Category: Psychology

Posts about psychological topics, experiments, and principles.

Study Summary | To protect students who self-injure, focus on helping them manage emotions

24 October 2018 /

Research from the University of Washington Medical School suggests how to improve treatments for college students struggling with non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). Treatments which develop people’s practical skill in managing emotions may be more effective than the current therapies that increase people’s confidence in their ability to cope with events.

The study involved 187 students with a history of self-injury. The students provided information about their experiences with NSSI, including the age at which they first self-injured and the reasons behind their self-injury.

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Decision Fatigue

31 May 2018 /

On the way to work, you stop for your usual coffee. As you walk through the door, 20,000 cups of coffee are laid out all across the room, covering the floor and tables. Somehow, you need to choose the one you’ll like best.

Tasting all 20,000 is impossible. So after trying a few, picking your favourite, and going on to work, you may not feel too satisfied with your chosen coffee. With so many options, there’s no way to know you chose the best- the very next cup could have been even better. (20,000 sounds absurdly large, but that’s fewer options than some big-name shops offer.)

During the day there are only more choices and decisions to make; from the best way to get your work done, to meetings, to the quickest way home. By the end of the day there probably isn’t much room left for thinking about anything difficult, such as starting that project you’ve been putting off or resisting the cake in the cupboard.

Although we hate not being able to make our own choices, it turns out that having too much choice is just as much of a problem. Making choices, major or minor, drains us. It leaves us less able to resist impulses or see through illogical options. Psychologists sensibly call this decision fatigue.

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World Suicide Prevention Day | What assumptions do suicide prevention initiatives make?

16 January 2018 /

(This is the third post in this series; my first post discusses the most popular current theory of suicide as well as some statistics on it, while my second post talks about what suicide prevention means in practice.)

In the previous posts about World Suicide Prevention Day, I looked at what research currently says about suicide, and at what ways organisations and societies try to prevent suicide. In this post, I’m going to look more closely at what these methods assume about suicide prevention, and if those assumptions make sense.

Assumption 1) There is a good reason to exclude workplaces and jobs from this conversation.

When first searching generally online, links to suicide “post-vention” appear more readily than for prevention. However, there are some useful resources online, mostly created by Australian mental health organisations.

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World Suicide Prevention Day | What is meant by Suicide Prevention?

11 September 2017 /

(This is the second post in this series; my first post discusses the most popular current theory of suicide as well as some statistics on it, and my third post discusses some assumptions made by suicide prevention initiatives)

In the lead-up to WSPD 2019, I’ve seen many videos aimed at individuals who currently feel suicidal, encouraging them not to act on that feeling. But that can’t be the full story for such a large goal as preventing suicide. So, my question for today is; what does “suicide prevention” actually mean? What areas does it cover, and how does it work?

According to Wikipedia, suicide prevention is “the collective efforts of citizen organisations, health professionals and related professionals to reduce the incidence of suicide”. This is centred on direct intervention, and accompanied by four supporting parts: treating depression, improving people’s coping strategies, reducing risk factors for suicide, and giving people hope.

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World Suicide Prevention Day | How is suicide currently understood?

10 September 2017 /

(This is the first post in this series; my second post talks about what suicide prevention means in practice. My third post discusses some assumptions made by suicide prevention initiatives)

September 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day, a day of awareness held by the International Association of Suicide Prevention (IASP) alongside the World Federation for Mental Health and the World Health Organisation.

After reading about the day and the organisations involved, I was curious about how suicide is understood from a research perspective, and what explanations or theories about suicide are used to talk about suicide prevention. This post covers a widely-used theoretical approach – the Interpersonal-Psychological theory of suicide. The interpersonal-psychological theory (IPT for short) was first created by Joiner (2005), and is the theory used to guide the IASP.

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“Fake News” isn’t new.

9 March 2017 /

Right now, conversations about “fake news” are everywhere. Between debates about Facebook’s role in creating and promoting “fake news”, websites promising to fix or block fake providers, and the Trump administration shouting “fake news” at every opportunity possible, there’s a cloud of confusion around the idea.

But what actually is fake news? One thing is for sure – fake news was not born in 2016. It is not a sudden intrusion into the media world, and to treat it as such masks its history and context.

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Theresa May’s Reform Plan

11 January 2017 /

Theresa May’s mental health reform speech on Monday was the first time I’ve heard her say more than a soundbite, and also the first time I’ve heard her talk about anything other than Brexit, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

At the opening of her speech, I wanted to support her. I wanted to believe she would say something genuinely meaningful and compassionate. I also hoped (perhaps naively) that she would make reference to the effect of austerity upon mental health. May is in a good place to acknowledge the negative impact of previous political choices, after all. While she is maintaining many of those choices, she didn’t instigate them. She has mostly inherited the bad decisions made by others, most obviously David Cameron, becoming essentially the country’s largest-scale supply teacher.

Initially, her opening discussion of the overt and covert injustices present today were impactful, leaving her actual reform strategies as arguably the weakest element of her speech. Similarly, while her view on reducing stigma (below) says all the “right” things, it does so without providing anything tangible or practical, or any awareness of where the Government themselves have been guilty of removing that attention and treatment.

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How Is The World Feeling?

11 October 2016 /

If you have a smartphone, then right now you could be taking part in the world’s largest mental health study. Sounds interesting? Then head over to http://howistheworldfeeling.spurprojects.org/ to join in.

If you need a bit more convincing, then read on.

The survey is called How Is The World Feeling?, and it’s aiming to get a snapshot of how everyday people around the world are feeling during this week (October 10th- October 16th). The target is to have 7 million people taking part, and 70 million emotions logged.

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Mental Health Online: Twitter

1 May 2015 /

Compared to Facebook, I didn’t think of Twitter as a useful place for discussing mental health issues. This was partly due to the 140 character limit; I couldn’t see the use of tweets for in-depth discussion compared to something like a blog post or video.

However, when I looked through my twitter feed more closely, there was a lot of talk about mental health. Most of the people talking were advocates; either they wanted to start conversations, to support mental health organisations, or start their own campaigns. And most of these advocates were survivors, using their experiences with mental health to show others why researching mental health matters.

#Academia

Twitter doesn’t have the same kind of scare-headline news stories as Facebook, and there isn’t any research saying it affects people negatively. However, there is some research on  responses to individual hashtags. Shepherd et al studied the #DearMentalHealthProfessionals thread, a conversation set up by Amanda O’Connell in August 2013, and found there were four main types of discussion:

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Mental Health Online: Facebook

7 April 2015 /

Everyone, their mum, and their cat has Facebook, or so it can often seem.  As one of the most subscribed-to places online, and perhaps some people’s only online connection, looking at what Facebook has to do with mental health could be important on a large scale.

Simply searching for “Facebook” flags up a New Yorker headline- “How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy”. Narrowing it down to “facebook and mental health” adds BrainBlogger’s  “Facebook is no friend to mental health”, and “7 Ways Facebook is Bad For Your Mental Health, from Psychology Today.

The BrainBlogger and Psychology Today articles were almost uniformly negative, showing research that connects Facebook use to envious friendships, jealous relationships and decreased life satisfaction.

The New Yorker article included its fair share of research on the unhappy consequences of Facebook usage, but also included some optimistic findings. Their best answer was: it depends what people are actually doing on Facebook. People actively using Facebook to keep in contact and engage with loved ones benefit from the social connection. People passively browsing their timelines, however, are often left feeling worse after using Facebook.

Facebook as a mental health resource

If actively participating on Facebook is generally beneficial, does that make Facebook a good resource for people with mental health issues?

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