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Post a photo, tag a friend, and schedule your mammogram? Social media companies are testing the waters in raising users' health awareness with new tools, and it’s only a matter of time before mental health becomes integrated.
Just last year, Facebook unveiled its new Preventive Health tool, allowing the user to get personalized reminders about health care tests and vaccines. Facebook wants to focus on the two leading causes of death in the United States, heart disease and cancer, as well as the flu. Based on your age, weight, and guidelines from the American Heart Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Cancer Society, you can receive alerts to see what tests are recommended for health conditions and screenings related to you, like cholesterol or mammograms. Flu shot reminders will also pop up with information about where you can get one.
Facebook has a massive audience, with almost 2.5 billion users. With a platform that large, it has the unique opportunity to encourage healthy living and healthy habits. As an adolescent psychiatrist whose main focus is exploring the role social media and the Internet has in the care of young adults with psychotic disorders, I am encouraged by this new tool and look forward to its future progression.
We are already exploring how social media, and companies like Facebook, can aid in the screening and prevention of psychotic episodes. In October 2019, our team at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and Georgia Tech co-authored a paper published in the journal Nature about how changes in behavioral health manifest online, specifically on Facebook. We want to encourage people to get healthy and maintain their health before they even become ill. This new tool is a step in that direction.
Yes, obviously, there are vital questions and ethical concerns, especially around a person’s personal health information and what’s being shared online and with whom. This goes beyond Facebook. Could an insurance company one day deny you coverage because you posted too many photos of yourself eating red meat? Although these critical discussions and policies need to be considered, they should not obscure the potential good that may be done using tools like Facebook’s app.
There needs to be an ongoing discussion about who owns the collected data and how it is analyzed. According to Facebook’s statement, “Personal information about your activity in Preventive Health is not shared with third parties, such as health organizations or insurance companies, so it can’t be used for purposes like insurance eligibility.” I still think it’s up to the users to opt in or opt out of this tool. We have to be very careful about how this data is given and used, as the public doesn’t truly understand the inner workings of it all.
In many ways, psychiatry is behind the times. Schools should be screening people for depression and anxiety. Doctors should be doing the same, even if the patient is not coming to see them for that particular reason. Why aren’t clinicians doing it? Perhaps for a variety of reasons, from stigma to inefficiencies in the system to lack of time. Maybe we can use the new technologies from these social media companies to help do some of that screening or at least remind people that they should be thinking about their emotional well-being to make sure they stay healthy.
We don’t know how all of this integration will turn out – only time will tell – but for now, there is an opportunity to leverage it, and I am looking forward to this continued convergence of technology, social media, and our physical and mental health.
