Research interests
Dr. Sendler : I am broadly interested in research on mental health-related topics, which then focuses more specifically on things like health promotion, forensic psychiatry, digital epidemiology, and health promotion. Overall, I think that there is a lot of potential and looking at how people use online technologies, to access health information and to see how that impacts their understanding of their health, and how people use the information available online to make health decisions. And how we can use this knowledge to advance our understanding of mental health problems in the age of technology.
How Can You Harvest Knowledge of the Use of the Internet in Understanding Mental Health?
Damian Jacob Sendler: There is no single way of figuring out how we can understand the role of the internet in improving mental health deliverability and even developing clinical practice. A lot of people the millions and billions of people around the world depend on internet-driven technologies to enhance their everyday life whether that means finding jobs, connecting with friends and family, or even identifying information that enhances their day-to-day being.
We know that there is a lot of information floating around. And all of that is freely available, especially on platforms like Google, Facebook, and so on and forth. But the precise issue here is that not all of that knowledge is calibrated in such a form that it can be trusted. In the context of seeking information about mental health-related issues, people turn into the internet because it is that on the restricted source of information, and there is a lot of information that feeds directly from other people’s experiences. Each person experiences mental health distress differently. And it certainly takes a professional level of understanding of mental disorders to be able to tell you to know which types of stresses are harmful and which ones aren’t.
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When it comes to mental health, the complication here is, you know, to what extent mental health problems impact your everyday life. I think that the internet is an excellent tool for finding those answers. But we don’t necessarily always have the right way of filtering out information. There are a lot of websites and services and blogs that talk about mental health. Still, these portals are not always transparent about whether the health promotion that they are engaging in is based on scientific evidence, medical practice, or personal experiences.
What Kind of Services People Should Access to Understand Themselves and Their State of Mental Health Truly?
Damian Jacob Sendler : I think that there’s such a wide variety of services that are available out there that there is not a single portal or website that I believe truly captures what it means to learn about yourself and your good mental health hygiene. I think that for some people looking over blogs or very personal websites of people who have gone through some sort of trauma, our negative experience might reinforce their ability to withstand hardships and to become stronger individuals. We don’t know so much about how and to what degree negative versus positive information available online impacts people’s mental health, as everyone processes those information differently. Now, a bigger problem is that we do not classify websites based on their trust level. And so everyone is sort of their judge of the quality of the information they are getting.
It is quite surprising that people typically choose to get their health information from some popular websites like Huffington Post or the New York Times, where in reality, many excellent resources are being published by major academic centers and research journals, and even individual scientists themselves and conditions who see patients. Therefore, it is really important to sort of have a proud understanding of how people approach the gathering of information on digital platforms because that can actually help us improve the delivery of health information online.
My research focuses on pinpointing those important discrete facts, on seeing how people access health information on the internet, how they process it, how it impacts their medical decision making, and what type of information they pass on to other people such as their family members and friends.
Research on Digital Health Is Complicated Because There Is Not a Single Methodology That Guides Proper Research. How Do People Find Research That Is Informative and Transformative?
Damian Jacob Sendler: There are a lot of different resources that people can use. I think that most journals that are focusing on promoting digital health and focusing on how mental health is transformed in the age of technology offer advantages to anyone interested in the topic. The topic is vast, and there are different ways of targeting it. Therefore, I don’t think that we need to focus so much on the methodology as not just on the principles of questions being asked for a research project.
There are different ways of answering various questions. And there are different approaches to identifying sources of data. In my research, I often not just do surveys of people to see how they interact with digital content. But I even look over participation in online discussions to see how they do so in an unprovoked way. Thankfully, social media platforms, and other places where people exchange opinions are incredibly important because they’re rich with data that just sits there. Sort of helps scientists understand, you know, what people want.
Whenever you buy something online, and you get asked to provide the feedback, it usually frustrates people that they have to waste their time and energy on delivering their service providers with a specific way of how they can improve the way they sell things. In terms of research, you can use a lot of that information and truly parse out what people want. You can aggregate all the data together and look into similarities and patterns of what influences health information consumption on the internet, as well as what people get out of it and how it impacts their health decision making process.
Social Media Are Influencing How People Consume Health Information, and What Is the Research About It?
Damian Jacob Sendler: The social media are incredibly impactful when it comes to health promotion because whenever people share research or particular articles, it has an impact on other people. The first thing that comes into mind is how authoritative the person sharing the information is. Because that ultimately impacts how people receive specific information. Now, what we know from the existing literature is that Unfortunately, most people don’t read the information that is being shared with them on social media. Most people read just the headlines and maybe the first few lines but don’t dig into the details of specific health reports that might have an impact on their health decision-making process. That is something that happens in the age of technology, where we are overwhelmed with health information and information in general about just about anything in the world. And when people are overwhelmed, they simply reject more. It’s sort of like you know, trying to eat more than you can handle. And that’s precisely what happens with online platforms and online social sharing platforms where people get bombarded with so much information they sometimes don’t know where to pick their truths. Therefore, I think it is so important to be able to discern which information is useful and important.
Scientific research is one of those things that I believe should be shared, and primarily from the source, which is the research journal because it allows people to understand what’s at stake truly. Some papers are written better than others. And I know that sometimes we can’t gather all the information from the research abstract available and rely on reporters to sort of interpret the data. Nevertheless, I think it should be part of everyone’s college education to be on the table to get the health data that is being given to us and interpret it because it has a direct influence on the decision-making capacity of people when they’re sick. And clearly, when people have more information and that information is of good quality, they can make better decisions about their health.
What Is the Future of Mental Health Research in the Age of Social Media?
Damian Jacob Sendler: This is something that we do not necessarily know because the scope of research is changing so rapidly. And others another sort of I think the biggest issue here is that a lot of social media platforms are beginning to develop. You know, some social media platforms didn’t exist five years ago, but now they do. For instance, we know that Twitter can pretty accurately predict if there is an epidemic coming up, especially of things like influenza. So yes, some social media platforms are under development or will be developed in the future that will have a direct impact on how people consume health information. Places like Reddit and Quora and Google, by itself, obviously influence how people digest health information. And there’s just so many ways of looking at those pieces of information that I don’t think that we can accurately predict what the future holds.
It is essential to figure out what the priorities are because, you know, we keep thinking about what technology has done to information sharing, but what we don’t think about is how we utilize that knowledge. Producing new software experience is only useful when it helps someone change their life, and sometimes the information being delivered by the research community that doesn’t ever get translated into the clinically applicable program or form of treatment. This is why I think what my research intends to do is to get things working in practice and to see how we can apply the stuff we learn in research in clinical practice.
