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Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Stephen Goldsmith, Tutor in Mental Health Nursing, Swinburne University of Technology

Beyond its monsters and 1980s nostalgia, Stranger Things resonates because it tells stories of struggles familiar to young people: trauma that lingers, identity that wavers, and friendships that buffer against fear.

And by turning inner struggles into visible monsters, Stranger Things can provide a lens to discuss trauma, identity and resilience.

Here are some of Stranger Things’ insights into adolescent development and mental health – and how adults can use the show to talk to teenagers about their own mental health.

Facing our fears

In the series, the Upside Down is a dark mirror of the Hawkins township – a shadow world where threats feed on secrecy and avoidance. It works as a metaphor for “unseen” unprocessed experiences, shame and anxious avoidance.

Avoidance often reduces fear in the short term, but it can maintain post traumatic stress symptoms over time and interfere with recovery. Avoidance and thought suppression have been shown to increase severity of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms.

One of the most effective ways to reduce trauma symptoms is exposure to feared memories, sensations or situations in safe, planned ways. Exposure-based treatment, including trauma-focused cognitive behaviour therapy (TF-CBT) and prolonged exposure produce meaningful reductions in PTSD symptoms for adolescents and adults.

Stranger Things dramatises this principle: the young people at the heart of the show must face their fears to overcome their power.

Teens can experience what we might call “Upside Down moments”: times when they feel overwhelmed, ashamed or tempted to withdraw. Adults can validate their feelings and then gently pivot toward exposure. This could be small, supported steps to face what’s difficult (a conversation, a memory, a classroom presentation), rather than escape.

Facing shame

Vecna’s attacks dramatise shame and self-criticism. His voice echoes characters’ darkest self-judgments: Max hears accusations about Billy’s death; Eleven relives failures to protect friends.

Shame and self criticism are strongly linked with adolescent distress and risk behaviours. Skills like reappraisal (rethinking a situation) and self-compassion reduce shame-proneness and improve emotion regulation.

The show externalises these inner battles, making coping strategies visible.

You can help young people by reminding them the harsh voice in their head isn’t who they are. It’s just a thought, like a bully they can fight. Ask, “What would you say to a friend in your shoes?” or “What’s one small step to feel more in control?”

Turn shame into something they can face, not something they are.

Grounding yourself

Max’s use of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill to break Vecna’s trance is a vivid example of sensory grounding. Teens can replicate this coping tool with music, movement or other sensory anchors during distress.

Music-based activities can support emotion regulation and grounding techniques are practical ways to reduce flashbacks and anxiety.

Adults can help teenagers “ground” by asking them to notice and name things around them, by counting down from five. This might look like naming five things they can see, four things they can touch, three things they can hear, two things they can smell, and one thing they can taste.

You might also like to work with young people to create a “Vecna playlist” as a sensory anchor – sounds, textures or scents a young person can use when anxiety spikes.

Impinging on daily life

Will experiences flashbacks and panic long after he escapes the Upside Down. In the show, these are dramatised as him vomiting slugs, sensing the Mind Flayer, and freezing during school events.

Will’s trauma persists beyond his reaching physical safety, mirroring post-traumatic symptoms.

Max embodies complicated grief and survivor guilt after her brother’s death. Her withdrawn demeanour, risk taking and fight-or-flight responses echo patterns seen in adolescents grappling with bereavement and trauma, where avoidance and rumination can amplify distress.

After Billy’s death, Max pulls away from her friends and starts taking risks, like skating alone at night. Her fight-or-flight response surges when Vecna targets her, showing how grief can spiral into something more complicated.

When grief becomes tangled like this, people often cope by avoiding reminders of their loss or getting stuck in painful, repetitive thoughts. Both patterns can make the hurt even harder to bear.

Like Will and Max, some teens experience persistent flashbacks, panic, avoidance or guilt. If symptoms impair daily life, adults should consider professional support. Trauma-focused CBT and exposure based therapies are evidence-based treatments for adolescent PTSD.

Friendship as a buffer

At its heart, Stranger Things is a friendship story.

The party’s loyalty and shared rituals provide a scaffold against isolation and fear. Rituals of D&D campaigns, walkie-talkie check-ins and bike rides create a safety net.

When Eleven loses her powers, friends rally to protect her. When Max is cursed, they mobilise with music and shared problem-solving.

Supportive peer relationships in early adolescence are linked with better mental and physical health. Peer support can improve coping, happiness and self-esteem and reduce loneliness and depressive symptoms among young adults.

Adults can point out how the characters in Stranger Things share burdens and protect one another.

Teachers and parents can help teens build belonging by supporting activities like clubs, group hobbies and gaming nights, alongside creating family rituals. Connection reduces perceived threat and buffers stress. In schools, interventions that strengthen positive interactions among students and staff can enhance belonging and wellbeing.

Stephen Goldsmith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How adults can use Stranger Things to talk to young people about their mental health – https://theconversation.com/how-adults-can-use-stranger-things-to-talk-to-young-people-about-their-mental-health-272809

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Richard Morris, Postdoctoral Fellow, Faculty of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Lincoln University, New Zealand

Cut the words “please” and “thank you” from your next ChatGPT query and, if you believe some of the talk online, you might think you are helping save the planet.

The idea sounds plausible because AI systems process text incrementally: longer prompts require slightly more computation and therefore use more energy. OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman has acknowledged it all adds to operating costs at the scale of billions of prompts.

At the same time, it is a stretch to suggest that treating ChatGPT politely comes at significant environmental cost. The effect of a few extra words is negligible compared with the energy required to operate the underlying data centre infrastructure.

What is more important, perhaps, is the persistence of the idea. It suggests that many people already sense AI is not as immaterial as it appears. That instinct is worth taking seriously.

Artificial intelligence depends on large data centres built around high-density computing infrastructure. These facilities draw substantial electricity, require continuous cooling, and are embedded in wider systems of energy supply, water and land use.

As AI use expands, so does this underlying footprint. The environmental question, then, is not how individual prompts are phrased, but how frequently and intensively these systems are used.

Why every AI query carries an energy cost

One structural difference between AI and most familiar digital services helps explain why this matters.

When a document is opened or a stored video is streamed, the main energy cost has already been incurred. The system is largely retrieving existing data.

By contrast, each time an AI model is queried it must perform a fresh computation to generate a response. In technical terms, each prompt triggers a fresh “inference” – a full computational pass through the model – and that energy cost is incurred every time.

This is why AI behaves less like conventional software and more like infrastructure. Use translates directly into energy demand.

The scale of that demand is no longer marginal. Research published in the journal Science estimates that data centres already account for a significant share of global electricity consumption, with demand rising rapidly as AI workloads grow.

The International Energy Agency has warned that electricity demand from data centres could double by the end of the decade under current growth trajectories.

Electricity is only one part of the picture. Data centres also require large volumes of water for cooling, and their construction and operation involve land, materials and long-lived assets. These impacts are experienced locally, even when the services provided are global.

AI’s hidden environmental footprint

New Zealand offers a clear illustration. Its high share of renewable electricity makes it attractive to data centre operators, but this does not make new demand impact-free.

Large data centres can place significant pressure on local grids and claims of renewable supply do not always correspond to new generation being added. Electricity used to run servers is electricity not available for other uses, particularly in dry years when hydro generation is constrained.

Viewed through a systems lens, AI introduces a new metabolic load into regions already under strain from climate change, population growth and competing resource demands.

Energy, water, land and infrastructure are tightly coupled. Changes in one part of the system propagate through the rest.

This matters for climate adaptation and long-term planning. Much adaptation work focuses on land and infrastructure: managing flood risk, protecting water quality, maintaining reliable energy supply and designing resilient settlements.

Yet AI infrastructure is often planned and assessed separately, as if it were merely a digital service rather than a persistent physical presence with ongoing resource demands.

Why the myth matters

From a systems perspective, new pressures do not simply accumulate. They can drive reorganisation.

In some cases, that reorganisation produces more coherent and resilient arrangements; in others, it amplifies existing vulnerabilities. Which outcome prevails depends largely on whether the pressure is recognised early and incorporated into system design or allowed to build unchecked.

This is where discussion of AI’s environmental footprint needs to mature. Focusing on small behavioural tweaks, such as how prompts are phrased, distracts from the real structural issues.

The more consequential questions concern how AI infrastructure is integrated into energy planning, how its water use is managed, how its location interacts with land-use priorities, and how its demand competes with other social needs.

None of this implies that AI should be rejected. AI already delivers value across research, health, logistics and many other domains.

But, like any infrastructure, it carries costs as well as benefits. Treating AI as immaterial software obscures those costs. Treating it as part of the physical systems we already manage brings them into view.

The popularity of the “please” myth is therefore less a mistake than a signal. People sense AI has a footprint, even if the language to describe it is still emerging.

Taking that signal seriously opens the door to a more grounded conversation about how AI fits into landscapes, energy systems and societies already navigating the limits of adaptation.

Richard Morris is the co-founder of Kirini Ltd, a nature-based solutions consultancy. He receives funding from Lincoln University.

– ref. Does adding ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to your ChatGPT prompts really waste energy? – https://theconversation.com/does-adding-please-and-thank-you-to-your-chatgpt-prompts-really-waste-energy-272258

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Richard Nedjat-Haiem, Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara

Before Beyoncé, before Cher, before Madonna, there was Googoosh.

The 75-year-old Iranian megastar catapulted to stardom in Iran during the 1970s, only to be silenced by the Islamist regime that took power after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In 2000, she was finally allowed to leave Iran to live in exile.

For Iranians – particularly those in the diaspora – Googoosh symbolizes an era of cosmopolitanism in late-Pahlavi Iran, the period from the mid-1950s until 1979 when Iran’s popular music, cinema, television and fashion embraced modernity and questioned social norms.

But as protests roil Iran and the nation’s clerical leaders find their grip on power slipping, the “Voice of Iran,” as Googoosh is known, hasn’t turned up the volume. Instead, she’s found herself putting her farewell tour on pause.

“Everyone is waiting for my last concert in LA,” Googoosh told reporters in December 2025, “but … I am not going to sing until my country is rescued.”

Googoosh’s refusal to sing is not a sign of hesitation but a conscious political gesture – one that draws its force from her singular position in Iran’s cultural history.

Over the past several years, I’ve studied Googoosh’s trajectory as a musical and cultural icon. For Iranians inside and outside the country, she’s been a canvas onto which they’ve projected nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Iran, memories of rupture and loss, and fantasies of resistance.

A star is born

Born Faegheh Atashin in 1950, Googoosh was raised in Tehran by Muslim Azeri parents who had fled Soviet Azerbaijan. Although civil authorities registered her under the Perso-Arabic name Faegheh, her stage name, “Googoosh” – actually a male Armenian name – endured.

She grew up onstage and onscreen. Her father, an acrobat, incorporated her into his act when she was just 3 years old; by the age of 4, she was the family’s primary breadwinner.

As she matured, Googoosh moved across music, cinema, fashion and dance, rising to prominence within a cultural landscape shaped by Western influences and aligned with the state’s modernizing ambitions. By the mid-1970s, she had become the most recognizable figure of Iran’s pre-revolutionary popular culture.

According to Iranian studies scholar Abbas Milani, Googoosh “embodied the frivolous joys, the reckless abandon, the exuberant era of social experimentation, the defiant desire to debunk tradition and its taboos, and the vigor and vitality of youth.”

Onscreen, she wore the newest styles and cuts. Young Iranians copied her hair and hemlines. She danced, posed and sang like a global star – alongside Persian, she recorded in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic and Turkish – and, in the process, redefined what a female pop star could look like in Iran.

Exiled from the stage

Yet to some Islamist critics of the Pahlavi order, she symbolized “gharbzadegi,” also known as “Westoxication” – the belief that by embracing the West, Iranians were betraying the traditions of their people and bringing about moral decay.

In the year preceding the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Googoosh had a residency at a Los Angeles club. Yet while many artists fled Iran in the wake of the revolution to rebuild their careers, Googoosh returned, only to be swiftly punished for her past.

Authorities charged her in 1979 with “moral corruption.” A couple of years later, the new regime briefly incarcerated her, confiscated her passport and prohibited her from publicly performing.

Just like that, a central figure in the nation’s cultural life was removed from the spotlight. It would be 21 years before she would perform again.

Googoosh wasn’t alone; musicians and performers across the country encountered the same fate: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader from 1979 to 1989, saw music as a vice. The regime also categorically prohibited women from performing solo in public.

In December 2025, she published her memoir, “Googoosh: A Sinful Voice.” In it, she opens up about this period of her life – and her decision to return to Iran.

Even though she was at the height of her fame in the late-1970s, she alleges that her managers had misappropriated her earnings. As revolutionary unrest intensified and the Pahlavi regime imposed martial law and closed cabarets and theaters in an attempt to appease conservatives, her sources of income vanished. This prompted the move to Los Angeles. But mounting debt and substance abuse issues influenced her decision to return home.

She writes that revolutionary hostility wasn’t simply directed at popular culture; it went after pleasure itself, particularly when embraced, celebrated or expressed by women. To the Islamic Republic, music was not a form of art or a vocation; it was a provocation and a moral abomination.

Googoosh, who’d been a practicing Shiite Muslim who prayed, fasted and went on pilgrimage, describes the shock she felt that so much cruelty could coexist with claims of religious piety following the Islamic Revolution. Personal faith and public, secular performances had not been seen as contradictions in pre-revolutionary Iran.

That all changed in 1979.

Iranian culture in exile

The revolution catalyzed a mass cultural exodus: Millions of Iranians fled the country, with many settling in California, where other popular singers such as Hayedeh, Mahasti and Homeyra rebuilt their careers in exile.

A proxy Iranian entertainment industry emerged in Los Angeles, allowing Iranian popular culture to live on outside the Islamic Republic. In what came to be called “Tehrangeles,” studios recorded Persian-language music and television, while entrepreneurs opened cabaret-style performance venues.

The entertainment infrastructure built in Tehrangeles later expanded to Europe, Canada and the Persian Gulf; much of the programming was saturated with motifs of memory, longing and nostalgia.

Meanwhile, Googoosh’s two decades off the stage had only amplified her mystique. When she finally received permission to leave Iran in 2000, she performed her first concert at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre before a sold-out crowd.

Since then, she’s recorded nine albums. Yet most of her fans have shown limited interest in these newer offerings. When she sings them, chants of “Ghadimi! Ghadimi!” (“Old! Old!”) often rise from the crowd.

Like many in the diaspora, they turn to Googoosh not to engage the present but to transport themselves to an earlier era – effectively freezing her, and their memories of Iran, in the past.

Silence reclaimed

Once silenced by the Islamic Republic, Googoosh now voluntarily withholds her voice in solidarity.

I see this refusal as a reclamation of her agency; with Iran again roiled by mass mobilization and protest, her silence resonates as loudly as her songs once did.

If Googoosh has long functioned as a vessel for collective memory, she now stands as a reminder that memory alone is not enough – that nostalgia cannot stand in for a political reckoning, and that voices shaped by exile remain tethered to unfinished struggles at home.

Richard Nedjat-Haiem does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Googoosh, the ‘Voice of Iran,’ has gone quiet – and that’s her point – https://theconversation.com/googoosh-the-voice-of-iran-has-gone-quiet-and-thats-her-point-273447