Dangers of Infographics on Mental Health Awareness

by Hanxi Zhu

Everyone has seen the color-coordinated, multi-frame Instagram and Twitter posts describing the internet’s latest discussion. In the age of social media, relevant and useful information coexist alongside unresearched infographics floating around cyberspace. By nature, social media posts and videos condense dedicated, specific research into media that are visually stunning and easily digestible enough to attract a wide audience to accrue internet traffic. These infographics can provide a general overview of a topic that might otherwise require hours of reading research papers, and it parses out complex ideas into plain, understandable text. The graphic design element allows it to make graphs a bit prettier, to visualize information a bit easier, to make the post more enticing to share. Due to the speed and outreach of social media, these infographics can be easily disseminated to its target audience.
With the current topic of spreading mental health awareness, these posts can be a double-edged sword. By neutrally portraying mental health, infographics can help destigmatize and combat negative stereotypes that might be portrayed in the media, such as the reduction of obsessive-compulsive disorder to excessive cleanliness, the presentation of schizophrenia as violent tendencies, and the depiction of depression as a one-dimensional sadness. Thus, it paints a kinder, more human picture of those who struggle with mental health. Before social media helped mental health outreach, therapy might have been looked at as something egregious – if a person went to therapy, that automatically labels them as mentally unstable. Normalization can show that seeking help for mental health can be beneficial for people’s quality of life, and the outreach that social media can provide can act as interventions to encourage people to seek treatment.
Improving mental health literacy can encourage the identification, management, and prevention of mental health struggles. People may not be able to put their issues into words, and the bite-sized infographics can contain short labels or phrases that provide people with a description of what they’re experiencing. This allows them to have a presenting complaint, which helps mental health specialists to quickly address the problem.
However, due to that generalization, important details might be absent from the description, leading to one-dimensional glamorization and trivialization, which can be misleading and dangerous when it comes to mental illnesses. For example, mania in bipolar disorder is generally described as “periods of elation and high energy” or “risky and impulsive behavior,” an oversimplification that ignores its more negative facets. I once spent a couple of hours in bed because I woke up one morning and thought I was possessed. I almost dropped out of college because I thought that I had the ability to transcend to another plane of the universe. I heard noises in my apartment in the dead of night and was convinced the previous tenants had embedded cameras and microphones into the walls (it turned out to be a rat, which I’m not sure is better).
Manic episodes like these are common, and by ignoring important facets of disorders, the infographic might lead people to seek help for the incorrect conclusion. There simply isn’t enough room or time to delve into specific cases of each bullet point. Infographics must tread the fine line between being specific while being visually pleasing. It can’t be too long or cluttered with words, or they risk losing people’s attention. The specific descriptions that can be more precisely described in longer texts cannot be copied and pasted into such a condensed frame. With the limited amount of information that is able to be presented, the general overview might not be thorough enough to be useful. It’s like reading the introduction of a research paper and calling it a day. Bonus points if the conclusion is read as well.
Thus, reading a short infographic, treating it as a comprehensive reading, and forgoing the next steps of seeking professional help leads to an absence of objective opinion, which is especially dangerous for mental illnesses and disorders. While self-diagnoses can be helpful for people who do not have access to specialized healthcare, people can subjectively ascribe general personality traits to specific criteria for diagnoses. People can take diagnostic descriptions – “being moody” does not necessarily mean that someone has a mood disorder; being inattentive does not necessarily mean that someone has an attention disorder. This creates a sense of invalidation for people who do struggle with that mental illness, and oversimplifying the problem can lead to imposter syndrome in people who have valid struggles. The idea that “I don’t have it as bad as other people” can allow people to forgo treating mental health, undoing the benefits of spreading awareness.
Moreover, we often take the information at face value without questioning accuracy. It’s hard to validate the content – even if the creator does provide their sources in the margins, people would have to type out the links by hand. Thus, while including sources and studies gives the illusion of trustworthiness, the information presented could be misinterpreting the study, cherry-picking incorrect details, or simply falsified. While infographics might be the only source of information that is easily accessible, it should not be taken as an authoritative source. Studies show that 59% of all statistics are falsified, and in the age of instantaneous clicks and taps, the misleading information can be widely disseminated.1 Instead of the internet being able to increase our understanding of a subject, incorrect information can be taken as a truth and acted upon as such, reversing the benefits of having a world of knowledge at our fingertips.
There are still benefits of increasing awareness, even with oversimplification and general inaccuracy – a wider outreach increases donations to foundations and helps fund support groups, laboratory research, and psychiatric ward improvements. The average audience does not have to read psychological or psychiatric literature in order for the infographics to have an impact, and creators likely have good intentions – it’s easy to be honest without being correct. Although it’s the creator’s responsibility to research the validity of their claims and cite their sources, it’s our responsibility as an audience to question and critically process the information.

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1 Myself