Tag: Mental Health

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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Facebook Suicide Prevention Initiative

12 March 2015 /

On February 25th, Facebook’s safety division announced an extension of their suicide prevention initiative. They describe the initiative as being based on work with suicide prevention organisations, clinical research, and lived experiences from mental health survivors.

From what I’ve seen so far, parts of this initiative seem beneficial,  and useful for helping people through a bad night or self-destructive impulse. However, there are still some concerning areas, and there has already been at least one example of just how this initiative can be dealt with wrongly.

The Benefits

Firstly I’ll go through its helpful aspects. The idea of pointing out that the post suggests someone is upset or distressed could be effective. Receiving this message might be the shock that lets someone realise they are having difficulties beyond typical ups and downs, and so might encourage them to see what the offered help is.

From the other side, allowing people to send an anonymous “someone thinks you might be in trouble” message reduces one of the barriers people often have in talking about mental health issues. It starts the conversation in a low-risk way, without requiring the face-to-face questions that many people just don’t know how to carry out.

Facebook’s post showed some pictures of the support options.  The support page offers the following message:

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Treating Mental Health Issues: Definitions

20 February 2015 /

When talking about treating mental health issues, it’s important to look at what medical staff, researchers, and people with mental health issues consider to be successful treatment. As its a lot harder to measure and accurately define mental health symptoms than physical ones, it is harder to accurately judge treating them. To show what kind of terms are used when treating mental health conditions, I’m  using some hypothetical case studies. Imagine that each of these patients has just been diagnosed as being in their first Major Depressive Episode, and this is their first mental health issue. Each patient starts with a score of 18 on the PHQ-9, representing moderately severe depression using that system, is treated with an antidepressant, and is followed up six months later.

Response

After a six-week course of medication, Patient A retakes the PHQ-9 and scores 14. Six months later, their score is 15. Because their score has stayed lower, Patient A has had a treatment response. Their diagnosis would not change. In a purely medical sense, this is progress. An academic study testing the effectiveness of patient A’s antidepressant would be happy with a 3-point response, and would consider this a successful response. However, the patient themselves won’t see it that way.

A score of 15 is still in the category of moderately severe depression. Their day-to-day feelings and experiences may not have changed in any meaningful way and, depending on what side-effects the medication had, they may not feel the treatment was worth having.

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History of Psychology – Now for my favourite psychologist…

28 September 2011 /

I’ve been looking forward to writing this blog for ages, as it’s on one of my favourite psychologists; the humanist Abraham Maslow. The reason I like Maslow so much is that he was different from the psychologists before him:  he did not use psychology for looking at people’s symptoms, but instead for looking at the healthiest and most whole people- for example, he studied only the healthiest 1% of college students in most of his experiments.

Maslow continued Rogers’ optimistic approach to psychology, seeking to understand what drove the most successful and productive people. His theory was that people were driven by needs at 4 different levels, which correspond with the 4 ways of seeing the world that Existential Psychology talked about. Unfortunately,  I have no idea if this was coincidental or not. These levels formed his moderately famous Hierarchy of Needs, where the lower needs have to be met to enable later needs to develop and be met. However, there are flaws with this theory, such as why people who temporarily reach self-actualisation are able to ignore their other needs…a good example of this is the stereotype of the “starving artist”.

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History of Psychology -Carl Rogers

20 September 2011 /

As I mentioned last week, Humanistic Psychology is based on aspects of life specific to humans, which borrows from Christian thoughts about the uniqueness of humans. The main areas of study include personal responsibility, values, and freedom, and it also studies the process of conscious experience (known as phenomenology, which is a very fun word to pronounce).

The Humanist psychologists believed that people were basically good, and everybody naturally wanted to be the best person they could. Rogers named this best version the “real self”, but later Humanists had different terms for it. For Rogers, people already have the ability to grow and solve their problems, they just need to be made aware of that. Related to that, he believed psychological problems weren’t inbuilt in a person but were caused by incongruence– the gap between their real self’s “I am…” and their learned views of “I should be…”.

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