As I said in a previous post, I've been wanting to post more about mental health. And in researching to do so, I noticed a few things wrong with some of the headlines of the websites I found, so here are all the things wrong with mental health websites... or at least with some of them.
1.) First up is www.medicalnewstoday.com
All I did was search "mental health" and this was the first website to pop up. I wanted to make this post specifically because of this result. (Picture of the search result is below). What is wrong with it you may ask? Well, it is all in the headline of the website: "Mental health: Definition, common disorders, and early signs." You can't have early signs of mental health, it itself is not a disorder, everyone has mental health. I, as a non-licensed professional know this, so an actual licensed professional would for sure be aware of this, so I personally would not trust the credibility of this site already, but let's click on the link to see if the rest of it is legit.
I clicked the link and read the headline and here's what it looks like:
At first glance, I thought it was fine, but as I kept reading, I couldn't help but notice how it says, "The term 'mental health' is sometimes used to mean an absence of a mental disorder." I, personally have never heard of that and I can't even think of what context someone would use the term 'mental health,' meaning the absence of a disorder, but I guess they could be right, I'm not sure. However, I'm not completely convinced.
So, I read through the first part of the article and it all seems alright. They mainly quote certain mental health organizations.
The very last line is what stood out most. Since I'm not sure that 'mental health' is commonly used to refer to the absence of a mental disorder, I decided to look the organization up instead. Here is what I found:
The World Health Organization seems legit. Personally, I'd turn to a more mental health based organization to give me mental health facts, but this works too.
Everything seems fine here, I fact-checked them below.
All of the information on all of the different disorders seem accurate, so maybe it was just the headline that was a bit off... I may have spoken too soon.
At the top of the picture in big, bold letter it says "Schizophrenia disorders." Schizophrenia disorders!?!? Okay, so here is the problem with this, schizophrenia is a disorder on its own, there are no subcategories for it. What the website means to say is "Psychotic disorder."
To conclude this post, I wanted to point out one last minor mistake. That would be that there are more forms of treatment than this. Also, I'm not sure how I feel about them adding "Self-help" as a form of treatment. This is quite unorthodox, for a lifestyle change isn't necessarily treatment, but rather a result of treatment, but I guess it's okay that they put it.
Be sure to subscribe to my website to read more like this and to see my next post, which will be me correcting and making my own mental health article like this one, but hopefully more accurate.
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