Thanks for coming back to Psych Central! If you’re new here, make sure you check out my previous blog posts. The challenges and consequences of stigma in mental illness served as an introduction to this campaign, and gives you the lowdown on how common mental illness is and how important it is to seek help. Last time, we touched based on how fundamental it is to find accurate information on mental health. Most of this information we’re fortunate enough to access on the internet! Adolescents and young adults constitute as the largest group impacted by mental illness, but are also among the most frequent Internet users! This post aims to serve you by giving you some key internet safety tips to follow.
Don’t Be Scared to Report Something As Abusive or Harmful
In a TED Talk by Twitter’s Director of Trust and Safety, Del Harvey, there are multiple different types of destructive behavior on social media – abuse, trolling, spam. As I’ve mentioned in my first blog post, there can be a great deal of stigmatizing and discriminating language that floats around in social media. It isn’t uncommon for people to deem someone living with a mental illness as ‘crazy’ or ‘psycho,’ or insinuating that someone can just ‘get over it,’ or even that their behavior isn’t ‘normal.’
Twitter is transparent with their users, and it’s fairly easy to navigate through your privacy settings. You can report users, tweets, and even hashtags! Content can be marked as sensitive, and this would be especially helpful for issues or experiences that may be triggering. No need to fear retaliation or anything. If you see something that demeans individuals or mental health in general, please report.
On that note – here’s a link describing why our language matters.
Personalization and Content
Another useful TED Talk by Jennifer Golbeck discusses how social media and networking sites, like Facebook, possess detailed information about our clicks and likes in order to predict our behavior. Have you ever noticed that after another one of your random google searches, you miraculously started seeing ads for them plastered over your social media?
Coincidence? Not at all.
This is interesting in a multitude of ways. When living with a mental illness, it is normal to want to seek a community for it. We are hardwired for socialization, and the beauty of media is that it makes it accessible and easy. So connecting with others or even just posts relevant to you can provide some benefit. Finding support in a seemingly marginalized world would surely prevail over living in isolation.
For example, I started following this instagram account about mental health called @asafeplaceinsideyourhead after they popped up on my ‘Discover’ tab. Now, similar accounts have taken over my feed, and I happen to follow tons of other ones just like it! Other apps, like Twitter and Reddit, always try to personalize you experience based on inferences they make about your usage. Please note, that you also have the capacity to control this in your privacy settings no matter what social media you use! This would be useful if you want to see more or less content regarding mental health.
Follow me on other forms of social media!
Since we’ve been talking so much about social media recently, feel free to check out my Vimeo for this campaign and watch some cool videos.
My campaign, Psych Central, is also in Twitter. Follow me at @psychcentral101.
That’s it for this week! See you next time.
Blog Disclosure
I appreciate you stumbling onto my blog, but to be clear, the goal of this campaign is for health promotion purposes only. I do not seek to gain profit from any of my followers. I will not use copyrighted material or plagiarize information as my own without credit to the sources I use.
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