Information Overload

I miss the smell of the books and the wood cabinets that held the Dewey Decimal cards, and I miss the silent hum of a building filled with people quietly reading.

Despite my nostalgia for unsupervised hours alone with books in libraries, I marvel daily at the freedom I have to access all of the information on the internet at any time. The books and publications I could find in my local library were necessarily limited by physical space constraints. They had been screened and filtered through layers of editors, proofreaders, fact checkers, and lawyers before being approved to be printed and shipped to an open slot on a shelf in Phoenix, Arizona. In contrast, a smart device grants anyone potential access to a global audience.

The result is sometimes referred to as the “democratization” of information. On balance, this ability for everyone to obtain knowledge seems to be of benefit. News and information has become somewhat less centralized and controlled, scientific knowledge is more widely available, and artistic expression seems to have become more varied and authentic. People with something to say can just say it and post it. The advent of the interconnected world has in many cases increased our connection with other people in ways that enhance our lives.

There are, of course, downsides to the digital world. While people are more connected online, the level of genuine human interaction has dropped precipitously. Entire cohorts of people are feeling more isolated and lonelier than ever before. Shared spaces that used to bring people together and facilitate relationships are disappearing. Faced with a tsunami of information, many people struggle to discern what is merely entertaining, shocking, or interesting from what will actually help them solve their problems and lead more fulfilling lives.

People are inundated with all kinds of facts and bits of data, but it is increasingly hard to understand how to apply this expanded information. This is apparent on any of the most popular sites. A reel or video will confidently declare to have the one technique to fix a problem. The very next post on that feed will claim that the first technique is completely wrong and advocate the opposite approach. The net effect of all this is confusion. People are collecting more knowledge, but they are slipping further away from gaining wisdom about their mental health.

I hear this from the patients who come to see me. They have more access to psychological knowledge than any previous generation, with new content being posted every day. In general, however, all of this information it is not necessarily helping them to get any better. As they diligently practice the newest technique, trick, or life hack, they find there is little predictability as to what works and what does not. These inconclusive results can be disappointing and frustrating. Worse, it can discourage people and take away their motivation to continue working toward relief of their distress.

When people gather the courage to reach out to another person, an expert, for therapeutic help, the cumulative effect of this information overload weighs on them. They might have guilt and even shame about their unsuccessful attempts at self-help. It sometimes takes them a little time to build up enough trust in our relationship to feel more comfortable cataloguing the failed internet remedies they have tried along the way.

Like my patients, I also follow the latest trends and fads in psychology. I have even tried a few out on myself over the years. My view is that more information can be a good thing when it leads us to run experiments in our own lives. Sometimes these things work, which is great. Sometimes they work a few times and then stop. Often these things don’t work at all or make things worse, which is disappointing but fixable. This process of failing until we succeed builds up our resilience.

Consequently, I encourage people to bring their experiences about whatever things they have tried along the way into the session. Together we work to separate the wheat from the chaff and assemble what remains into a sound mental health practice.

We do this by analyzing the information they were using to run their experiment and by assessing the kind of and quality of the knowledge they heard on the internet. In order to do that, we often start by discussing a taxonomy of knowledge.