Social Networks And Mental Health: Dangers Of An Increasingly Widespread Reality
Currently, Mental health is a widespread issue among the population, especially young people
This represents a fantastic advance in terms of normalizing a formerly stigmatized issue, but it undoubtedly constitutes a double-edged sword. Let’s look below at some of the main risks posed by the massive expansion of this type of information.
Evidently, Self-diagnosis will never be a recommended way to approach understanding mental health phenomena
We have seen how posts about it have proliferated exponentially in recent years and evidently there is an effort by many professionals to bring ideas about the same topic closer to people, but it ends up having undesirable effects: by greatly simplifying the language of psychology and psychiatry to make it understandable to those who are not experts, part of the richness of its content and background is also taken away.
To the already widespread practice of self-diagnosis of all types of diseases in search engines like Google, information of even worse quality is often added due to the lightness of many of the aforementioned posts, which do not have more information about their sources.
The above is more dangerous among adolescents. There is a kind of over-identification (and very lightly) with the possible symptoms of the different symptoms of psychopathology, which often leads them to pigeonholing themselves into categories and diseases whose central aspects they do not manage, 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.
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 judgment. And unfortunately in the context of a culture that values instantaneousness, speed, and also values the logic of self-help very positively, this happens too much.
Even worse 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 may distance themselves from the basic ethical principles that should govern the professions that deal with mental health.
Giving “tips” or simple advice generally has nothing wrong. Advice is not the same as a psychotherapeutic intervention. The first has more to do with a simple solution applicable to a generality of cases.
Psychotherapeutic interventions, on the other hand (whose place is in the clinic and consultation), make sense in the particularity of a person’s problem and the search for alternatives and solutions that help alleviate it. Generally what is found on the networks is more the former, but it is certainly not recommended if you try to apply the latter.
The difference between normalization and trivialization
There is a fundamental difference between the normalization and trivialization of 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, accepting the fact that the mental is as important as any other phenomenon involved in health or beginning to have a more generalized knowledge on the subject.
Trivialization is another matter: Not because we know that psychopathology or some type of suffering can be highly prevalent in society and that we increasingly have shared experiences about the same thing means that they should therefore lose their attention or perception of risk. In this context, the greatest dangers observed in social networks emerge: when all these topics become practically an object of consumption or a space for the appropriation of a generational experience, as occurs mainly among adolescents.
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 those who produce it are what topics they are experts in and what their sources are.
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 their approaches, which is not a problem in itself, as long as substantive background arguments are presented. that support what is being published and exposed. The three parameters mentioned above can be useful to analyze the quality of said arguments.
