Any parent of a teenager or pre-teen knows all too well the allure of the Internet.
What they may not know is that kids are as likely to go online to find health information as they are to play games, download music or chat, according to a report entitled Generation RX.com: How Young People Use the Internet for Health Information.
And when young people go looking for health information, two topics predominate: sexual health and mental health.
“It's an incredible way to reach kids,” says Michael Cheng, a child and family psychiatrist at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario. “They can educate and inform themselves about mental-health issues. They're also comfortable online – there's no stigma there.”
The catch, Dr. Cheng says, is that “it's still the Wild West,” so young people need guidance to distinguish the good information from the bad. “We used to street-proof kids. Now, we have to Web-proof them.”
The best way to do so, says Darcy Santor, a University of Ottawa psychology professor, is through schools, with programs that bridge classroom learning and self-directed learning online.
One of those initiatives is yoomagazine (www.yoomagazine.net), an online magazine with themed issues that feature short articles, information sheets, Q&As, and interactive quizzes.
Dr. Santor and his colleagues started the site in response to a rash of suicides at a high school after realizing that “if you offer young people the opportunity to seek help, you will do a lot better than trying to pick the ones who need help out of a crowd.”
The magazine, interestingly, is not open-access. Rather, it is accessible only to students in the 250 schools where there is related classroom teaching.
There was also a deliberate decision to provide health education more broadly and not just mental-health information, to stress that the two are intertwined.
Dr. Cheng fully agrees with that approach. In fact, the slogan at the top of his Web page (www.DrCheng.ca) is “no health without mental health.”
He is a big fan of www.eMentalHealth.ca, which includes an interactive map, a detailed list of mental-health resources nationwide and background information by topic. “With something like eMentalHealth, people don't have to wait to see a psychiatrist like me only to be referred elsewhere,” he says. “They can go directly to the services they need.”
André Picard
