Most of the other social messaging work described in the conference was about countering tobacco marketing or marketing of syrupy drinks, or marketing of alcohol. Instead, in mental health social media, most of the governmental agencies and the mainstream mental health advocacy organizations like NAMI, DBSA, or Mental Health America instead do their work to spread the pharma industry line that “All psychiatric medications are effective and well-tolerated.” The Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation, one of the mental health social media groups that heavily pushes diagnoses and labels, had a blog about how kids can get themselves diagnosed even when their parents didn’t want them to.

I know that this is a compromise mental health social media term to include substance use as well, but I never chose to have my emotional difficulties that landed me in the psychiatric system. I never “behaved” in a way that got me sick, except that I had to learn a few behaviors to make me well, like exercising and eating well. Substance use may be a behavior, but mental health issues are not. I tell you what is behavioral health – heart disease. I tell you what is behavioral health – Type 2 diabetes. Those issues directly come from people’s behaviors. Mental health issues do not. Susan Rogers said, “Every time they lumped substance use and mental health together, it grated on me. That’s stigmatizing to us. I’m not a substance user.”

Beverley Schwartz from the Ashoka foundation did this incredible inspiring presentation to sum up the conference and asked the 600 or so people left if they thought of themselves as “HealthCare communicators.” Most of the hands went up. Then she asked if they though of themselves as “Social media experts.” Only about half of the hands stayed up. Then she said, “How many of you are social entrepreneurs?” Only about ten hands went up. Then “How of you want to be social entrepreneurs?” About twenty hands went up. Well the Unreasonable Institute has 10 characteristics of a successful social entreprenuer, and I’ve got all ten of them, especially not doing well in a beauracracy.

One of the most well thought out and researched programs that I heard was from Jeff Jordan, who started Rescue Social Change Group when he was 17. He said that you can either affect policy change, or cultural change. Policy change can be done by the “clean cut, preppy, ambitious” young people that are good at talking to adults, interested in volunteering for us, and want to make a difference for other young people. But these kids are not at risk.

The at risk kids are “cool kids, highly interested in what their peers think, and very involved with youth culture.” He said these kids will have nothing to do with a policy change campaign. He has designed many cultural change campaigns that are on his website, mainly where they bring “cool” people into bars to talk about anti-tobacco messaging. He said the two campaigns have to look and smell and feel totally different. He said you can either do one kind of campaign or the other kind and if you want to do both you have to do two separate campaigns. He said it’s like people who eat healthy food and people who eat fatty food. If you prepare a salad and then put a bunch of pork rinds on it, no one is going to eat it. You can’t meet in the middle with your campaign because then no one will listen.

Given the current huge use of psychiatric medications in our country, and the growing doubts about their long term effectiveness, this can be a huge problem. For every story that SAMHSA tells about people that have benefitted by being diagnosed and “treated” by the mental health system, I can give them three stories about people who learned that the diagnosis and medications themselves were the most damaging parts of all. I told Mark Weber from SAMHSA and a woman from the Carter Center, “As long as we’re not being honest that mental health treatment harms some people, we’re not going to be able to reduce stigma in this country.” Sure screening doesn’t have to be about diagnosis and labeling, but that’s the modern paradigm of care. Are problems with labeling discussed in screening tools? Here are SAMHSA’s 37 mental health screening tools, and if someone has time, tell me how many times they use the words, “overmedication,” “iatrogenic,” or “medication discontinuation syndrome.”

Currently more and more research is starting to question this assumption that has gone into mental health care for the last 30 years. We need to have a national, open and honest debate about this topic. SAMHSA is ideally positioned to conduct this debate since they listen to more recovery advocates than other organizations like NIMH who try to ignore our presence. I asked during the opening plenary, “What do we do if we’ve been giving out a social media message and it turns out to be wrong?”

The answer was, “You have to be honest. When the facts change, the message has to change.”

It’s time to do a serious evaluation about the honesty and efficacy of medicating every person with a psychiatric label for the rest of their lives. There is so much evidence on the side of complete recovery and more and more evidence showing serious problems with medications. We need the mainstream mental health social media community that is totally pro-med to address the radical mental health social media community that is totally anti-med. SAMHSA is ideally positioned to forge a common ground in the middle showing that medications help SOME people but not everyone, and that many people do better off medications. This is a more evidence based mental health social media message.