Mental Health

Welcome back for another week of discussing the most difficult thing to talk about: mental health! If you have not checked out my other blogs yet, check out MENTAL HEALTH: IS IT A FRAUD? and MENTAL HEALTH: WHY THE STIGMA? for some more information on mental health awareness. In these two blogs, I have discussed how mental health is hard to talk about and how there is such a stigma around having a mental illness. I also talked about how mental disorders develop in your brain. I have also talked about how you need to be careful when researching mental health issues or disorders because there are some untrustworthy websites on the internet that contain extremely false data.

The Internet and Mental Health

Speaking of trustworthy, have you noticed that when you speak about something to a friend, or when you look up something on your phone, there will be an ad for that on your phone within the next minute? It is like your phone is listening to you. I watched a Ted Talk by Jennifer Golbeck who talks about this phenomenon; our phones and technology track our information and they study consistent things we look up, and this helps certain companies with advertising and with tracking our patterns.

This creeps me out when it comes to mental health searches! When people, who are extremely vulnerable, are looking up medications and symptoms in private, someone on the other side is tracking this information to be able to advertise it to them later. This can also be super triggering. If someone with panic disorder is looking up symptoms during an attack, and then later ads on panic attacks come up, that can trigger a panic attack for that person.

Privacy

Next time you are searching something that is potentially triggering, or you want that information to be in private, unfortunately it is just better to go to the doctor and talk to someone in person because you have no more privacy online anymore. Me, personally, how I would address this issue is by not searching up specific questions I have and just call the doctor; I am a very private person and I do not want my mental health questions out in the open for people to track.

To protect my accounts, I won’t use any material that is copyrighted or plagiarized. When I do use other sources to reference data, I always link the website to the creators and quote them in my blogs as well.

My New Social Media Accounts

I do have some new social media accounts you should follow regarding new updates on mental health awareness. I have a Vimeo on how exercise helps with mental health, so go check out that account to see how exercising can help your mental state of mind. I am starting up a Twitter, @mentalhealthru1, and it will consist of facts, statistics, and inspirational quotes to help my mental health awareness train continue to take off. Thanks for reading, and tune in next week.