From Dr. Jane's Notebook

Only YOU can protect your mental health!

Few would dispute that we live in stressful times. Turn on the television and you can co-experience almost any kind of misery. The media constantly bombards us with messages of fear and violence, both fictional and non-fictional. Many people worry that the media is unhealthy for children who may grow up with a warped view of the world. Beyond this concern for children, we should be equally concerned about adult mental health. What happens to us when we listen to too many terrible stories? Here are my thoughts.

There’s too much news. I am all for being fully and truthfully informed, but watching the same news story over and over again isn’t healthy or necessary. Human beings learn very quickly. We don’t need to watch the same dreadful stories repeatedly. Television is very hypnotic and media professionals know how to get our attention.
There are too many drug ads. Human beings are susceptible to suggestion. When pharmaceutical advertisements list symptoms, our minds absorb this information and our imaginations can go wild. We don’t need more things to worry about. We should pursue medical care when our bodies tell us to, not when advertisers tell us to ask our doctors for their name brand medication.
Stress gets absorbed in your mind and your body. The effect of all this bad news is that it can actually make you sick. Current theories suggest that stress is a major culprit in creating a chemical imbalance in the brain that results in depression. Stress increases our likelihood of becoming ill, and stress slows down our healing time. So be aware that the price of watching commercial television these days has increased greatly. We are increasingly exposed to more sales pitches, more frequently and more dramatically. Think about your own emotional reactions to certain commercials. Do they ever make you feel sad, angry or worried?
We must learn to be optimists again. It is up to each one of us to take more control over whether we allow ourselves to get upset. Dr. John Gottman found that happily married couples communicate five positive messages for every one negative message between them. Perhaps we should expose ourselves to five positive news stories for every one negative story. If we wish to protect ourselves, we must realize that we are the only ones who can control the amount and type of information that we are exposed to. Lest you think I don’t care for the daily news, rest assured that I do. What troubles me is that in the span of time from 6:00 to 8:00 in the morning, I can easily see the same news report four times.

As a child, I could not watch the news at all without becoming frightened that every bad thing might happen to me. At the time, I was sure this only happened to me. But following 9/11, when we all watched the attacks on the World Trade Center over and over, researchers studied the impact of the media on children and low and behold, they found important differences in the way that children and adults reacted to tragic news. In short, while adults understood that they were watching the same two buildings under attack, researchers found that many children watching the attack on the twin towers believed that every image of an airplane crashing into a building was a new airplane crashing into another building. To them, buildings were being attacked continuously and everywhere!

We must remember that in our role as consumers, it is important to be both accurately informed and careful about the information we absorb. We don’t have to experience trauma directly to develop post-traumatic stress. When we empathize, we are subject to second-hand trauma. Perhaps we should add one more disclaimer to our television sets: WARNING: ONLY YOU CAN PROTECT YOUR MENTAL HEALTH.

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