about children having imaginary friends, but researchers say unseen playmates are really teaching infants the art of communication.

“Having an imaginary friend is a good thing,” Evan Kidd, a La Trobe University psychologist, said.

Dr Kidd and a University of Manchester colleague, Ms Anna Roby, asked children aged from four to six to describe pictures in a book. Those with mysterious companions proved to be significantly better communicators than children [without such companions].

That made sense, Dr Kidd said. To communicate information to another person, “you have to understand what they need to know”. That required practice. “When you have an imaginary friend, you have to invent both sides of the conversation.”

It was a myth that children could not tell the difference between real and fantasy friends. Some in the study had totally imaginary playmates. Others gave life to objects, such as teddy bears. But many would interrupt their talks about their fantasy friends to note: “It’s not true, you know. It’s only pretend.”

Children sought to understand the world around them by having imaginary companions act out roles. “My favourite,” Dr Kidd said, “was a boy with an imaginary wife and an imaginary baby. But the wife wasn’t the mother of his child. The mother was a nurse who travelled internationally. When asked where the wife was, the boy replied: ‘I divorced her. She talked too much’.”

It was also normal for children to blame some wrong they had done on fantasy friends. “They are separating the good self from the bad self.”

Princess Margaret, Dr Kidd said, had a troublesome, make-believe friend named Cousin Halifax. “I wouldn’t imagine too many modern-day families have a Cousin Halifax.”

One of 15 “early-career scientists” presenting research findings at Fresh Science, an [Australian] Federal Government-sponsored project, Dr Kidd advised parents of children with fantasy friends “to enjoy it. My worry is that people try to hide it.”