For those of you who haven’t heard, Pinterest is a pinboard style of social media which emphasizes visuals.  Recently I was trying to learn more about it and how it might apply to the psychotherapy/psychology field.  So far I can see possibilities:

DBT- Using Pinterest to create worksheet boards, or better yet boards of images which provide self-soothing for distress tolerance.

Behavior Charts which are visual and available instantly from home instead of going home in a book bag and being forgotten.

Virtual Comic Books to help adolescents learn and practice sequencing and pragmatic speech.

Screenshots of video games that can be shared by gaming patients with gamer-affirmative therapists.

Psychoeducation Tools for a variety of issues, including the above example.  Click on the image to see my board on Infographics for video games and gaming.  They are not intended as professionally vetted research, and you’ll not the heading encourages viewers to check out the research.

There are obviously things to be concerned about, such as privacy and how best to bring Pinterest into the therapeutic session, office and process.  Pinterest is not HIPAA-compliant, for example, so would a link sent via hushmail be secure enough for some uses?  How might we make sure our patients could use this powerful visual tool in a way that did not disclose what health information described what they were using it for.

What do you think?  How might we use this powerful visual medium to enhance our treatment with patients in an best-practice way?

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