Recently, mental health research has come on in leaps and bounds, creating more engaging and reliable information than ever before. Alongside medical publications, specialist blogs have cropped up which offer professional information in a way which the wider audiences can understand and interact with. In the late 1990s, the Oxford University set up an educational programme which was specifically for the use of mental health professionals. The aim of the programme was to help introduce people to the basics of this area of healthcare, ass well as to build upon the research already gathered.
At this stage of mental health research, there were few sources which provided people with such reliable information. Over the following 15 years, however, the landscape has changed dramatically. There are so many areas of mental health to be explored, with far more evidence to build upon and refer back to, giving professionals are more varied and informative base from which to work. The problem faced by so many mental health experts is that keeping up to date with the waves of new research is tough. Initiatives such as the Cochrane Collaboration help to publish summaries of the evidence found, which saves time and allows people to refer to information swiftly without compromising on the facts. However, if there is no available evidence to support your question, looking into the research can be a large undertaking which will cost you hours of time and resources.
It’s thought that mental health professionals need to read around 20 journal articles a day in order to keep up to date on the latest research in their chosen field – given the importance and scale of the task, time is not something these experts have to give. There have been several solutions which have been posed to resolve this issues, from search engines to free biomedical databases. However, often these simply exacerbate the problem as the amount of information is too vast. It seems that health blogs are the newest solution, offering the ability to provide reliable information in short, sharp bursts. Not only are they informal, they have the ability to reach millions of people easily.
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