Today Gabe speaks with the president and CEO of PsychHub.com, Marjorie Morrison. Psych Hub is a partner of PsychCentral.com and has more than 100 free animated videos on a variety of mental health, substance use, and suicide prevention topics.
Join us as Marjorie explains how Psych Hub got started, what types of videos they have, how to find credible information in the internet age, and how for some, animated videos can be the best choice for an information source.
SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW
Guest information for ‘Video Library Documenting Mental Health’ Podcast Episode
Marjorie Morrison is the president and CEO of Psych Hub, the premier online platform for engaging videos on mental health, substance use, and suicide prevention. A visionary and pioneer in the mental health space, Morrison co-founded Psych Hub with Patrick J. Kennedy to connect people with best-in-class online certification trainings for providers and a free public video library for people seeking to learn more about some of our Nation’s most vexing mental health challenges.
Prior to Psych Hub, Morrison was the founder and CEO of PsychArmor Institute, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Under Morrison’s leadership, PsychArmor flourished and is now widely recognized as the trusted “Best-in-Class” resource regarding the understanding of and solutions to complex and unique military veteran issues
Morrison is a CA Licensed Marriage Family Therapist, a CA Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, a PPS-credentialed School Psychologist, and the author of The Inside Battle: Our Military Mental Health Crisis. As a subject matter expert, she has been featured by national media giants such as BBC, NBC, FOX, CBS, CNN, and NPR, along with being a contributing writer for multiple outlets.
About The Psych Central Podcast Host
Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.
Computer Generated Transcript for ‘Video Library Documenting Mental Health’ Episode
Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.
Announcer: Welcome to the Psych Central Podcast, where each episode features guest experts discussing psychology and mental health in everyday plain language. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.
Gabe Howard: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Psych Central Podcast. Calling into the show today we have the CEO and president of Psych Hub, Marjorie Morrison. Psych Hub is a PsychCentral.com partner Web site and we are super excited to be working with them. Marjorie, welcome to the show.
Marjorie Morrison: Thank you, Gabe. Thanks so much for having me.
Gabe Howard: Oh, well, it’s, of course, always a pleasure to have any partner of PsychCentral.com on the show. And before the partnership with Psych Central, I wasn’t aware of your organization. Can you tell us what Psych Hub is? As well as the mission behind it?
Marjorie Morrison: Absolutely, and I’m hoping the reason why you hadn’t heard of us is because we’re like brand new and you were one of our first partners. So you were in early. Psych Hub is online education in the mental health, substance use, and suicide prevention space. So we are an online library of over 100 free short videos. We call them micro videos; they are usually about 2, 3, 4 minutes. They’re all animated and they’re all around subjects of all types of mental health issues, substance use and suicide prevention. About two-thirds of them are targeted for consumers. And the other third are for healthcare professionals, doctors, nurses, hospitals and clinics.
Gabe Howard: Nice.
Marjorie Morrison: There’s so much information out there and it can be so confusing. And people also experience mental health issues so differently. So depression to one person might be different than depression to someone else. Words really matter when you talk about mental health because you can be very exclusive if you use the wrong words. And yet not everybody experiences things the same way. So you have to be very careful about explaining that this may not be what you feel, but this is what I feel.
Gabe Howard: To sort of go back for a moment, can you tell us how this all sprang up? I mean, were you just sitting in a room one day and you thought, hey, what we need are mental health cartoons? Can you walk us through that process?
Marjorie Morrison: Patrick Kennedy has been a longtime friend of mine, and I was just sitting having lunch with him one day and talking to him, and I said wouldn’t it be so great if we could take a similar model and do it in the greater mental health, substance use, and suicide prevention space? And he was like, “Okay, that’s great, let’s do it.”
Gabe Howard: That’s incredible. And of course, my favorite part of the story is that a previous guest of the Psych Central Podcast and a current guest of the Psych Central Podcast are buddies in real life. That’s awesome. Patrick Kennedy is a great friend of the show.
Marjorie Morrison: So he became my co-founder and just really felt like there was a need for a place where people could get engaging information at a fairly basic educational — maybe high school — level. Nowadays, people consume information by watching videos quite a bit more than they would read things. You know, people will just not stop and actually go to a Psych Central with credible information and read from there. They’ll get information from all kinds of places. Oftentimes not credible. So I learned a lot about online education and the movement that what you can do and how you can scale really good quality information in a training or in a video, much more so than anything else. Because a lot of times when you read something, you can interpret it a lot of different ways. When you watch something, most people interpret it the same way. And the retention of what you have when you watch a video is so much higher. So it’s a really good medium to really kind of scale quality information. So that was where it started.
Gabe Howard: And this shouldn’t come as any surprise. I mean, even if we look at, like the history of Facebook, you know, Facebook started, all you could do was type in a status update. And now even Facebook allows you to not only upload videos, but also to go live. You can literally have a live video on Facebook. And the reason that I bring that up is not to plug Facebook because they don’t need our help, but because Facebook is really good at giving people what they want. And clearly what people want is video content. Did that go into your thinking or were you just like, hey, there’s just so many blogs, we have to do something different or we will be drowned in the space?
Marjorie Morrison: No, it was a much bigger quest. It was a knowing that people are not reading, you know, they’re gathering information on whether it’s social media, YouTube or whatever it is. And the whole space of mental health is very complex. You know, there’s just so many different symptoms or diagnoses and they’re very different. You know, when you think about we clump mental health, it would just be the same thing as clumping medical. So if you have a, you know, a heart issue, it’s very different than a broken foot. And I think we tend to “Oh, she has mental health issues.” You know, it’s like.
Gabe Howard: Right.
Marjorie Morrison: That’s why we have over 100 in. Our intent doesn’t – it’s not to have somebody watching, you know, 100 something videos. It’s to give people the information that they want when they need it and have it to be customized. So if it is something like I’m just using example, depression, watch a video. But this is what depression is, then there’ll be another video. These are medications for depression. These are evidence based treatments for depression, all done in first person. All of our videos are very positive about help work. We don’t ever have anybody who is sad and cowering in a corner and all of the things that make stigma worse. Right? Our characters are just average people using diversity of different colors, skin, different sizes, different accents in everyday life who experience everyday mental health conditions that are so prevalent.
Gabe Howard: That is incredible. Now, one of the things that you talk about and I love this, especially for, you know, the work that I do as a mental health advocate, and of course, PsychCentral.com believes so strongly that correct and credible and factual information is worth so much more than, you know, hearing what you want or the comforting lie. But this is tough, right? How do people know what’s credible and what’s not? It’s not just as simple as, oh, go to this website and not this one.
Marjorie Morrison: Right.
Gabe Howard: Some Web sites have a mixture of credible and not credible information. What would you say to somebody if they’re asking, how can we ensure that the information we’re finding online is credible?
Marjorie Morrison: It’s so true. And you know, and I think it’s going to continue to be a problem. It’s I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better because there’s just so much content out there. And people also want to promote themselves as subject matter experts. So they’re producing their own kind of content. It’s a great question. And I mean, there’s just so much bad information out there. So I think, you know, first and foremost, that all of us to get our information online. We really need to look at the site, look at is it a reputable company? Where are they getting their information from, you know? Do they have partners? Where are the partners coming from? What’s the criteria that they might have to vet information? I think that also there is an element of common sense people have to use. And I always say that first and foremost, because people want to believe what they want to believe, right? So I have a friend who has cancer. And he was telling me I got diagnosed with stage four cancer of a very slow growing cancer. And he was explaining to me that he truly believed that his cancer wasn’t going to grow. And he said, I just was like searching the Internet, searching the Internet. I finally found a site that said, even if it’s at stage 4, it so slow growing, you don’t have to do treatment. And he resisted treatment for a while. And actually, he’s doing well now because he got treatment. So it’s a good story. But the reason why I share this with you is that he kept digging to find what he wanted to find, you know? And I think that’s another scary thing, too, because if you keep looking, you’re going to find it. Right? So it’s just also so important that people are open minded about are you trying to find information to tell you what you want to hear or are you actually seeking knowledge and are you using a credible site?
Gabe Howard: I think what you’ve described is called answer shopping.
Marjorie Morrison: Yes.
Gabe Howard: And we’re all guilty of that in so many things. We do this in politics, we do this in religion. We do this in our friendships. If we want to be mad at our friend, we will find every single reason to be mad at them and ignore the part where we’ve known them for 25 years and they loved us when we were in high school and nerdy. You have to look at it with a critical eye and think to yourself, is this accurate? And can I find something that backs it up or does it only exist in this space?
Marjorie Morrison: That’s exactly what it is. And you know what? Obviously, we’re having this issue with our news, too. So in politics and whatever it is. So I think it’s we in mental health are a microcosm of the bigger problem, which is just information overload. I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. There’s no way to really guarantee that this is quality information. So I know for us at Psych Hub, we work really, really hard to make sure that our videos are as accurate and as professional and with the most evidence-based content that’s clinically sound and trauma informed. And so we go through a painstaking process, a whole bunch of powers that be — we have them review them on an editing software before it goes live. And I’m so proud to say this. We have never yet had to take one video down or make any. Not a single edit. And we have conjured the thousands of views now. So now we’re going through it and I’m only plugging that in that that’s how important it is to us that we’re giving up quality information.
Gabe Howard: I like what you said there, though, that in that whole time you haven’t had to do it because you would do it.
Marjorie Morrison: Absolutely.
Gabe Howard: If something changed, if information was brought to light that was wrong, you would remove that. So admitting that you made a mistake or that something wasn’t accurate or even just acknowledging that research changes and removing and updating, that’s something to look for, right? People who are willing to say, yeah. Yeah. That this was incorrect and now this is what’s correct are actually more credible than people who have managed to go 25 years without ever making a mistake.
Marjorie Morrison: I mean, absolutely, and some of the stuff, you’re right, and sometimes you will say to me, well, what’s your favorite one? And. This is it. Literally we treat each one exactly the same because it could just be one video that gives off the wrong information and you can cause a lot of a lot of havoc for that.
Gabe Howard: We’ll hear from our sponsor and be right back.
Announcer: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face-to-face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.
Gabe Howard: And we’re back speaking with Marjorie Morrison, the CEO and president of PsychHub.com. I know that there’s a lot of challenges in being a mental health speaker or being a mental health podcaster or her being a mental health writer. And obviously, you’ve listed some of the challenges and even making little animated mental health videos. But aside from everything that we’ve already discussed, what are some big challenges in putting mental health information out there, especially in our current state, with a lot of misunderstanding?
Marjorie Morrison: I will tell you, depending on the day of the week you asked me that question, you’re going to get a different answer.
Gabe Howard: I love that, I love that.
Marjorie Morrison: I’m going to try to give you the sort of most… I think the biggest issue is that there are evidence-based interventions that are better to treat symptoms. And people just don’t understand that the average consumer doesn’t know. And I use myself as an example when I used to be in private practice. I could have someone come in with ADHD at 9 o’clock. I could have major depression at 10:00. I could have sexual trauma at 11:00. I could have complicated grief at 12:00. I could have insomnia at 1:00. People have, like we talked about already, so many different types of diagnoses or symptoms. And yet we go to a therapist who is a generalist. And it oftentimes doesn’t work for either party. The patient doesn’t really understand that there’s a specific intervention. I’m gonna use, for example, sleep issues, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is an effective treatment. Talking about what happened to them in fifth grade isn’t gonna help them sleep any better, but they might sit there for a year talking about it because that’s what intervention their therapist does. So I just think that is the biggest challenge that we face in mental health is this really educating both the consumer side of it and on the provider side of it.
Gabe Howard: It sort of sounds like what you’re saying is that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So you have a mental health issue and you don’t know where to go. You might get a different answer if you go to, say, a general practitioner versus a therapist versus a psychologist versus a psychiatrist. So even though you’re the same, you could potentially get four different takes on what’s going on. Because after all, there’s no definitive test for any mental health issue. We can’t take blood and say, aha, that that creates confusion. And then we add everything that we’ve already talked about, you know, answer shopping, fear, the stigma, discrimination, the stuff we put on ourselves. Well, I’m not crazy. I’m fine. And on and on and on and on and on. It really does sort of create this potential for mass confusion.
Marjorie Morrison: Yeah. You know what, you bring up a really good point about the different disciplines because I wasn’t even going there. But you’re absolutely right. The psychologists, a psychiatrist, a social worker, they’re all different. But even just as a therapist, a psychotherapist, you could use, you know, talk therapy or a theoretical type of family systems approach. And yet it might be that cognitive behavioral therapy for whatever that symptom is, is a better fit. The disciplines make it confusing, the treatment types make it confusing. And so I think that, you know, it’s at Psych Hub what we’re trying so hard to do is educate people. If you have whatever it is, it might be eating disorder, substance use, schizophrenia. There are different treatment types and to get educated about what they are. So you could start looking around for providers that know that intervention and that use it. That’s where we would feel like we were we were at a success.
Gabe Howard: And speaking about health care providers for a moment, what can health care providers do to help in the process to improve the mental health experience?
Marjorie Morrison: One I would say is getting educated in evidence-based practice. It’s very confusing to kind of know what’s out there and what’s the latest and greatest. They have it just as bad, too, with all this information out there, but also helping educate their patients or their clients, helping them know that, A, things are gonna get better. Expecting what the process is like. So we know one of the biggest challenges for patients is this not knowing what therapy is going to be like, the fear of the unknown. Right? So providers can help with that. I’d like to say that videos help with that, too. Now we are coming out with what we’re calling these kind of companion videos in January. So things that therapists can send to a patient to be able to educate their patient. This is what that therapy is going to be like. This is what we’re going to try to cover or cover around this session. I think that that’s good. And that also puts some of the responsibility of the treatment on the patient, which I think is also part of that process that works well.
Gabe Howard: I know that Psych Hub is a new organization, and I also know from interviewing experts all over the country that it’s fascinating because younger practitioners are like, oh, yeah, we love the Internet, we have sites that we like and that we send our patients to on the regular. And I hate to say older practitioners, but we’ll say practitioners with more experience say, no, no, no, no. I advise my clients not to get on the Internet in any way that the Internet is bad, bad. So I know that Psych Hub is a new organization, but have you found practitioners being receptive to utilizing your videos in their practices or is that a goal?
Marjorie Morrison: We are rolling out a whole phase two in January, February, and so we partnered with the major insurance companies. Right now what we have is all public facing and we have not come to the practitioner side. I would imagine that we will find, A, what you are talking about like the more seasoned ones, but also they’re not as much on line. So part of it is an age piece as well, because the 30 year olds and, you know, early 40 year olds are doing everything online and probably are scheduling all their appointments online and providing maybe some digital therapies in between sessions. And so really the whole practice is changing. And depending on the age demographic, your experience could be different too.
Gabe Howard: So my final question that I have for you is what other resources do you use that you would recommend to others? Because again, like you said and sort of as we talked about, it’s hard to find quality information. What can you recommend that you’re sort of vouching for?
Marjorie Morrison: So I get asked this question all the time. My number one answer. I know this is going to be a real shocker to you, it’s always Psych Central. So the first thing I always tell people is
Gabe Howard: Yeah. Yay!
Marjorie Morrison: You have to go to Psych Central. They have the best. They have the best content, the best stuff. So, I mean, I’m not just saying that because I’m on your podcast. It really is. I mean, I know we share a lot on our social, too, about Psych Central. But it’s so important people know that the quality of content of Psych Central is so good and the need of it is so important. We also really like PsyberGuide. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it’s a great resource that helps rate different kind of mental health apps and tools and technologies. It’s really like a consumer guide for all the stuff that’s out there. It’s “cyber guide,” but it’s P S Y B E R. So that’s one of our favorites. And then we have like our our favorite more national based nonprofits that are close partners of ours, MHA and NAMI are ones that we work with, the Jed Foundation, you know, really on a regular basis that we would send people to or that people could look at. But that’s what I would say is there’s not a lot of really, really good, kinda credible stuff. But there are some great, great associations. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has great content on there. So a lot of times these larger nonprofits that are national, that have been around a while, are really, really credible.
Gabe Howard: Well, that is excellent. And of course, thank you so much for all you do over at PsychHub.com. And that’s how we find it. You don’t need any special software. You don’t need to download any special apps. You just go to PsychHub.com. And I know that you can click on individual, if you’re an individual; you can click on provider, if you’re a provider, and they’re all right there and they’re all 100 percent free. There’s not a catch in the world, correct?
Marjorie Morrison: That is correct.
Gabe Howard: Well, awesome. If you’re not heading over there right now, you’re missing out. Marjorie, thank you so much for being on the show.
Marjorie Morrison: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. I appreciate all that you do.
Gabe Howard: Oh, you’re very, very welcome. And listen up, everybody, if you want to interact with the show on Facebook, if you want to suggest topics, comment on the show, or be the first to get updates, you can do so by joining our Facebook group just by going to PsychCentral.com/FBshow. And don’t forget to review our show on whatever podcast player you found us on. And do me a favor, tell a friend. I would take it as a personal favor and I’d owe you one if I ever saw you in real life. And remember, you can get one week of free, convenient, affordable, private online counseling anytime, anywhere, simply by visiting you BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral. We’ll see everyone next week.
Announcer: You’ve been listening to the Psych Central Podcast. Previous episodes can be found at PsychCentral.com/show or on your favorite podcast player. To learn more about our host, Gabe Howard, please visit his website at GabeHoward.com. PsychCentral.com is the internet’s oldest and largest independent mental health website run by mental health professionals. Overseen by Dr. John Grohol, PsychCentral.com offers trusted resources and quizzes to help answer your questions about mental health, personality, psychotherapy, and more. Please visit us today at PsychCentral.com. If you have feedback about the show, please email show@PsychCentral.com. Thank you for listening and please share widely.
from World of Psychology https://ift.tt/2mWaaHe
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment