Unwinding Mental Health With Technology
Mental health consists of many aspects of our life. It includes our emotional, psychological as well as social well being. Although everyone feels worried or anxious or down from time to time, very few develop a mental illness. So where do we draw the line? We can say that a mental illness gets in the way of thinking, relating to others and day-to-day function. It’s a physical illness of the brain that causes distortions in thinking, behaviour, or emotion that make it difficult to cope with the ordinary demands of life.
Nowadays, dozens of mental illnesses have been identified and defined. These include depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and many more. There are various factors involved like genes and/or brain chemistry, scarring life experiences such as trauma or abuse and family mental illness history. And therefore, these illnesses are being diagnosed in large numbers on a daily basis.
People struggling with their mental health may be in your family, live next door or work in the same office. However only about half of those affected receive treatment due to the stigma attached to mental health.
So, how aware are we?
It is indeed crucial to be aware of something that affects literally a quarter of the population at any given time. It’s not only mental health that people need to be aware of, so much as the fact that mental health can, and does go wrong. And when someone has a mental health illness, they should receive the same concern and help that someone with the more obvious physical element should get, not scorn and stigma, as it often happens.
Though the general perception of mental health has certainly improved over the past decade, studies show that the stigma against mental illness is still powerful largely due to media stereotype, lack of education and that people tend to attach negative stigmas to mental health conditions at a tremendously higher rate than to other diseases and disabilities such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease.
Stigmas related to mental health not only exist in the public but also in healthcare systems. Stigmatized healthcare providers can be thought of as a key barrier between mental health services that are provided by the government and people seeking help pertaining to mental health.
People who have experienced mental illness commonly report feeling devalued, dismissed and dehumanized by many of the health professionals with whom they come into contact. Key themes include feeling excluded from decisions, receiving subtle or overt threats of coercive treatment, being made to wait excessively long when seeking help, being given insufficient information about one’s condition or treatment options, being treated in a paternalistic or demeaning manner, being told they would never get well, and being spoken to in a stigmatizing language.
How can healthcare be mental health friendly?
The deleterious impacts of stigma in healthcare have promoted increased calls to action for health organizations to take leadership roles in tackling the problem. Research has identified several promising strategies for stigma reduction in healthcare environments.
These include teaching skills that help healthcare providers know “what to say” and “what to do,” ensuring that the program facilitators are modelling person-first behaviours and making good use of social contact. Social contact refers to hearing first-voice testimonies from people with lived experience of a mental illness who are trained to speak about their experiences of illness and its recovery, as well as their experiences within the healthcare system, and is a key strategy for interprofessional educational practices to stigma reduction in healthcare.
Two other key ingredients have also been identified- The first is providing interventions that include myth busting or a transformative learning focused to target unconscious biases and correct false beliefs that may be negatively impacting healthcare.
The second is demonstrating/emphasizing recovery from a mental illness and showing ways in which healthcare providers emulate an impactful role in that process. More fulsome implementation of person-centred recovery-oriented models of care is also considered to be important.
Can technology help bridge the gap?
In recent times, we have witnessed that with the advent of technology, solutions to mental health problems have become more accessible. On one hand, there are apps that cater to certain illnesses in particular, such as anxiety, depression and addiction. These apps diagnose as well as help the users deal with their mental illnesses. On the other hand, there are apps which simply promote a healthy and mindful lifestyle. You need not be mentally diagnosed in order to inculcate these in your life.
For many people, health related support groups may fill the gap between medical treatment and the need for emotional support. Nowadays, these support groups have been replaced by their online app based or web based counterparts. Some people wish to be anonymous while visiting a support group. Others don’t have time compatibility to attend these groups. Online support groups allow users to remain anonymous, people can feel comfortable revealing their struggles and engaging with other participants.
With the advent of virtual reality in mainstream media consumption, it has found its applications in treating mental illnesses as well. PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder is characterised by failure to recover after witnessing a terrifying event. Certain triggers associated with the trauma can bring back memories accompanied by nightmares or flashbacks, heightened reactivity to stimuli, anxiety or depression. This is mostly treated by the means of exposure therapy. This is where VR comes into play. Exposure therapy helps people confront their fears by breaking the pattern of avoidance and fear. Here, individuals are exposed to the things they fear or avoid in a safe environment to reduce the fear. Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy does exactly that with the help of computer generated virtual environments. These can be tweaked to help in confrontations that are otherwise not safe to encounter in real life and more and more psychologists are going the VR way due to the sheer flexibility it offers.
In a nutshell, technology can help in many aspects of mental health such as self-management, mindfulness, skill training, illness management, support and care, passive symptom tracking and data collection. It has many advantages over other means. These include convenience, anonymity, lower cost, service to more people, consistency, support and data privacy.
