Mental Health Online: Fact or Fiction?

Abstract

The digital universe is home to a vast trove of content about mental health and mental illness. A Google search on “mental health” in March 2023 found 3,860,000,000 hits in less than one second. While online mental health information extends and augments other sources of information, for many people it has become the sole source of material. That is easy to understand: online information is always available and includes copious amounts of data, which can be located easily, anonymously, and generally without cost. Access to the digital world has increased to the extent that most people in developed countries (and many in developing countries too) have either a personal device with internet connectivity (92% in the US, 97% in the UK) or free access via computers in public spaces such as a local library (Petrosyan, 2022, 2023). A small study of UK adults (Stawarz et al., 2019) found that 78% of participants used smartphone apps to support their mental health, either alone or along with other technologies. It is important to remember that digital platforms are not regulated, unlike books or manuscripts in scholarly journals, which go through a rigorous review process. Social media content also includes misinformation, which Shu et al. (2020) define as unintentional inaccurate information (i.e., an error) that is not intended to mislead the user, and this is distinguished from disinformation, which is deliberately false or misleading information intended to deceive the user. Thus, it is necessary for both mental health professionals and the public to scrutinize these tools carefully.