Research project – technology and mental wellbeing
I recently met Aislinn Bergin, a PhD student, at the King’s Fund Digital Congress and it was great to find out about her research. As I enter the final stages of writing up my thesis, it’s nice to be able to help out someone in the early stages of their PhD journey. Here is a bit more from Aislinn about her research: I have to admit that I wish I had thought of the words ‘people-driven’ when I first started my research. Instead I chose the much more difficult to explain concept of ‘autonomous’ – it’s also one of those terribly academic words that no one really knows the meaning of. Oh to go back in time! In fact the title of my research, “a constructive grounded theory study of the experiences of autonomous users of digital mental health” is quite a mouthful, so much so that I had to set up a website just to explain it! People-driven really does explain my research quite well though. I’m inviting people to tell me about their experiences of digital mental health, of using technology for their mental wellbeing. After spending the past 3 or 4 years digging deep into the world of digital mental health, looking at everything from computerised CBT to gaming apps for anxiety, I realised that there was something really significant going on. On the one hand you had all this research looking at the efficacy and acceptability of various digital tools and activities and on the other you had people using them. Lots of new stuff was being created, tested and rolled out with less than perfect results (few...
#JoyCott and the four affordances of networked publics
For some of us, the Asda #MentalPatient incident is etched on our memories as a Twitterstorm which took an issue from relative obscurity, to mainstream media notoriety in the space of an evening. Today a serendipitous scroll through Twitter led me to happen upon another corporate blunder – an indication of how much further we have to go in reducing stigmatising attitudes towards mental distress. Put simply, the @joythestore responded in a misjudged manner to a legitimate question from an individual on Twitter about a card they were stocking in their store. A couple of tweets later and @joythestore had unwittingly provided perfect content for another online protest. Rather than discuss the specifics of the offensive tweets, I will consider how the technical affordances of Twitter and the social practices of individuals combine to enable a viral protest. In order to do this, I draw on four affordances of ‘networked publics’ which, according to Boyd, are notably different in character from physical public spaces in the following ways: Persistence: the durability of online expressions and content Visibility: the potential audience who can bear witness Spreadability: the ease with which content can be shared Searchability: the ability to find content (Boyd, 2014, p.11). I use these four themes as a basis to examine how a mixture of technical affordances and deliberate social practices by people on Twitter, have turned the #JoyCott episode into a viral phenomenon. Persistence – the persistence of content on social media enables asynchronous conversations to take place without temporal limitations. Persistence also means that content can be hard to remove. Practices on social networking sites such...
Audible Thoughts – A unique research project in mental health
I have found undertaking PhD research a solitary experience, so it is lovely to find other people on the same journey and researching in a similar field. Ali is doing fascinating research at the same University as me and I can’t wait to meet up with her and exchange notes. Here is a summary of her research and a request to get involved: My name is Ali Hull and I’m a PhD student at the University of .Leeds. I’m carrying out some research into the ways in which we think, talk, write about and otherwise represent mental health, with a view to understanding how those things impact on clinical practice. I am looking for people who are aged 18+ and have experience of NHS mental health care to take part in my study. Purpose of the research There are many different ways to think about mental health. Service users and mental health staff don’t always agree on what causes mental health problems, or what can be done to help those who experience them. This sometimes contributes to a mutual sense of ‘not being understood.’ Previous research tells us that staff who work with people who are mentally unwell sometimes find their work challenging. To help them cope, staff use things like humour to help them. My research attempts to bring together the ways we think about mental health and the way mental health staff deal with the difficulties of working with those who are distressed. The hope is that my research findings will be used to help improve care. The first phase of my research will help me to understand...
Curating mental health content online – what do you think?
Last night I took part in a conversation with @markoneinfour @psycle_doc @MHnurselecturer and @PsychorBust about curating mental health content online. You can find a storify of our conversation here. It came about as a result of Mark posting a blog about the demise of One in Four magazine with reflections on what had worked and what hadn’t. You can read his post here. My PhD research has primarily focused on the now sadly departed The World of Mentalists (TWOM) blog which curated blogs and tweets from around the madosphere on a weekly basis – the nearest thing I’ve found to regular curation of personal/unofficial conversations about mental health. TWOM ran its course and is testament to the ephemeral nature of content online – things come and go, work for a while, and then no longer work. What I loved about TWOM was the fact that it was curated in a highly participatory way (guest curators each week), with many different perspectives, and shared fascinating blogs that I probably wouldn’t have come across any other way. It was also outside the boundaries or official or institutional conversations. There are all sorts of different types of mental health content online, from blogs through to historical websites through to Wikipedia pages and Twitter chats. And no doubt lots more. Is it desirable to find a way of curating this content and, if so, what would be the best way of doing it? Lots of questions to which I don’t have the answers but I’d be very interested in extending the conversation further and knowing what other people...about.me
Victoria Betton
victoria betton
director mHabitat | NHS | social media & mental health doctorate | interested in digital inclusion | parma violets fiend | http://codesigndigitalhealth.co.uk
