The World Inside Your Head
Knowing when to seek help for a mental health condition is a problem that Albert Einstein once described thusly: “A question that sometimes drives me hazy: Am I or are the others crazy?”
Tens of millions of Americans experience depression, a mental disorder or some other form of mental health problem each year. But many fail to seek help because they don’t recognize their symptoms as a problem requiring professional treatment. Or if they know there’s a problem, they may be too embarrassed to seek help.
If Albert Einstein had had Internet access, he might have found some answers on the American Psychological Assn.’s Web site: https://www.apa.org. This site has everything I look for on the Web: It’s produced by a credible organization and is vibrant, current and comprehensive.
The APA site is easy to navigate, the attractive graphics download quickly and there’s no advertising to distract you. From the home page, you can go directly to the public section (https://www.apa.org/psychnet/) or to the Help Center (https://helping.apa.org).
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From there, check out the Concept Corridor, a shortcut to a variety of information (books, newspaper articles, Web sites and news releases) on popular topics including children, depression and managed care. PsychCrawler is a free search engine that indexes “quality psychological information,” not just from the APA site, but also from the National Institute of Mental Health (https://www.nimh.nih.gov), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (https://www.samhsa.gov/) and the American Psychiatric Assn. (https://www.psych.org).
Even if you don’t have children, you might want to check out the KidsPsych section, which was created, says one of the site’s designers, “just for fun.” And fun it is. KidsPsych is as slick as some of my son’s computer games, and you can see how it challenges a young child’s brain.
This “online gaming adventure” was designed with the intent that kids and parents would both enjoy it and could play together. Besides being fun, it was also designed to help children develop cognitive skills, such as deductive reasoning. One of the 10 games, “Oochina in Space” (https://www.kidspsych.org/space.html) involves remembering a secret code and pressing a sequence of colored buttons to get a stalled space station’s engines working again. I steered my kids here from the enormously popular Pokemon site and kept both a 3- and 5-year-old happily engaged and challenged.
The topics on the APA’s Help Center (https://helping.apa.org/) are relevant and useful. Psychology at Work focuses on workplace problems and balancing work and family; Mind/Body Connection looks at such issues as how psychosocial issues can influence pain; and Family and Relationships explores such issues as how to have a successful marriage, single parenting and elder care. There’s also a violence prevention guide for teens, co-produced with MTV.
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Another site I like is Internet Mental Health, https://www.mentalhealth.com, a “free encyclopedia of mental health information.” While the site is registered as a dot com, it’s a noncommercial site, fully funded by its founder, Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Phillip W. Long, who does not believe in corporate sponsorship.
The Disorders section provides definitions, treatment descriptions, research, information booklets, and magazine and newsletter articles (including the Harvard Mental Health Letter) for dozens of mental disorders.
These sites offer a wealth of facts and figures, but I also appreciated being able to read about mood and personality disorders on all these sites. There is just so much power in knowing and understanding human behavior and thought processes. As comedian Paula Poundstone said in a recent television interview, discovering that she had obsessive compulsive disorder was “like a light going on.” She says she still exhibits some of the same behaviors, but she can laugh about it now because she understands it better.
* Your Health Online runs the first and third Monday of the month in Health.