You Might Also Like: The Blind Spot with Dr. Aditi Nerurkar

**Aditi Nerurkar** (0:13)
Welcome back to The Blind Spot, I'm Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, your host.
This conversation is about mental health and social media, but not in the way that you think. This is not another episode about social media being bad for mental health. This conversation is not about the problem, it is about the solutions for clinicians to navigate the online world for themselves and also their patients. Because we know that social media has lots of benefits. It is not all bad, but I think we all know that it has not ended up in a place of unalloyed good. Mental health information when disseminated on social media can get warped and oversimplified by the community aspects of social media. And for people who are hungry for community, they can find themselves adopting an identity for belonging, not because their symptoms fit a particular diagnosis. And so the blind spot we're revealing today is the search for belonging mistaken for a medical symptom.
My guest today is exactly the right person to help us untangle this web of social media, self-diagnosis, and patient empowerment. Dr. Judith Joseph, also known as Dr. Judith, is a board-certified psychiatrist, a researcher, and author of High Functioning, and the host of The Vault Podcast. She chairs the Women in Medicine Initiative at Columbia and teaches child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU Langone. She has run more than 130 clinical studies as principal investigator of her own research lab, and she does something most of her peers do not. She has built an audience of more than one million people across social media platforms, teaching mental health in the very medium that's producing so much of the confusion and misinformation we're here to talk about today.
Dr. Judith, it is such a pleasure to welcome you today here on The Blind Spot.

**Judith Joseph** (2:22)
Thanks for having me. It's great to see you again.

**Aditi Nerurkar** (2:24)
It is great to see you. So Dr. Judith, tell us about your path. What drew you to the work you do, and what made you decide to take that work into the public space in front of cameras and microphones, and a much bigger audience than you ever could see in your office and clinical setting?

**Judith Joseph** (2:43)
Well, actually, I started off as an anesthesiology resident. I did that for two years at Columbia.
Very different than psychiatry, you know. In psychiatry, the person's up talking, we're listening. In anesthesia, you put them under, you wake them up, and you never see them again, in most cases. But I found that work not as gratifying, not as fulfilling, and that led me to really question myself, like, what am I doing? What is this for? And a friend of mine was actually a psychiatry resident at Cornell, and she said, you know, you'd be really good at psychiatry. And when I switched over from anesthesiology to psychiatry, she was right, I loved it. As a psychiatrist, we're taught, when I was actually in training, we're taught, it's all about the patient, you know, really mute yourself, be a blank slate. So, you know, the path to becoming a media personality or being in front of a camera never even crossed my mind. I was actually in the child psychiatry emergency room, ER, again, one of the first in the country for child psychiatry emergencies. I was thinking about that, an emergency room for child psychiatry emergency. The director of the department was being interviewed by a journalist that day, and she is a very, very successful woman, but was no longer treating patients. And she said, I need someone who's actually in the ER seeing patients to come with me for this interview to answer the clinical questions. So I was a fellow just seeing patients in the, in the psych ER. And she was like, Hey, want to join me? And you don't say no to the boss. So I was like, Okay.
So I went along with her. And then when the article came out and I read it, and they pass it out to the entire department, I just, I've read my interview and I was like, Oh my gosh, like, I am terrible at this.
So I went to my trading director and I said, You know, we should really learn how to speak to the press because we're going to be asked these things. You know, child psychiatrist always ask things on the news. And he was like, that's a great idea. You develop the course. Now, mind you, I was in fellowship. I didn't have time for that. So I just remember going home and being like, why do I have to open my big mouth? Why do I have to ask? So that's how it really started. I developed this course to teach doctors how to answer questions when the press ask questions like, what causes gun violence in the school? Why did this person end up committing suicide? All these mental health things that you typically see in the press. And initially, it was mostly focused on press interviews with traditional media, television, radio, print. I had to learn how to use social in order to teach my students. It was not out of like, I was very afraid of social media. I didn't want to be on it at all. I thought it was unprofessional, like everybody else did in my field. I thought, well, there's respectable media and then there's unprofessional. I was wrong.