YouTube and Podcasts

I had a really productive therapy session yesterday that is leaving me torn between multiple topics to write about today.  I guess that is a good problem to have.  Let me start with the issues with YouTube (and podcasts as a similar concept applies there too).

First, I'm not anti-YouTube.  I even have my own channel.  There's some great stuff on YouTube.  I also enjoy a number of podcasts.

The issue is that anyone can post anything at all.  There isn't anyone to fact-check it and people often don't pay attention to the speaker's credentials.  And this has become a real problem in the mental health space with so much garbage out there to sort through to find anything good.  What that means is that it is easy to find content that validates what you want to hear.

My ex-husband was (probably still in) obsessed with YouTube.  That is where he went for all his answers.  And as things were falling apart in the end, his focus switched to many mental health and relationship videos.  I can't even count how many times I cringed at the things said in some of the videos I saw him watching.  I'm not a mental health professional so I didn't have a researched reason for why I was cringing and so I didn't speak up but the messages often just didn't seem right and they seemed to be creating more division between him and me.  

So my ears really perked up when my licensed and educated therapist mentioned the dangers of YouTube and podcasts and the misconceptions they put into people's heads.  She mentioned that she had worked with a number of men who had fallen into that YouTube/podcast trap and the challenge of working with them.

You know as a country where both sides of the political divide blame the other for letting themselves be brainwashed by online content, you would think we would learn to be a bit more discerning about the content we consume.  But we are not.  I try hard to vet sources of what I read and hear but I know I could do better and this was a good reminder of that.  It was also a reminder that this needs to extend beyond just the political content we may trying to fact-check but it also needs to extend to all areas of our life every time we open up an internet browser, YouTube, or some other social media platform.