Leveraging Social Media to Support Your Practice

The rise of telehealth has transformed the landscape of mental health care, offering patients more accessible and flexible treatment options.

Alongside this trend in our increasingly virtual world, whether helpful or harmful, more people than ever are consuming information about mental health care from social media websites, including TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube.

Psych Congress Network sat down with Nishi Bhopal, MD, founder and medical director of telehealth practice Pacific Integrative Psychiatry, on-site at Psych Congress Elevate 2024 in Las Vegas Nevada, to hear more about how mental health clinicians can best utilize social media to support current (and future) patients’ mental health.

In Part 1 of this Q&A, Dr. Bhopal details the benefits of clinician presence on social media, including their role in combatting rampant misinformation. She also provides guidance on how to incorporate social media presence into everyday workflows, detailing a couple of helpful virtual tools that can help to optimize time.

For more expert insights for your virtual practice, visit our Telehealth Excellence Forum.

Psych Congress Network: What are the potential benefits of using social media to support one's clinical practice? Is social media promotion better suited to certain clinicians' practices rather than others?

Nishi Bhopal, MD: Well, there are multitudes of benefits to using social media as a clinician, and this applies to the clinicians whether they're an intrapreneur—so whether they're working in an organization or maybe they're working in somebody else's practice—or if they're an entrepreneur—they may have their own business or their own practice or something else that they are working on. So, there's benefits to both types of clinicians. Those benefits are not only for the clinician though because they also extend to the patient. The way that I look at it is that using social media is really providing a service to the patients that we are trying to help or to the audience that we are trying to serve. The reason it's a service is because we are providing good quality information.

In this day and age, there's so much misinformation online. In my talk on social media here at Elevate 2024, I asked the audience to raise their hands to let me know if they have seen patients who have self-diagnosed from TikTok with things like autism or ADHD or a myriad of other mental health conditions and almost everybody raised their hands. So, we're all seeing this as clinicians that patients are getting not good quality information necessarily from the internet. We as clinicians who are qualified healthcare practitioners actually have a responsibility to make our voices heard on social media.

PCN: As you know, social media devours our spare time, What tools are available that clinicians could utilize to streamline the amount of time spent promoting one's practice through social media?

Dr Bhopal: It can become quickly overwhelming, where you’re like, “Okay now I have to see my patients and I have to do my notes and I have to answer all my emails my messages, and now I have to do social media as well.” So, it can feel like a lot to add this new thing into your workflow, but what I do recommend to people is that you want to let it be easy and just keep it simple.

So how I recommend starting is you just pick one platform, and whatever platform that is that you feel resonates with you and resonates with the people that you're trying to speak to so for me. I've chosen YouTube because that works well for me. You want to pick one platform so you don't have to learn the algorithms for all of them, and then there are tools available to help you manage. One that I use it called Repurpose—it takes all of the videos that I have posted on YouTube, it breaks them down into small clips, and then you can actually schedule it directly to Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever other platforms you're using. It's all automated. So even while I'm here at this conference, all my social media has been automated. I'm not even going into my Instagram account. It's all just happening behind the scenes because I've scheduled it ahead of time.

Another tool that I use is called Descript; what this does is it will actually transcribe your video as you record it, and there you've got a blog post or you've got a LinkedIn post or an X post. You can also cut and slice your video that way easily as well. Then, the other tool I do recommend is for everyone who's kind of diving into social media is to get a virtual assistant. This is a person who can actually help you do all of the behind-the-scenes things. It doesn't cost a lot of money, but it takes a lot of material off your plate and it saves you a lot of time.

Part 2 of this interview coming soon! Interested readers can explore Dr Bhopal's YouTube Channel here.

Nishi Bhopal, MD, is board-certified in psychiatry, sleep medicine, and integrative holistic medicine. She graduated from the University College Cork School of Medicine, completed her psychiatric residency at Henry Ford Health System, and a fellowship in sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is the founder and medical director of Pacific Integrative Psychiatry, an online practice in California where patients receive a whole-person approach to anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders, including nutrition, psychotherapy, and integrative and functional medicine. In addition to her private practice, Dr. Bhopal is the founder of IntraBalance, an educational platform for physicians and therapists that includes a YouTube channel and online courses on clinical sleep medicine for healthcare practitioners. Her passion is making clinical sleep medicine easy to understand and accessible to all.