Well, nine out of ten young people tell us they’re using their phone when spending quality time with their parents. Seven out of ten are using it when hanging out with friends. Five out of ten when at dinner at a restaurant. Three out of ten when crossing the road. And one in ten are using it when having sex. Statistics like these never fail to impress me because they show just how much of our lives have become infiltrated by a device weighing a mere 150 grams.
We now exist entirely in a digital world, whether we like it or not. As a mental health researcher, I’ve spent the last eight years looking at how we can use technology to improve mental health and reduce suicide in Australia. On average, eight people a day take their own life, and for every death, there are up to 20 others who make an attempt. At any given time, four percent of all Australians feel like their life is not worth living. That’s nearly 100,000 people. Suicide is a big problem, but it’s preventable, and I think your phone offers us a new solution.
Now, you guys don’t need convincing that your mobile phone is a useful piece of technology. It allows you to contact others 24/7, and there are plenty of people who think this is a bad thing. We see campaigns for digital disconnection, mainly pioneered by parents who feel that online connectivity is not as healthy or meaningful as face-to-face. And you can’t blame the parents, seeing a lot of phones. But, in general, this disbelief in online connectivity bothers me, and it should bother you also.
Why? Well, your phone connects you to support and gives you a voice. I’ve spent the last five months traveling around Australian high schools asking students what they need and want when going through a tough time. Overwhelmingly, these students tell me that they would prefer to be asked by their mobile and not a phone call or a text message. These same students tell me that when something is up, though they don’t want the adults in their life to know first, like parents and teachers, they’d prefer to turn to a friend. And we get the same response when we turn to University students and other young adults, who all tell us they would prefer to turn to a friend. And this is because seeking professional help, although it’s entirely necessary and very effective, can be really daunting. We have trouble finding the right words to explain how we’re feeling, and this is made harder when the person doesn’t know us. So, all of us, we all turn to our friends. And for someone out there, you are that friend, and your phone gives you a tool to reach out.
But we have to remember who and what we’re dealing with here: mental illness and suicide. It is notoriously stigmatized. Young people feel that if they disclose their mental illness, they’ll be seen as weak, or different, or selfish. This means that there are a number of cases of mental illness that go undetected, so help-seeking is delayed, often by up to 15 years. This makes recovery a lot harder. Researchers like myself know that if we can have a better method of detection, we can lower the suicide rate. And we think your phone allows us to do just that.
How? Well, every one of you out there who owns a phone or has ever opened an internet browser has what I call a digital footprint. And I think you’d be surprised by just how much we can learn about your mental health from your digital footprint. Take a minute to think about your social media feed. Have you ever seen a post that left you feeling not quite right? It might not be the post and what it says exactly, but what the person is doing. For example, an image of your friend doing something risky or dangerous or out of character. These can be signs that your friend isn’t in a good place, and this can represent a risk for suicide or mental illness. And believe me, signs like these get shared on social media every day. At the Black Dog Institute, our not-for-profit mental health organization based here in Sydney, where I work, we monitored Twitter for any suicide-related term. We found that there were nearly 15,000 in just eight weeks. Alongside four of my colleagues, we sat down and we randomly selected 2001. By one, we went through to see if we could judge the suicide risk based only on the post itself. We had to decide whether or not the post was strongly concerning, possibly concerning, or safe to ignore. And what our results found was that there was, on average, 32 strongly concerning posted suicides per day. That’s more than one every hour. But what we also found was that in the majority of cases, we couldn’t quite tell, so they were possibly concerning. With all of our training and all of our expertise, we couldn’t quite tell. And what that means is that all of you out there, you’re likely to face the same challenges when trying to determine your own feed. And this is now particularly hard because a lot of people joke about suicide, and a lot of people joke about mental illness. Take, for example, the status update, “I’m as emotionally stable as an IKEA table.” You might laugh, you might like it, you might know how the person feels, so you respond. Or you might not really know what to think, so you just keep scrolling past and ignore it. And that’s what we found happened on the Chinese version of Twitter, Weibo. Without overseas collaborators, we analyzed responses made to online suicides, and what we found was that very few of the responses were helpful, many were stigmatizing, and most people didn’t respond at all. Imagine if that were you reaching out in your darkest hour, and no one responds, or worse, someone encourages you to continue taking your own life.
That’s why researchers argue against methods that only rely on humans. There’s just too much room for error, and the world of social media is far too big for humans to monitor alone. So instead, we have to turn to the sophisticated methods of computer science and engineering. Using a mobile phone app that we also use at the Black Dog Institute, researchers in Holland and in the U.S. mapped people’s GPS data with their depression levels. And by the end of the study, the researchers could tell just how depressed you were based only on where you were going or really where you weren’t going. In a different study that we do at the Black Dog Institute, we recruited over 100 bloggers, and for a period of four months, using computer science, we scraped their blogs and analyzed their mental health. And what we found was that certain bloggers changed their linguistic expression when their depression and anxiety increased.
Now, what this unobtrusive data collection does is it creates windows of opportunity where we can potentially reach out and intervene and save lives. But the issue with this is that the phone is starting to really know you, potentially better than you know yourself. And take a minute, like, how do you feel about that? Whilst we don’t have time to delve into the detail, it’s safe to say that most people
are uncomfortable with the idea of their daily data being monitored for their mental health. Although it happens every moment for things like marketing and for Google to give you the quickest trip, most people don’t like the idea of having mental healthcare targeted based on what they’re doing online. It conjures up an issue of Big Brother, and it’s an issue that big data scientists haven’t quite figured out yet. Researchers also haven’t figured out yet how to merge all these exciting new technologies into one mobile phone app that can help you be a better friend, detect mental illness, break down stigma, change help-seeking behavior, deliver effective treatment, and monitor over time to check that you’re recovering all in an ethical way and all in an app that works on both our Android and iPhone.
We don’t have all the answers, but we’re getting there, and we’re not giving up. In the meantime, don’t underestimate the power of your mobile phone for suicide prevention and mental health. Whilst my reasoning to you may seem logical and even obvious, to those who make decisions about our healthcare system, this knowledge has serious implications. Because what it means is that the future of our mental health lies in your hands, literally. What you have in your bag or your pocket right now has a powerful impact on those around you, and it helps researchers like me to better understand mental health and create better programs to tackle illness. So next time you check your phone, which is likely to be in the next 15 minutes, try to look at it and everything on it a little bit differently. Remember that this piece of technology can save lives. Your phone is our weapon against mental illness. How you choose to use it, well, that one’s up to you.