Why designers should care about the mental health crisis
Content warning: talk of mental health/illness, suicide, COVID-19.
COVID-19 has come with a lot of side effects. Loss of smell, economic recession, a general feeling of despair, etc. But the side effect I think will end up as the most long-lasting and most difficult to heal is the widespread increase in mental health issues.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already seen a massive increase in adverse mental health conditions in the second quarter of 2020, reporting anxiety levels three times higher than 2019 and depressive disorders four times higher. While we are all well aware of the immediate dangers surrounding the pandemic, it seems as though there is not equal attention placed on the lives we will lose due to worsening and increasingly prevalent mental illness.
Any lives lost as a direct or indirect result of this pandemic is tragic. It is heartbreaking to think of the lives we will continue to lose to this disease. Lives lost due to untreated or inappropriately treated mental illness is simply unacceptable.
This isn’t meant to be a post about adequate treatment for mental health conditions. I am a product designer. I am not a psychologist or a therapist or a CDC scientist, but it doesn’t take an expert to see these patterns arising.
As designers, one of the most commonly valued traits is empathy — empathy for the customer’s woes, worries, needs, and desires. From my work in UX, I’ve learned how to dig into a user’s true concerns, behaviors, and needs from a product. I’ve learned how products can use a consumer’s psychology against them in creating apps and services that you just cannot help but keep coming back to. And of course, I’ve seen how that same knowledge can be used for good, like in encouraging users to keep a regular meditation schedule.
But I think that now we need to focus not only on the more openly expressed needs that can be solved with our products, but the potential (and lately, probable) underlying conditions that inevitably impact how the consumer interacts with our products.
It is no secret that we can become addicted to the apps and services we interact with. I’ve recently had to delete my Instagram and Facebook apps because of how much anxiety the endless scrolling caused for me, and how difficult it was to stop regardless of that fact. Movies like The Social Dilemma help to highlight the toxic nature of many social media applications, and more and more we see people doing “digital detoxes” to try to improve their wellbeing and productivity.
As designers, we keep our jobs by building products that people want to use. And if people want to keep coming back to them, even better. But if the pandemic is negatively impacting our user’s mental health, which it clearly is, then shouldn’t we as professional empathizers build products with that in mind?
Caring for the mental and emotional health of our users shouldn’t be just for Calm or Headspace anymore. This appears to be a mental health crisis the likes of which we have not seen before, and the apps we’ve designed are making it worse. As Matt Haig explains in Notes on a Nervous Planet, social media allows us to mirror each other's emotions at such an advanced rate that it can feel like the whole world is collectively going mad at the same time.
Designers are the ones crafting the products that will be used for years to come. We are the ones studying users, their behaviors, and their needs. What do we do with the knowledge that our collective mental health is suffering, that it shows no signs of immediate improvement, and that some products we have designed contribute to that suffering?
We have to be especially mindful of what we are creating and how we are creating it.
Prioritize impact over intent. Even if we build something meant to connect us or help us, the end effect can be more harmful than helpful.
I truly believe the vast majority of what we work on is backed by good intentions. I wouldn’t want to be a designer if I didn’t believe that. But I also know that how products end up being used is often not how they were intended to be used. How we expect users to feel while using our products is often not how we expected or hoped they would feel.
We are designing, creating, and building products that are going to be used by a population that is experiencing more mental illness than ever before. We have to empathize with the users whose disabilities cannot be seen or objectively measured. We have to be even more mindful of what we put out into the world, knowing the long-lasting and world-changing impact it can have.
