As people struggled with the loneliness and isolation brought upon by the COVID-19 pandemic, they became much more open about their mental health. Even as lockdowns ended and the pandemic faded from the headlines, mental health has continued to have a position of greater prominence in our national conversation – and this has increased demand for mental health experts.
Unfortunately, this increase in demand has led to seemingly everyone branding themselves as an expert regardless of their qualifications. Some offer genuine, heartfelt, and well-founded advice. Many are well meaning, but misinformed. And sadly, a good number have cynically seized on the moment to make a quick buck.
For consumers this has created an environment in which the voices of fake experts have taken on prominence and misinformation abounds. This is dangerous because it creates confusion and can lead people to waste time and money on ineffective solutions.
Misinformation in healthcare is such a serious issue that the United States Surgeon General (2021) has flagged it as a national priority; however, most of the focus is on misinformation about physical health. For the time being, you have to protect yourself when it comes to mental health misinformation – here are some tips on how:
Tip #1: Be Cautious with Social Media Influencers
#MentalHealth surged in popularity on social media, especially on platforms like TikTok. Unfortunately, the quality of mental health information on social media is often quite low. In a study conducted by the online health platform Plushcare, they found that, “83.7% of mental health advice on TikTok [was] misleading. While 14.2% of videos [included] content that could be potentially damaging” (2022). Similarly, a peer-reviewed study published in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry found that 52% of Tiktok videos on ADHD were misleading (Yeung, Ng, & Abi-Jaoude, 2022). Both studies found that the vast majority of accurate mental health content was put out by licensed healthcare professionals.
To put the danger in perspective, ask yourself, “Would I trust these statistics if we were talking about physical health?” For example, let us imagine that you are feeling sick, you aren’t sure if you want to go to a doctor just yet, and your friend offered to give you some medication. Your friend says, “These are free, but only about half the medication is effective. The other half is mostly sugar pills and there are a handful of pills mixed in that will make you feel even worse.” Would you take the medication or would you just go talk to a healthcare professional and get safe, effective treatment from the start?
To be clear, I am not saying that all social media mental health content is bad. Social media has done a wonderful job of destigmatizing mental health and has encouraged thousands of people to reach out and get help. The issue is that you need to be careful about the content you are viewing, which brings me to my second tip.
Tip #2: Go Beyond the Meme
Even the good mental health information on social media tends to be massively over-simplified. And given the platform, that makes sense. It is difficult to reduce a complex mental health issue into a few lines of text or a 30 second video – and even a solid effort to do so is going to remove a lot of important context and nuance.
Remember, memes – and social media content more generally – are meant to offer highly condensed information in a striking and catchy form, not to offer an in-depth understanding of a topic. But when it comes to your mental health, an in-depth understanding is needed.
If the content of a meme or a short video speaks to you, understand that this should be examined further. You should read more on the topic and consider talking about it with a licensed healthcare professional. If you are trying to educate yourself, I highly recommend New Harbinger – a company that publishes a variety of books on mental health topics, all written by highly qualified experts.
Also consider going to therapy and talking about the topic with your clinician – they can provide additional context to ensure that you are understanding the information accurately and applying it in the most effective way to overcome your mental health struggles.
Tip #3: Look out for Therapy Speak
Popular discussions of mental health have been overtaken by a phenomenon dubbed “therapy speak” (Waldman, 2021). Therapy speak is language that superficially sounds like something a therapist would say, but actually contains misinformation and counter-therapeutic messages.
It is not always easy to tell the difference between therapy speak and legitimate mental health advice; however, there are some warning signs. Therapy speak is often recognizable by liberal use of mental health buzzwords, like trauma, toxic, attachment, narcissism, boundaries, co-dependency, gaslighting, etc. It also tends to paint the world in simplistic, black-and-white terms that divide the people into good vs. bad (usually toxic, narcissistic abusers and their victims).
Of course, trauma is real, boundaries are important, and there are toxic, narcissistic abusers out there. The problem is that therapy speak presents these issues in a dangerously over-simplified form (Waldman, 2021). For example, in the language of therapy speak, having good boundaries is often imagined as simply severing all contact with people you find distressing. Sometimes we do have to cut people off, but having good boundaries requires more.
Life involves dealing with difficult people – you can’t cut off everyone who upsets you. Also, most interactions are actively created by both parties, and it is important to ask yourself about the role you play in distressing interpersonal situations. These are complex issues that need to be carefully examined with the help of a professional. Simply cutting people off may just encourage a person to avoid their relationship problems, which will only make them worse over time.
Tip #4: Watch out for Biobunk
It has become popular to talk about the neuroscientific basis of behavior, especially in the business world. And much as we saw with therapy speak, the neuroscientific research is presented in such a massively oversimplified and distorted form, that it can no longer be trusted. This phenomenon has been dubbed biobunk by neuroscience researchers (Voss, 2012).
These oversimplified neuroscience explanations make it seem like psychological issues are much more clear cut than they are in reality. You cannot effectively address a problem on the basis of such an oversimplified understanding. Biobunk is especially dangerous when it comes to mental health because research has shown that these overly simplistic biological explanations can actually increase the stigma faced by people with mental health conditions (Loughman & Haslam, 2018)
Tip #5: Verify Credentials
Because mental health misinformation looks so similar to legitimate mental health advice, you should always look at the sources. Make sure that you take advice from people with well-established mental health expertise, such as academics, researchers, and licensed mental healthcare professionals. Do a quick google search to verify this person’s background and qualifications. Check out their LinkedIn to learn about their education and work history. Most states have a public online database that you can use for free to verify a healthcare professional’s license.
It is important to recognize that there are many people outside of university and healthcare settings that have important things to teach us about mental health – such as human resource professionals, occupational health and safety experts, and policy makers. It is also vital that we listen to the voices of people who have personal experience with mental health issues. That said, you still need to carefully vet their credentials. What training do they have? Do they partner with licensed healthcare professionals? What research do they cite? This brings me to my next tip:
Tip #6: Look for Supporting Citations
Even when someone has the education and credentials to legitimately call themselves a mental health expert, you shouldn’t automatically trust them. Expert opinion is better than an uneducated guess, but it is still widely considered to be a weak form of evidence (Baur, 2021). Experts should try to back up their views with concrete data – preferably from peer-reviewed journals.
A reputable expert will not only share their opinion, but also provide you with references to the data they use to draw their conclusions. You should always check their sources to make sure that they are relaying the information accurately and to ensure that the studies are actually of a high quality.
Tip #7: Look at the Date
Even when sources are offered, make sure that the information is up-to-date. Advancements in psychology are happening rapidly – more so now than ever. If a knowledgeable psychology expert is not constantly learning and staying on top of new studies, research suggest that within 5-9 years, their expertise is likely to be significantly out of date (Neimeyer, Taylor, Rozensky, & Cox, 2014). To be clear, older research can still be useful, but if all the studies cited by an expert are more than 10 years old, they could be operating on the basis of outdated information.
Tip #8: Avoid Mental Health Coaches
During the pandemic, many coaches began to market themselves as “mental health coaches.” Sometimes they went by other terms, like “trauma coaches” or “mental fitness coaches.” They will claim that what they are doing is different than counseling because they are focused on promoting well-being rather than curing an illness; however, if you examine the way they practice, what they are doing is indistinguishable from counseling.
To be clear, the term coach is entirely unregulated. Anyone – even someone with no training whatsoever – can call themselves a coach . Even when somebody does have coach training, that isn’t much of a protection. There are organizations that offer to certify you as a coach on the basis of a short, weekend-long training program.
Mental health issues are complicated, and if they are handled improperly, the consequences can be devastating. For example, a coach in Texas has been sued recently for allegedly offering low-calorie diet plans to people with eating disorders who reached out to her for help (Mark, 2022). Similarly, several coaches have been sued in the past for a variety of alleged misdeeds, including escalating a contentious divorce proceeding, diagnosing a client with bipolar disorder, and improperly reporting child abuse to state authorities (Montemarano, 2020).
Of course, there are counselors who have engaged in malpractice as well, but you have more assurances that your mental health will be handled properly by a licensed counselor. Before they are ever allowed to practice independently, a counselor has to go through an extensive graduate education program, receive thousands of hours of supervised experience, and pass a rigorous standardized exam to get their license. And after they are licensed, they have to regularly receive continuing education to ensure their knowledge is up-to-date. Their work is regulated by a state board, so when they practice improperly, they can be disciplined and you can look up those disciplinary records, as they are public information.
I am not opposed to coaching in general. Indeed, I have trained as a coach, have provided leadership and career coaching for others, and worked with several coaches myself – and I found coaching to be extremely beneficial. A coach can assist with a variety of issues, from clarifying your goals to learning to communicate more confidently – but they are not trained to work with mental health struggles.
The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is recognized as the central organization for coaching and provides all the training and ethical guidelines for coaching. The ICF is clear that if a coach is seeing a client with a mental health issue, they should refer them to a licensed healthcare professional (Hullinger & DiGirolamo, 2018)
Tip #9: Be Cautious about Mental Health Apps
The number of mental health apps has increased dramatically over the past several years. These apps have the potential to be helpful, as they provide quick access to mental health resources, and they can be used at any time when a person needs some help with their coping skills. That said, it is important to remember that these apps are entirely unregulated. No one is ensuring that they are designed by knowledgeable mental health experts or that they are protecting your data. Literally anyone can create a mental health app and put it on an app store.
This is not an abstract risk. Many mental health apps have been designed with no input from knowledgeable mental health experts, and as a result they lack very basic features, such as providing information about crisis services if a client starts to feel suicidal while using the app (Palmer & Burrows, 2021). You don’t need to be a mental health expert to know that a feature like this should be included in any mental health app. Ask yourself, if many of these apps lack an obvious feature like this, what else could they be missing?
The risk to your privacy is not abstract either. According to a study conducted by the Mozilla Foundation (Mozilla, 2022) mental health apps have the worst data protection standards of any product they have reviewed in the past six years. They found that many apps on online therapy platforms have weak security standards (e.g. not requiring strong passwords, absence of regular security updates), require users to sign vague privacy policies, and collect and sell user data to advertisers and other third parties.
If you want to use a mental health app, carefully look at who made it, what research informed it’s design, whether mental health experts were involved in its creation, and review it’s privacy policies.
Citations
Baur, C. (2021, November 17). What is the hierarchy of evidence? Retrieved February 13, 2023, from Research Square: https://www.researchsquare.com/blog/what-is-the-hierarchy-of-evidence
Hullinger, A. M., & DiGirolamo, J. A. (2018). Referring a client to therapy: A set of guidelines. Retrieved February 13, 2023, from International Coaching Federation: https://coachingfederation.org/app/uploads/2021/01/ReferringaClienttoTherapy.pdf
Loughman, A., & Haslam, N. (2018). Neuroscientific explanations and the stigma of mental disorder: a meta-analytic study. Cogn Res Princ Implic.
Mark, J. (2022, February 10). People with eating disorders sought help from a fitness influencer. Some got weight-loss plans, lawsuit says. Retrieved February 13, 2023, from The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/10/brittany-dawn-davis-texas-attorney-general-lawsuit/
Montemarano, A. (2020, February 21). When life coaches get sued. Retrieved Feburary 13, 2023, from Medium: https://amymonte.medium.com/when-life-coaches-get-sued-b6c7d3af515e
Mozilla. (2022, May 2). Top mental health and prayer apps fail spectacularly at privacy, security. Retrieved June 17, 2022, from Mozilla FOundation: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/top-mental-health-and-prayer-apps-fail-spectacularly-at-privacy-security/
Neimeyer, G. J., Taylor, J. M., Rozensky, R. H., & Cox, D. R. (2014). The Diminishing Durability of knowledge in professional psychology: A second look at specializations. Professional Psychology Research and Practice.
Palmer, K. M., & Burrows, V. (2021). Ethical and safety concerns regarding the use of mental health related apps in counseling: considerations for counselors. Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science, 137-150.
Plushcare. (2022, November 18). How accurate is mental health advice on TikTok? Retrieved February 13, 2023, from Plushcare: https://plushcare.com/blog/tiktok-mental-health/
United States Surgeon General. (2021). Health Misinformation. Retrieved February 13, 2023, from Health and Human Services: https://us02web.zoom.us/postattendee?mn=f_CL6ncbU2Eh2Vg3Lar-G1jhg2DHBG_vel1S.yUD3kiELv3tqn2zZ
Voss, M. (2012, July 25). How to spok psuedoneuroscience and biobunk. Retrieved Feburary 13, 2023, from Association for Psychological Science: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/how-to-spot-pseudoneuroscience-and-biobunk
Waldman, K. (2021, March 26). The rise of therapy-speak: How a langauge got off the couch and into the world. The New Yorker.
Yeung, A., Ng, E., & Abi-Jaoude, E. (2022). TikTok and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A cross-Sectional study of social media content quality. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 899-906.