The Internet and Mental Health

When psychologist Andrew Campbell began his doctoral studies in 1997, a faculty member strongly urged him to rethink his interest in pursuing how the Internet impacts adolescent health. The Internet is a passing fad, the professor said. It would be dead by 2001.

Needless to say, the faculty member was a little off the mark, and what Campbell began researching has become a booming field of study—cyberpsychology, or the influence of the Internet on human behavior.
Campbell, director of Prometheus and lecturer in psychology at the University of Sydney Faculty of Health Sciences, shared his experiences as a cyberpsychologist during the closing plenary, “The Impact of Information Science and Technology and Mental Health,” at the 2009 iConference.


During his presentation, he touched on how the Internet has become a tool for delivering educational and preventive information to patients, a supportive network for patients to interact with each other, a tool to provide telemedical services to people around the globe, a venue for medical counseling and advising, and a simulated environment that can be used for healing a variety of afflictions, to name a few.


He also described the social and physiological changes occurring in Generation X and Y, including a sharp increase in depression and emotion disorders. “They are highly susceptible to depression and mental illness,” Campbell said. “It had increased four-fold in teen-agers and adolescents in the past decade.”

He stopped short of directly relating their use of technology and online socializing to these increases, but he said it is being studied.

Campbell also said he sees great potential for new uses of social networking and Web 2.0 technologies in therapies and treatments. He presented one such case of a child diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, who used a relaxing virtual world game that responded to the child’s breathing patterns to treat the illness and then could avoid having to take medicines with possible harmful side effects.


Serious games are also being used to conduct preventive medicine trainings, and researchers are trying to find new ways to incorporate more gaming and virtual environments in cyber-medicine. These methods, researchers are discovering, are effective not only for children and teens, but also adults and aging populations.