Social networks and mental health: an increasingly widespread reality

Currently, Mental health is a widely spread issue among the population, especially young people.

This presupposes a fantastic advance in terms of normalizing an issue that was once stigmatized, but it is undoubtedly a double-edged sword. Let us see below some of the main risks associated with the massive expansion of this type of information.

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Self-diagnosis and social networks

Evidently, self-diagnosis is never going to be a recommendable way of approaching the understanding of mental health phenomena.

We have seen how posts about it have proliferated exponentially in recent years and obviously there is an effort from many and many professionals to bring ideas on the same topic closer to people, but it ends up having its undesirable effects: by greatly simplifying the language of psychology and psychiatry to make it understandable to non-experts, it also takes away some of the richness of its content and background.

To the already widespread practice of self-diagnosis of all kinds of diseases in search engines like Google, it is often added information of even worse quality due to the lightness of many of the aforementioned posts, which do not have more information about their sources.

This is more dangerous among adolescents. There is a kind of over-identification (and very lightly) with the possible symptoms of the different pictures typical of psychopathology, which often leads them to being pigeonholed into categories and diseases whose central aspects do not address, or not at all. Many times this results in phenomena of an identity nature, within which self-diagnosis becomes a central element in the definition of the person who uses it.

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Search for easy likes, the mistake of some professionals

Everything mentioned so far becomes even more dangerous when the internet and the sources that emerge from it are used as a substitute for professional criteria. And unfortunately in the context of a culture that values ​​instantaneousness, speediness, and also values ​​the logic of self-help very highly, this happens all too often.

Worse still is when we see mental health professionals delivering rapid diagnoses in spaces other than the clinic, in mass media, since they contribute by delving into the previous logic simply to gain visibility and obtain their own benefits that they can move away from the basic ethical principles that should govern the professions that take charge of health mental.

Giving out “tips” or simple advice is generally not a bad thing. Advice is not the same as a psychotherapeutic intervention. The first has to do more with a simple solution applicable to a generality of cases.

Psychotherapeutic interventions, on the other hand (whose place is that of the clinic and the consultation), make sense in the particularity of a person's problem and the search for alternatives and solutions that help to alleviate it. In general, what is found in the networks is more the first, but it is certainly not recommended if you try to apply the second.

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The difference between normalization and trivialization

There is a fundamental difference between normalizing and trivializing the suffering involved in the human experience. That it be normalized as part of life is even desirable, understanding normalization as becoming part of our daily conversations, that it be accepted the fact that the mental is as important as any other phenomenon involved in health or that a more generalized knowledge of the issue.

Trivialization is another matter: not because we know that a psychopathology or some type of suffering can be highly prevalent in society and that each time we have more shared experiences about the same means that for this reason they must lose their attention or perception of risk. In this context, the greatest dangers observed in social networks emerge: when all these issues become practically an object of consumption or a space for the appropriation of a generational experience, as occurs mainly between teenagers.

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How to distinguish useful information

It is difficult to give general guidelines as the type of information that circulates is so varied, but in broad terms it is important to know who are the ones that produce it, in what topics are they experts and what are their sources.

It happens in psychology and psychotherapy that there are many currents or approaches of thought that can be very diverse and even contrary to each other in some of them. their approaches, which is not in itself a problem, as long as substantive substantive arguments are presented to support what is being published and exposing. The three parameters mentioned above can be useful to analyze the quality of these arguments.