More and more people are seeking mental health therapy online, a trend that College Health Services Director John Turco M.D. sees as filled with new possibilities -- and also new concerns.
Although Turco has had no personal contact with students seeking psychiatric help online, many new websites have sprung up recently, offering everything from mental health advice to actual online therapists ready to chat.
Turco sees many potential problems with psychiatric help via the Internet.
How can you really know the quality of the help without knowing who's setting up the website?" Turco questioned. For example, if a financier of Prozac is backing the site, the help might be biased toward drug therapy.
Psychiatrists lose, as he sees it, in not seeing the person face to face, and not being able to analyze the possible physical causes behind the patient's mental problems.
While communication over a chat line is still communication, it is of a different and more limited form from talking personally with a counselor.
Without the "human dimension ... can you still have a therapeutic relationship?" Turco asked.
At this point, Turco said, nobody can be certain of the effects of this new communication medium on the quality of therapy.
However, Turco sees many positives and exciting new possibilities in online therapy.
Many in need of help are not at the point of venturing out to make an appointment and seeing a psychiatrist. Especially for those with problems such as depression, just getting up the energy to seek help is hard enough.
But now with the Internet, they can get constructive help in the comfort of their own homes.
For those who are already Internet-savvy, it's only natural for them to look first to the Internet for help, which is indeed what Turco often sees among his patients, especially the younger ones.
For college students, "it's what you guys do, you're on the Internet," Turco said, and it would only be natural for them to peruse sites for help with their mental health problems.
Dartmouth students most often seek psychiatric help for anxiety, depression and eating disorders. Many need help just in dealing with stress, and some suffer from more serious mood disorders.
Health Services has considered offering online help to students, but as of now, has no formal program.
Turco often receives and answers e-mails from students about their health problems, but often, he says, it's difficult to deal with the problems electronically.
He said that if Health Services were to offer mental health help through a formal online program, they would first need to be sure they had the resources and people-power to manage it, something which, as of now, they do not have.
But for Turco, other online mental health services are here and a reality.
"The cow's out of the barn, and it's more of a question of how we deal with it."
For now, he advises students to be savvy in which online sites they choose to use and realize the limitations of online help.
