Gathering information
As a young member in the academic community it is imperative that students like myself immerse ourselves in the social issues that surround us. At any given time across the U.S their are several social issues that need to be addressed and it is up to my generation and I to educate ourselves in them in order to change them for the better.
For this week’s assignment my group and I were tasked with navigating the web in search of credible sources for our topic of HealthCare. As a psychology major I wished to focus more on mental healthcare or the lack there of.
While searching for credible sources we needed to make sure the websites passed a “crap test’ in which all of the sources I posted on Google Docs passed. However, as I searched I found that many websites that claim to help you find healthcare information are just bombarded with third party advertisements that make the website look more like a billboard than any respectable medical site. The moment any of these websites opened up to a pop up of some random new pill I knew I needed to leave that site alone.
To diversify the kinds of sources that was coming up I used three different search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Duck Duck Go. Out of the three Google usually had the more relevant since it is the most popular, I felt that Yahoo was a utter failure since it went to more promotions than actual informative sources, and Duck Duck Go was useful because it also included blogs and essays written by other students.
Out of the sources I posted to our Google Docs page,a source that really popped out to me in my search for information on mental health was an article published in Time magazine about a father who lost his son to suicide. The father was a local science and medical writer for the local paper and even with his knowledge of the medical field he lacked the resources to properly care for his son. The article continues to talk about how this incident is just one of many that Americans have to deal with because our government continues to cut funding for mental healthcare causing millions of people with mental problems to go untreated.
