From doom scrolling to video games, we're constantly hearing how digital technologies are ruining our mental health, but do these claims hold any credence? To try and get to the bottom of this question, Bey and Kirsten sit down with three different guests - trauma researcher Roxanne Cohen Silver, author Jordan Shapiro, and the Franklin Institute's own Dr. Jayatri Das - to investigate the 24 hour news cycle, fears around kids using new technology, and the potential of chatbots and VR in mental health treatment.

Links for today's episode:

• Learn more about Dr. Roxanne Cohen Silver and her extensive research into the effects of stressful news consumption
• Learn more about Dr. Jordan Shapiro and his books on parenting in the modern age

Resources for today's episode

• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline
• NAMI, for non-crisis mental health needs
• VOICES Center for Resilience for support following a mass tragedy

Hey, what's y'all, it's the Bul Bey checking in ahead of today's episode.

There's some discussion of September 11

th and the news coverage surrounding the event.

If this is an activating topic for you, please proceed with caution.

And we've also included some resources in the show notes.

Hello, hello.

I'm Kirsten Michelle Cillis.

And I'm the Bul Bey.

We're the hosts of this podcast, So

Curious, presented by the Franklin Institute.

Today we are investigating how technology

affects our mental health, both the good and the bad.

First, we'll be joined by Dr.

Roxanne Cohen Silver to learn about how

media coverage and consumption of stressful events affects us.

Then, we'll sit down with Dr.

Jordan Shapiro to discuss children's relationships with technology, and how

growing up in a digital landscape can actually be a good thing.

And to round out the episode, we'll be joined by our friend, Dr.

Jayatri Das, we love her!

Chief Bioscientist at the Franklin

Institute for another installment of her Body of Knowledge segment.

What do you think about technology?

Do you feel that it benefits your mental health?

You know I feel like I'm at this threshold

where I have an online profile, obviously, you can find my website.

I'm on Instagram. All this stuff.

Yada, yada, yada.

Technology is one of those things where I'm super appreciative of the sharing of

information, being able to connect with people on the other side of the planet.

Mhmm, Yeah.

I'm from Philadelphia, but a lot of my listeners are not.

So technology is great, but it's also overwhelming.

You got to have a little break, a little pause.

What about you? I like technology when it comes to games

and video games, games on my phone, kind of mindless stuff.

But I hate the social aspect of technology.

Like, I hate being constantly reachable.

Our forefathers used to wait months for letters.

Like, you can wait for me to respond to you.

Like four moons - and four moons! Right exactly.

If I haven't gotten back to you in a fortnight, then you can call me back.

A fortnight, yeah yeah exactly. Our next guest, hopefully is going to be

able to help us understand this a little more.

Dr. Roxanne Cohen Silver, thank you so much

for agreeing to sit down and speak with us today.

Roxanne, can you introduce yourself and talk about what it is you do?

Yes, my name is Roxanne Cohen Silver.

I am Distinguished Professor of

Psychological Science, Public Health and Medicine at the University of California,

Irvine. And I study how individuals and communities respond to adversity.

And in particular, for the last few decades, I've been studying how people

cope with large scale disasters, collective traumas, natural disasters,

mass violence events, large infectious disease outbreaks.

Wow. You are needed right now.

Well, what we're experiencing since 2020, for sure.

Yes, definitely.

A lot of your research has been the longitudinal study of how media coverage

of 911 impacted mental health, where news was spread primarily through television

coverage and how it affected people who were watching it on TV.

It's so interesting, all of it.

Can you talk about how the TV broadcasts, when it came to something like September

11th, impacted those people who were just watching them?

We followed a large, representative

national sample of Americans from days after the 911 attacks for several years.

And one of the things that we saw was the

importance of media exposure in the days after the 9/11 attacks.

As you may remember, the all regular TV programs were suspended

for a nonstop coverage of the 9/11 attacks.

And we found that those individuals who spent a great deal of time watching

news on television about the attacks, and again back then, that was the primary way

in which we received information, were more likely over the next several years to

be experiencing symptoms of post traumatic stress.

They were more likely to be anxious, they

were more likely to be worried about terrorism.

And over the next few years, those who

spent a great deal of time watching television about the attacks were more

likely to develop physical health problems.

And in fact, we saw that those who watched

the attacks live on television were most likely to be the ones who exhibited these

physical and mental health effects over time.

Now, back after 9/11, traditional media - television, print media, radio - was the

main way in which people received their news about tragedy.

But things have dramatically changed over the last two decades.

I would love to talk about that change, actually.

Yeah. In a modern age, social media and

smartphones, news is accessible, you know, practically anywhere.

How has that change the consumption of

news, and in turn, the amount of stress that's caused by it?

So it's changed very dramatically in several ways.

So let me just start with the fact that

after 911 there were editors who made decisions about what content would be

shown on the television and in print media.

In addition to having an editor that would

be moderating the content, there were very few opportunities to simultaneously be

exposed to all sorts of images and videos and sounds.

But with the advent of smartphones and the

fact that people carry powerful cameras in their pockets, there are many

opportunities for individuals to take pictures, to take videos,

and rapidly disseminate that content by posting it to their social media feeds.

And there is no editor making any

decisions about what it is that we can see.

Yeah we're seeing people go live.

We can see it live, we can see it graphically, we can see it without anybody

making the decision that we shouldn't be seeing it.

But now let's just consider.

I could be sitting on my cellphone, the radio could be playing in the background.

I could have images on my television, I

could be getting tweets, let's say, on my phone.

I could be searching somewhere online on

my laptop about a different tragedy, different angles, different pictures,

different videos, it's really enormously different.

That sounds stressful, that sounds very stressful.

Yeah. There's a popular term that has

emerged online since 2020, which is doom scrolling, the issue of compulsively

reading about upsetting news on social media.

What is the insight you found into why do we do this?

Well, that's a very complicated question.

Doom scrolling, where you click on one link and then another link and another

link and you lose sort of time perspective and all of a sudden you find out that

you've spent many more minutes than you had expected in consuming bad news.

And in the early days of 2020, it was all bad news all the time.

It was very difficult to find any positive news.

We found in our research on the Pandemic in particular,

which was consistent with other research we'd seen after other tragedies, that the

more hours in which people were consuming all bad news all the time, the more likely

they were to be exhibiting symptoms of post traumatic stress or acute stress.

That is ruminations, perhaps nightmares, inability to sleep, hypervigilance.

In addition, we found that people were more likely to report feeling anxiety, to

report feeling distressed, more difficulty functioning day to day.

And we have found consistently that with

increased hours we see increased stress response.

Wow.

And is there a way, I mean, I know this is a loaded question.

Is there any research or insight into, like, how we stop doing this, how we

keep ourselves from whatever that impulse is that makes us want to do that?

I would say that the one thing, and this

is based on a lot of research that's been done about habits that people want to

break, is to make sure that people are conscious of this activity.

So, what I was describing previously about clicking on a link and then another link,

and then another link happens almost mindlessly.

Whereas what we've been advocating on the

basis of our research over the years is that people should try to stay conscious

about the amount of time that they are consuming news.

Perhaps pick one or two or three times during the day in which they will check

the news, but be very deliberate about it, very vigilant about how much time they're

spending, and make it a habit to attend to how much time one is spending.

What are some best practices that you could offer when it comes to sharing

information about a mass tragedy on social media or just offline?

How do we best practice sharing hard news?

You know, that's a great question.

One of my graduate students is very

interested in that question because we don't really know very much

about why it is that people distribute graphic and vivid images of tragedy.

My student Kaylee Estes is studying this

process, trying to understand what is motivating people.

But, we're right in the midst of

collecting data and we don't have any answers yet.

Well, when you get it, come back on the So Curious podcast.

Yeah.

I don't necessarily think that when people send links or send images that they are

thinking carefully through how the recipient is going to respond.

I think they want to get the news out and it happens much less graphically.

For example, with the election, getting

multiple texts from friends and family members telling me about outcomes and

particular races that have been called, they just want to make sure I know.

Now, with the election, they're not sending me graphic gruesome images, but

they are wanting to share that information with me.

And in the same fashion, people may see

something and just want to send it out to their friends and loved ones.

But again, I think it's really important,

in the same way that we need to moderate how much time we are spending immersed in

bad news all the time, I think we also need to be cognizant of the impact of our

distribution and recognize that this content is not healthy to see.

The more graphic, the more gruesome these images, and the more likely we are to stay

immersed in them, the more likely it is to impact our mental and physical health.

Yeah, and so what comes to mind too is, we hear tragic stories like deaths and

shootings and explosions and all these different things.

It's really become normal.

I know I have a bit of a toned down response compared to what my response was

in 9/11, you know, very scared, very confused, not knowing what's going on.

Now I see something pop up on my phone and I'm like, oh yeah.

What's very upsetting is when I am sent them or I see them without warning that

I'm going to as opposed to something that I'm seeking out.

I see people a lot on 9/11 every year

posting "Never forget the people that lost their lives" and in the picture will be

like a very, very graphic photo of the plane hitting the tower or something, and

it's like, is that really the best way to be honoring people?

You know? And is it helping anyone to post that as

opposed to just, I don't know, the building before or...

And speaks to that culture of sharing trauma, right?

Yeah, right.

My favorite picture are the two blue lights

Oh yeah Showing laser beams of the World Trade

Center where the World Trade Center had been.

I've been very conscious of and vocal about exactly what you're saying.

Mhmm. Well, thank you.

I appreciate that, seriously.

And anytime I see any graphic images that are trying to serve as a, quote,

"anniversary" to remind people, I do reach out to them.

I do want to get back to this point that

you were saying about the people get desensitized.

We are not seeing that in our data.

We are seeing instead, sort of a cascade, a compounding of stress, one on top of the

other, on top of the other, on top of the other.

And in fact, we have not seen in any of the studies that we've conducted over the

years, a sense that people are really desensitized.

Now, you may not have that same immediate reaction of the horror that you had after

9/11, but it compounds one on top of the other.

And it seems instead that people are getting more sensitized.

After one, they're more reactive to the next,

Wow! And they're more reactive to the next.

I do agree that we're probably less

shocked, but I think that these kinds of tragedies make us anxious and lead many of

us to monitor our environment with more energy, and we're more likely to be

immersed in media about this and then more disturbed as a consequence.

Now, ufortunately, there is likely going to be more tragedy in the future.

What advice would you give listeners for

the next time a stressful mass event happens?

Well, I will say I'm in no way advocating for censorship, and I'm in no way

advocating that people put their head in the sand.

But what I would recommend is that people

monitor the amount of time that they're spending.

There are many, many different opportunities to get one's news.

I'd say pick two or three that you trust,

and make a decision about how much time you're going to be spending.

These kinds of tragedies are going to continue to happen.

I would be very happy if I ran out of

things to study, but that just doesn't happen.

All of these are things to say, be

deliberate in one's consumption of the news, deliberate

in one's exposure to images, and be conscious of the fact that the more we

engage with bad news, it's not likely to be psychologically beneficial.

Mhm. Yeah. Thank you.

I mean, this whole season we're doing is on mental health and pretty much across

the board, we've just been hearing the importance of mindfulness.

Thank you.

All right.

Thanks again, Roxanne, for coming on the show.

Kirsten, what's your relationship with the digital news cycle?

I feel like there's not even a right answer to that question.

I try to be careful about how much news I'm intaking.

Like my mom and my stepdad, when I go

over, they have the news on all the time, and I'm like, this cannot be good.

At the top of the hour, we're going to be discussing .

Right. At the top of the hour, we're going to

discuss something so upsetting it's going to ruin your day!

Yea yeah , for sure. For sure.

More at 11! And you're like, that, I don't know.

I think I have to be careful with it

because I do doom scroll . Then now for a look at some of the more

positive impacts that technology can have on us because there are positives, I'm

looking forward to hearing them, we are joined by Dr.

Jordan Shapiro.

Welcome to So Curious!

Jordan Shapiro, please introduce yourself and tell us what you do.

Yes, my name is Jordan Shapiro, and I am a

writer, an author, a parent, and a Temple University professor.

So how did you get interested in how digital technology affects kids' minds?

What was your catalyst for this?

Well, my catalyst was I got divorced from my now ex-wife, and I had two little kids

at the time, and of course I was worried about their mental health.

I figured, you know, as hard as divorce

was on me, I could only imagine how hard it was for two little kids.

So I tried to work with them, but I

realized really quickly that all they wanted to do was play video games, right?

And I was like, if I'm like, stop playing

video games and go take a walk in the woods and let's process your feelings, I

was pretty sure that would feel like punishment to them.

So instead I started playing video games

with them and I started trying to understand video games and to understand

in general just the way that technology was affecting my own kids.

And then it just became a very interesting subject that a lot of people have a lot of

things to say about, very little of which is based on any real research.

Yeah! So I was really fascinated by it.

What aspects of technology have the most

measurable effects on children, from your perspective?

Well, it's kind of har d for anyone to say, right?

So this is one of the biggest issues in all research on technology and development

is that we still don't have any kind of open research standard.

So you sit there and you imagine, right,

the amount of data that YouTube and Facebook and TikTok must have about kids

behaviors, and researchers don't have access to that.

So most of the research that we have is

sort of parent surveys, or just self reported by kids.

Sometimes, they'll put kids in a lab and

watch them, but the real measurable effects we don't really know, right, until

all those giant media conglomerates are ready to open their data to researchers.

But also their main asset is their data.

So I certainly understand why they wouldn't want to share it.

Yeah, it seems like a double edged sword.

Like it's exciting because we're on the threshold of finding out and learning,

but, we could have probably learned these things, like years ago, if they didn't

withhold so much of the information that we had access to all these.

Yeah, I mean, if you just think about it,

companies like YouTube, know exactly how much attention kids have when they get

bored, when they click off, when they pause.

But what we have instead is a lot of

speculation about the effects on kids, right.

So we get a lot about mental health and usually negative, although very little of

it is based on research that has large effect sizes.

I mean, almost none of it.

And what would you say is the top three things that you would say are pros in

terms of kids interacting with technology and video games?

I mean, there's a couple of different ways to think about this, right?

On the one hand, we often think very

narrowly when we think about technology, right?

So we say technology, we usually mean

digital information technologies, not the broad scale of what technology is, right?

Yeah

And I don't just mean like, cars, obviously, are technology also.

But so is, like, the chalkboard, and so is a chair and so all our books. They're all

technologies that humans invented in order to do something, whether that's

communication of some sort or something else.

The reason I'm saying all that is just to

point out that when we take those for granted, it's because they've already

become so embedded in our thinking, and this sort of consciousness with which we

move through the world, we just take them for granted.

And so to me, I think we're all adults here, and we know that as an adult, an

enormous amount of your life is lived through technology, right?

Live through your phone, live through your computer, right?

Your romantic life, your professional life, maybe even your spiritual life.

Like, all these things are connected through this technology, which means it's

an inherent part of what it means to live or be in the world in the 21st century.

So to me, the primary importance of kids

having access to technology and mentorship while accessing it, is that we're actually

preparing them to live in a world in which it is not optional, right?

It's no longer optional to have technology.

So every time we sort of turn it into a

black and white, zero sum game of, like, is technology good or bad?

What's good about or what's bad?

We're sort of missing the real point,

which is, it's here, it's happening, and we need to make sure our kids, one, know

how to operate it from just a skill set level, but also have a moral, ethical

consciousness around it and have a well being and self care around it.

As a parent, your kids are not little anymore.

Now they're teenagers. Teenagers

Yeah, almost adults.

So why is it that you think people get scared about kids using new technology?

Where do you think that narrative comes from?

Two things here, right?

On the one hand, in general, people are always afraid of new technologies.

I use the printing press often as an

example, just because we all think of it as such a great invention.

But at the time, like, they were complaining.

They were worried about fake news.

They were worried that if you

decentralized the information, which at the time was held by governments and

monarchs and churches, and they were like, well, wait, if anyone can just print a

pamphlet that says anything, how does anyone know what to trust anymore?

And there's a lot of resistance in the beginning as to every technology.

In my book, The New Childhood, I write about how in trains, when we first having

real passenger trains, they used to have cars with blacked out windows because they

were sure that if the kids saw so much of the world going by so fast.

They'd have brain damage, right? Wow!

Because the human brain wasn't capable.

I mean it's normal to have these fears.

It's great to have them too, right? We want to have fears.

We want to do the research, we want to solve those problems.

But the other thing, I think, is not even a technological fear, right?

I think it's actually a fear about seeing the change in childhood, right?

I also write about playgrounds and the

sandbox are all brand new play technologies, right?

They didn't even exist until the beginning of the 20th century.

And at the beginning, many people were against it.

They were against idleness.

A sandbox?

Yeah! They were like, the kids are going

to waste all their time in this sandbox where they're imagining whole universes,

and it's crazy that they're not going to come in for dinner when they're called.

There's a whole book of this called The Story of the Sand Pile by G.

Stanley Hall, who's a very famous

psychologist, actually, the guy who invented adolescence.

He wrote a book called Adolescence, but they were afraid of all these things.

And I think what's at the core of that is

that parents intuitively sort of recognize that this is a different way of being, and

that it's going to lead to a different kind of consciousness, and it's going to

lead to different ways of thinking about the world.

And that that is inherently sort of scary as a parent, right?

It's the same as letting your kid go to sleep away camp.

You're like, I don't know what they're going to be exposed to.

I don't know what things are going to say.

I don't know what it's going to mean.

And I think that is inherently scary to someone who is responsible for another

human and everything about their life and their well being.

And so the fear certainly makes a lot of

sense, both of the fears, whether it's just the fear because it's new technology,

or the fear of kids with different consciousness than you.

What does it look like for a child, or for

parents for that matter, to practice mindful technological consumption?

Yeah. Well, the first thing is absolutely like,

you're totally right to ask how parents should think about that.

In my opinion, parents in general aren't thinking about it enough.

They do a lot of thinking about sort of, what I call the on/off switch mentality,

which is, should they have it or shouldn't they have it?

Screen time versus zero screen time, right?

Which is not really thinking about it.

It's sort of going, "am I going to think

about it or am I not going think about it"?

But if you think about, for example, my

kids were little and I had to teach them to cross streets, right?

Like, what did I do?

I held their hand and I talked to them about it for, like, ten years, right?

It wasn't even like twice, but ten years

of like, okay, now you hold my hand, look both ways, until I was like, now I trust

that you can take care of your own safety while walking across the street.

There's definitely not enough of that happening when it comes to technology.

Part of the reason it's not happening is

because parents have been fooled into really thinking that they don't know

anything about technology, which on some level is true, but also, parents almost

never know anything about what kids do. We often hear this sort of

rhetoric where people say, how do we prepare for a world we can't understand?

And I always think, my grandparents didn't

understand the world my parents lived in, and my parents don't understand the world.

Mhmm that's so toughThat's normal.

That's just parenting!

Yeah and What do you prioritize? You know what I mean?

Yeah. And at the core of it are questions about

values, and safety of course, but it's values.

And parents do know their values, and

they've just been fooled into thinking that this technology is so strange.

And that's why what I usually tell parents is just a lot of talk with your kids and a

lot of playing with your kids and a lot of seeing what they're doing.

It is bad to leave a kid alone with a device for a long period of time.

Kids need face to face interaction.

They develop all of their executive function, all of their self regulation,

all of their social skills through the kind of eye contact, through the back and

forth conversation that they have with parents and with other people.

So there needs to be a lot of that for young kids.

It's not a terrible thing to be like, here's an iPad for like 40 minutes while I

make dinner or take a shower. right like that's fine.

Not going to hurt anyone as long as as not all day long.

You need to take a shower!

Right.

But that doesn't mean you have to limit technology to 40 minutes either, right.

You can sit there and be on technology

with your kids as I was with my kids, playing video games for hours at a time.

As long as that also includes the kind of conversation that really starts to get

into questions about wellbeing, and starts to get into, like, how are you making

sense of the images that you're being confronted with?

How are you making sense of the kind of

stimuli that this game or this app or this video presents?

And how do I help you think about it? Right?

And how do I say to you as a parent, I like this, I don't like that, right?

I used to say to my kids all the time,

they go, "why can't I play these first person shooter games?" And I go, "Because

honestly, I don't get what's fun about shooting people".

Right?

I'll let you play a game where you shoot aliens.

That makes sense to me. But I don't understand. Like, I get that

there's a target practice part that's sort of fun, but I don't understand why it

would be fun to watch images of murder, right?

So until I felt like they could think

about that in a mature way, I did limit that access to them.

Once I felt like, okay, they could be like, it's just sort of fun and it's a

fantasy, then I went, all right, fine, and play it all you want.

But that's how we have to think about it as parents is going, we do it with them,

we do it with them, we do it with them, we do it with them.

And when we're confident that they're making their decisions in a way that's

aligned with our values , then we let them free.

I love that. It's interesting that you bring up

shooting video games because in my mind , and in my lifetime, I feel that that's

the biggest argument I hear from people of why it's bad.

It's "violent video games are going to turn you into a real life killer".

Violent movies, blah, blah, blah. So do we...

By the way, there's no research that supports that, right?

If anything, when we do look at the data and they've sort of compared video game

releases with crime rates, it actually goes the other way.

I'm not suggesting that we could maybe make an argument that goes, oh, "because

people are playing it, they don't even get the idea to go out and do it for real".

But I doubt that that's true either.

I doubt there's even any correlation at all.

But what is reasonable to worry about is

not whether or not it's going to make them violent, right?

Like, kids can tell the difference between

reality and non reality, but you worry about whether or not they can make sense

of the violence that they're seeing, right?

You could ask sort of the same question about graphic movies, right?

Like I don't, I'm not going to show my

kids Pulp Fiction when they're three and four.

Not because I'm worried that they're going to suddenly become like the characters,

but because they don't know how to make sense yet of the imagery that they're

going to be confronted with, and they need to have those skills first.

To me, it's just a sort of age appropriate

question, not a direct cause and effect fear.

Absolutely.

And so in your experience and your work, do we have projections for the long term

effects of kids now who are using digital technology from birth?

And what is that future projected to look like?

No, we don't know. Another issue here is how would you even

think about doing a real longitudinal study about this, right?

We all know technology changes so much and

so quickly, that what are you even studying, right?

Is it the use of, like, touch screens?

Well, okay, but are they going to still have touch screens in 10 years, or is it

going to be some other way of interacting right?

The change is so much and inherently,

anytime you ask a question, it's going to be too broad, right.

You're going to be thinking of technology

as too general a category to start to really measure those effects.

Right.

And I do think it's easier in general for anyone, right, to just pinpoint a bad guy

and just say, like, there's all this stuff going on and none of that is fixable.

But what if we just say, this is the singular issue?

Because then I can just take their phone away and it'll all go away, right.

And it won't. Yeah.

And in many cases, there's so many places in which people are able to find positive

communities for whatever affinity group they're a part of.

They're finding so many communities where

previously they were so isolated and so marginalized prior to social media.

And to me that's a really beautiful thing.

We have a lot of data showing how positive that has been.

Unfortunately, we also know that it's the

same thing that social media allows that, that also allows hate groups to meet

together and find problematic affinity groups.

But in that case, what we know is it's not the technology, right.

The technology is facilitating positive community well being.

Right.

The problem is not all the communities are positive and that's about values.

And to me, that's sort of the same thing.

I'm saying again and again, parents really need to sit there with their kids and

teach their kids how to make sense of things.

We've all heard about going down the rabbit hole of these

you know, into this hate online, and that's certainly a serious danger.

But when I was a kid, my parents talked to me a lot about, "don't listen to

everything that you're told by your friends, here's how you make sense between

the meaningful things", and we're just not doing that.

And I sit there and imagine a ten year

old, an eleven year old, a twelve year old on Reddit who is not yet equipped to be

able to judge some of the things that are said from the others.

That's the failure there is that they

don't have the literacy to be able to make sense of that information.

Yeah.

So often we're not having complete conversations.

It's very one dimensional.

And as you said, we look to pinpoint one

object and be like, this is it, that's the issue.

I've done my work.

And it's like, nah, it's so much more than that.

You have to continuously be engaged.

So, Jordan Shapiro, thank you for coming

on and having this complex conversation with us.

Yes it's my pleasure.

We appreciate you offering all the sides and the angles and the insights.

Yeah. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. Absolutely.

Hey, Kirsten. Hey, Bey.

Do you ever wonder whether this planet is even going to be around in 20, 30 years?

Yeah. It can be overwhelming to think of how to

deal with some of the biggest problems we're facing.

Our friends over at the Franklin Institute

talked to some of the sharpest minds working in science and technology.

And I gotta say, I think 2050 is going to be a pretty cool year.

Check out the road to 2050, a

new docuseries from Franklin Institute, at fi.edu.

So we looked at the effects technology can

have on our mental health, both good and the bad.

But now we're going to learn about the

potential that tech has in mental health treatment.

We're joined now by our friend Dr.

Jayatri Das, Chief Bioscientist at the Franklin Institute, to chat about these

innovations in her segment, Body of Knowledge.

Jayatri, what's up? Thanks.

It's always good to be back with you guys.

You know, it's always great to have you.

So, Jayatri, what is the spectrum of how

technology has helped and hindered people on their journeys of mental health?

Right, so you know, we think a lot often about the negative impacts of technology,

about how social media can exacerbate feelings of having low self esteem.

But what's really interesting, and

especially through the COVID pandemic, is how technology is really evolving as part

of treatment and therapy, both for mental and physical illnesses.

And on the positive side, having this whole set of resources can now increase

people's access to services and information.

We've talked about how some people often

don't feel comfortable, necessarily, talking about it to somebody else.

And so having that ability to use

technology to get information for yourself is great.

Having more regular interaction

, you know, through like, 24/7 services that are online, things like that.

So in general, we think about four main

benefits of technology when it comes to this.

First, of like self management, whether

it's just like having technology to remind you to take your medication or like manage

your stress or measure your heart rate, things like that. There are apps that can

help you develop your thinking or coping skills for different disorders, or

thinking about managing your mood or stress or anxiety.

We can think about how there are different aspects of care that can be supported.

I'm kind of fascinated by the idea of chatbots.

Mhmm. Tell me more.

Yeah.

I mean what do you guys know about chatbots?

Have you ever interacted with one before? I haven't.

I mean, I guess statistically, I'm sure I

have when it comes to talking to different companies on their chat services.

Oh yeah. okay. A lot of times it is bots, but no.

YeahBut I know that they are intricate.

Yeah! So there's a lot of technology research

going into like, AI and machine learning and language processing that are helping

these chat bots become more and more sophisticated.

Right? Because when you're having some sort of a

crisis situation, you don't necessarily want to talk to a person, you also don't

necessarily want to talk to a robot. RIght?

Yeah, yeah yeah yeah.

And so this kind of, you know, advances in computer technology,

is increasing the sophistication of these chat bots, which allows people to avoid

having to talk to that human in a place where they might not feel comfortable.

But it also allows real time monitoring of what that person is saying and whether you

get automatically connected to further resources and really just a more

personalized interaction, which is kind of really cool.

That is amazing. Yeah!

I'm just going to, I guess, open it up a little bit.

What are some more negatives or positives

that you can talk to specifically in regards to tech and mental health?

Yeah.

So part of the landscape that we're trying to navigate right now is as this

technology is really growing, kind of what are the ethics?

Mhmm

That are also governing how we use this technology.

So things like privacy, right.

So, for instance, if we're just talking about chatbots, who has access to that

data that's being pulled from that conversation, how effective are these?

I think we don't really have a good sense

of what kind of an impact these different technologies have.

Thinking about who has access to them, the equity question of this.

And right now there's a need for standardizing, sort of best practices in

the field, regulating them, like, who decides what those standards are?

And the question of, are some of these technologies being oversold?

And if they are oversold, does that then

distract people from therapies that have more proven effectiveness?

I'm thinking about last season when we interviewed the VP of Grinder and he was

talking about how one of the big positives of that app is creating the community.

When you are in, let's say, a rural area where there's not a big LGBT community,

you feel very alone, and then you have the ability to find your people.

And how big that's been for mental health in the queer community.

And I'm thinking about, you know, I have cystic fibrosis, incredibly rare disease,

and I've never met anyone else with cystic fibrosis.

And if it weren't for the fact that there's online chatrooms and stuff, I

never would have been like, other people go through this too.

You know It was huge for my mental health

when, like, groups came out, Facebook groups and everything,

Right! Yeah.

I think that speaks to a really important

point when we think about social media and technology and mental health, is that

there's no kind of overall good or bad aspect of it.

Right?

It depends on the types of interaction you have.

And there's data to support this, from

some of the early research that we have to date, that for people who have more

positive interactions, like you are Kirsten, it does lower depression and

anxiety, whereas for those who have more negative interactions and more social

comparison, like, you have the opposite effect.

And it's kind of just like real life interactions.

Right. Mhmm.

The more positive you have, the better it makes you feel.

The more negative you have, the worse it is.

So I think it's important to kind of

modulate how we perceive social media and technology.

One of the applications that I think is

really interesting is actually virtual reality.

So creating, you know, these virtual

worlds, especially for people who have experienced trauma or are trying to

develop different coping skills, is by practicing that in a virtual world, it can

be a safe space to develop these new types of coping skills.

I have a nephew that has one of those things and I was like, this is stupid.

You need to go outside. And I slipped it on.

I was like, oh wow, this is kind of cool.

I was like wow, it's pretty amazing.

As always, thank you so much to Jayatri for sharing all of your knowledge with us.

Well, I hope that you're hungry.

Bey, are you hungry? Yeah,

I'm actually super hungryAll the time!

Because next week we're going to talk about food.

Food, mental health and all the ways it interacts.

All that and more.

Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen and go to find podcasts.

Make sure you listen to the So Curious podcast.

Listen to it, put it on your newsfeed so you'll always see it.

This podcast is made in partnership with Radio Kismet.

Radio Kismet is Philadelphia's premier podcast production studio.

This podcast is produced by Amy Carson and Emily Cherish of Radio Kismet.

This podcast is also produced by Joy

Montefusco, Jayatri Das, and Aaron Armstrong of the Franklin Institute.

Head of operations is Christopher Plant.

Our assistant producer is Seneca White.

Our mix engineer is Justin Burger, and our audio editor is Lauren DeLuca.

Our graphic designer is Emma Seager.

And I'm Kirsten Michelle Cillis.

Oh, yeah, and I'm the Bul Bey!