BIG READ | The four sins therapy shares with journalism, and how to fix them
Failure to keep up with technology, mistreating workers, emphasising despair over hope, lack of diversity and erosion of trust.
As I grapple with a stubborn relapse of my head bugs, I've been thinking a lot about the profound chaos in the mental health sector right now that is dismantling a lot of received wisdom.
Much of this churn owes to the rise of technology that's threatening to upstage conventional systems, notably psychotherapy. But the real reasons for the unease in the mental health sector at large and therapy specifically run a lot deeper. And it struck me that the field shares many of these catalysts of upheaval with my former profession – journalism.
Today I present my field notes, if you will, based on my understanding of the four big systemic problems common to mental health and journalism, and how we may find solutions to them. I find this sort of comparative learning to be powerful and clarifying. Let me know if you agree.
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Shared errors of mental health and journalism
1. Failure to adapt to technology-led disruption
Problem summary
Journalism and mental health have mirrored each other's prickly relationship with technology. They branded technology as the 'enemy', dismissed tech-based products and services as inferior instead of engaging with, learning from, and improving them, before realising their errors and struggling to fix the damage. This left the gates open for tech-powered actors, often unscrupulous ones, to dictate the future of both the industries - at a grave cost to their respective end consumers.
One of the biggest failures of legacy media bosses was their arrogant refusal to buy into the rise of digital media. They scoffed at the emergence of new digital-first outlets, until the latter carpet bombed their traditional turfs and ran away with market share. Media educators and leaders also neglected to equip journalists with technology tools that'd help improve both how they worked and what they produced. They made minimal investment in digitising workflows or training journalists in data analysis or interactive storytelling techniques to keep pace with changing audience needs.
The lack of tech leadership from within journalism left the door open for opportunistic 'intermediaries', such as social media platforms and misinformation peddlers, which hijacked the direction of the news business by manipulating the tastes and behaviours of news consumers. How the race for likes and shares hastened the unraveling of the journalism industry's ethics – and imperiled society at large – has been the subject of much lament.
