Reading the Research: Text Message Therapy

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article starts off with kind of a shocking statistic: 19% of all adults in the USA have a diagnosable mental illness.  That's basically 1 in 5 adults.  That's several people in your family.  Count off people in the grocery store.  Every time you get to five, know that one of those people suffers from depression.  Or anxiety.  Or a personality disorder, or some other condition classified as mental illness.  

That's absolutely awful.  

As simple as it would be to blame the coronavirus for Messing Everything Up, it's unfortunately not that simple.  The fact is, people in the US mostly don't get preventative care.  Our medical system is set up to treat symptoms and bankrupt us in the process.  Our food is created to be addictive, nutrient-deficient, and laced with sugar.  We overall don't get enough movement to be anything close to healthy, and we don't spend much, if any, time outside in nature.  

The end result is a profoundly unhealthy population.  The obvious consequence: staggeringly high rates of mental illness.  

While I'm pleased to see this idea of therapy-via-text message seems to work, I'm a little dubious as to how high quality it can really be.  It's one thing to generally teach people about mental illness, self-care, and support techniques, and quite another to put together a file on a client and be able to offer targeted, specific advice and strategies the way a typical therapist would.  

Something is better than nothing when it comes to mental illness, and having someone outside your circle that you can trust to ask about things is extremely valuable.  But I will note that similar systems have been tested using chatbots, with some success.  This might, I suppose, be a better educated and human-centric version of that.  

Mostly, though, I'm just frustrated these sorts of things aren't taught in school.  It would go a long way toward a healthier country if people knew what mental illness looks like and how to help with it.  After all, almost everyone experiences major depression at least once in their lifetime.

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)