Helping is healing: examining relationships between social support, intended audiences, and perceived benefits of mental health blogging

ABSTRACT

Background: The benefits of helping others have long been intuitively acknowledged as a key to health and well-being, and computer-mediated social support research has predominantly focused on support one receives from others through online venues, including health blogs. This study aimed to raise attention to the practice and benefits of offering social support through examining a hard-to-reach population: mental health bloggers.

Method: An online survey was implemented with a self-reported sample of 50 mental health bloggers to look at the relationships between the helping motive and the help-seeking motive as they relate to perceived health benefits. The study also examined the relationships between intended audiences of mental health bloggers and their perceived health benefits.

Results: Paired t-test suggested that mental health patients’ motive to help others through blogging was significantly higher than that to seek help from others. Multiple regression analyses revealed positive associations between the helping motive, the help-seeking motive, and perceived health benefits. The helping motive played a more significant role than the help-seeking motive. Anonymous readers, friends developed through online interactions who shared the same or similar health concerns, and self were the most frequent intended audiences. Among all intended audiences, only friends developed through online interactions who shared the same or similar health concerns positively predicted perceived health benefits.

Conclusions: This study adds fresh empirical evidence to research on social support in the digital age: mental health patients blog to help others and connect with a larger community, and this motive is significantly linked to better perceived health.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental health
• blogging
• social support
• helping

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Yifeng Hu (Ph.D., Penn State) is an associate professor of Communication Studies at The College of New Jersey. Her major research areas are uses and effects of new media and emerging technologies in health communication.