Building familiar-looking bridges and reaching familiar-looking outcomes: Information behaviors of recovered mental health patients and their roles in sense-making their mental health

Abstract

This paper explores the motivations of recovered Filipino mental health patients (RMHPs) for seeking and processing mental health-related information, as well as these information behaviors’ roles in helping them make sense of their mental health. The findings show that practical motivators such as the need to alleviate pain and socio-psychological motivators shaped RMHPs’ information seeking, information processing, and privacy management. In particular, the pain of enduring symptoms and the expectations to get better increased their intentions to seek information, engage with their concerns more effortfully, and craft lenient privacy boundaries that helped them gain more insights about their mental health. RMHPs labeled these behaviors as guides that helped them achieve an acceptable but not ideal outcome. That is because RMHPs wish to feel “normal” again after having engaged so much with their concerns. This implies that the role of information in sense-making may be that of helping people reach familiar but not ideal outcomes.