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TikTok is flooded with videos from users discussing mental health topics that have long been taboo: Managing anxiety. Seeking help for depression. Living with bipolar disorder.
In many ways, the shift in America toward cultural openness around these topics is a cause for celebration, said Christina Caron, a reporter who covers mental health for the Well desk of The New York Times. But the proliferation of online discourse around subjects like trauma disorders and cognitive behavioral therapy can come with a downside: misinformation.
“It’s hard to know what’s true,” Ms. Caron said.
In her new monthly column, Psych 101, Ms. Caron tries to combat that uncertainty by unpacking topics like what happens when your moral compass is compromised and how a simple technique known as cognitive shuffling can help calm a busy brain. She speaks with people who have experienced the symptoms that she is writing about, as well as clinicians and researchers.
Ms. Caron is a former clinical research coordinator, so she is familiar with weedy medical terminology. But her goal is to provide readers with trusted — and vetted — health information, without the jargon that can sometimes accompany it.
In an interview, Ms. Caron shared how she selects topics for the column and which subjects she wants to tackle next. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Why did you want to start this column?
The idea is to look at mental health terms and trends that we think are worthy of bigger conversations. You see a lot of people online talking about, for example, relationship O.C.D. We can add clarity to that and help explain why people are discussing the distinctions between different types of O.C.D., and why it matters.
We want to be conversational and help people understand topics and ideas that they either might be hearing a lot about and want to understand better, or that they hadn’t heard of before but that really resonate with them.
Your recent piece on moral injury comes to mind.
I got so much feedback from readers that the phrase was something they identified with, and that they had never been able to put a name to what they were feeling before.
Before your journalism days — first at ABC News and NBC News, then The Times — you were a clinical research coordinator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Was there a learning curve when you shifted to writing for a general audience?
I’ve always had an interest in health and science content, but before I joined the Well desk in 2021, I had never been a health reporter. Over the last four years, I’ve learned a lot about how to interview people and help them step away from some of the jargon that they’re so accustomed to using in their professional lives. Sometimes I say to them plainly: Explain it to me like I’m in junior high.
I try to think about this in the way my audience would. They’re quickly scrolling through their phones, glancing at headlines, and then they click into my story. I’m always imagining the most accurate way to explain a concept and the most compelling way of phrasing the explanation.
What makes a topic a particularly good fit for this column?
I’m looking at concepts that are percolating on social media, or ideas that might be especially resonant in light of recent headlines. I like digging into questions that don’t have an immediate, obvious answer that you can Google. I want to offer a deeper layer of explanation, or insight that you won’t find elsewhere.
In the first column, you wrote about a dissociative condition called depersonalization/derealization disorder, or D.D.D., which is thought to occur in only about 1 or 2 percent of the population. Why dedicate a column to such a rare condition?
There are a lot of people on TikTok talking about what it feels like to be disconnected from your life, as though you’re living in a movie or a dream. It’s not clear that all those people necessarily have D.D.D. or would be diagnosed with it, but it’s enough to generate a conversation online in which people are examining these symptoms and wondering, “Is this something I’ve experienced, too?”
The goal of the column was to clarify what the characteristics were, according to the most authoritative sources possible. We’re trying to counter any misinformation, and we’re also addressing people’s curiosity about something they think they might have noticed in themselves.
Some experts think D.D.D. might be underdiagnosed. The people I spoke with who had the disorder talked about the difficulty they had in getting diagnosed. In my view, some of the less common disorders deserve more attention, in part because it can be harder to find reliable information about them.
You typically start the column with an anecdote from someone who has experienced the symptoms you’re discussing. Why?
I feel very strongly that we should, whenever possible, include people with lived experience when talking about a disorder, and not just rely on experts.
How has the way people talk about mental health changed in recent years?
In the last decade, it’s changed quite a bit. A lot of people have noted how the pandemic, in many ways, pushed people to think more about their mental health and to talk more openly about it. But that isn’t the case across the board. There are still pockets of the country where mental health isn’t discussed openly or frequently.
But, on average, there is a greater openness to discussing mental health, and you can see evidence of that on social media, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, talking about mental health has been a great way for people to educate one another and to feel less alone. But on the other hand, these conversations do sometimes promote misinformation, or encourage people to label themselves in ways that might be too restrictive.
What topics are on your wish list for the column?
I’m interested in taking a closer look at tapping, which is also known as the E.F.T., or emotional freedom technique.
I also want to look into enmeshment. This is where two or more people, usually family members, are involved in one another’s activities and personal relationships to an excessive degree that makes it hard to have healthy interactions, and tough to have autonomy. How is it different from codependency? Is there a way to disentangle yourself?
I don’t know these answers, but I’m eager to find out.
Sarah Bahr writes about culture and style for The Times.
The post Unpacking Truths Behind Mental Health Trends appeared first on New York Times.
