Mental health, mass communication, and media

Abstract

(from the chapter) Social media have considerable potential for providing mental health information and educational services quickly to the target audiences. This chapter proposes that media can play a role in encouraging positive mental health and well being, thereby impacting prevalence rates of common mental disorders. Today, multiple forms of media and creative broadcasts are available and can be coupled to social interventions for a positive effect on mental health at the community and individual level. It can help , through opening the discourse for improving mental health and facilitating the reciprocal exchange of mental health knowledge between professionals and local experts by experience. A negotiated use of media between professional, citizens, broadcasters, and publishers can provide a place where people refined themselves and interact, a place where security, not anxiety, is fostered, and a place of both renewable resources and sustained references to the past. Formats that link information from the "past" to the current swell of new information can facilitate knowledge building, decreasing anxiety and apathy while maintaining stimulating yet secure social interactions (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)