Depression and Anxiety Treatment Therapy Through Social Networking is Effective Says Study

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A promising study involving 166 subjects and the use of an experimental social networking platform has been found effective in treating individuals who suffer from depression and anxiety.

A peer-to-peer platform called Panoply was developed by MIT and Northwestern University. It allows its users to build online support communities and encourages them to "think more flexibly and objectively about the stressful events and thoughts that upset them," says a research published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

According to Wired, Panoply was designed to manage the thought patterns of those who are struggling with depression. Through Panoply, users are exposed to cognitive reappraisal, in which they try to look at stressful situations from another perspective. Panoply has been likened to another therapeutic approach called expressive writing for people with anxiety and depression. This therapeutic technique allowed its participants to recognize their own thought pattern and then reinterpret these events by looking at them in another angle.

When a person who is stressed writes down his feelings, thoughts, and reactions in the platform, a "crowd" answers back by rehashing the situation to form another outlook. To ensure safety and non-tolerance for any kind of abuse, each comment is carefully examined before being published, notes Time. According to researchers, as users were able to master this technique, they were able to help recognize the thought patterns of others.

In an article by BostInno, Rob Morris, the lead researcher of the tool and an MIT graduate, is now commercializing Panoply through KoKo, a company where he is a co-founder. Morris hired over 1,000 individuals online through Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing application to simulate a large network of users for Panoply.

According to James Gross, a professor of psychology at Stanfod University and an experienced researcher of cognitive reappraisal, he liked the idea of crowdsourcing because it addresses two things at the same time.  "One is that reappraisal, although powerful, can break down when you most need it. Therefore, this is saying, 'Hey, instead of relying on intrinsic regulation, let's try extrinsic regulation, where we're going to get some help from other people.'"

"The second thing is that when you're depressed, you can withdraw from other people. So now you've got this double whammy, where you've got a high level of negative emotion, making it more difficult to reappraise, and you're isolating yourself from other people, which means that you're not going to be as likely to get extrinsic regulation," he adds.

What they did was to nicely address both of these issues by saying, "Hey, we can help with reappraisal, even if you're feeling a bit depressed, by helping you leverage outside input that you wouldn't otherwise get. I think this is a promising approach."