Blog 2- Abbi Herrold

This week in class we briefly reviewed the benefits of technology, followed by a discussion over the potential hindrances of technology in our lives. Technology impacts us greatly in our everyday lives from being a distraction, to increased privacy concerns, to decreasing our social bonds. I thought the book did an exceptional job of highlighting the potential disadvantages of technology. One idea which stuck out to me was the idea that although technology enables us to have more free time, the extra time we are gaining is not spent freely. Since we can get things done more quickly we expect more not only of ourselves, but also of others. For instance many of our courses require deadlines of midnight because we are able to submit things online at any time of the day with just the click of the mouse, but if we didn’t have this privilege would midnight deadlines even exist, or would they just be pushed to the next day? Yes, perhaps deadlines would be pushed to the next class period, giving us a few extra hours to scramble and get an assignment done, however our assignments could also be moved to an earlier deadline of due in class with a physical copy instead of the convenient midnight deadline many of our instructors offer us due to the use of technology. Technology is a double-edged sword that can both help us and hurt us. 

As we discussed last week, technology obviously has many benefits and can make mental health services more cost effective, time effective, accessible, and adaptable. In my Introduction to Clinical Psychology class this week, we discussed all of these benefits, however we also discussed other issues that are raised by clinicians such as: How can clients find cyber therapy and how do we know such therapy is a reliable source? There is an immense amount of false advertising on the internet. So how can we ensure that patients can decipher between reliable and research-backed sources versus a faulty advertisement, which leads a patient to buy into some sort of therapy which isn’t backed or supported by actual therapists at all? As the use of technology for mental health services increases, we must also increase people’s knowledge of what accredited treatment is and what it is not. Perhaps with the increase use of technology for mental health services we must also have easily accessible guides and websites where people can search for mental health services that use primarily an e-mental health technique. As the way we provide mental health services change, we must always reconsider the way we advertise and inform patients of such services as well.