**6.1 Transformations of society and media**

The hegemony of the digital culture has changed and transformed the structure of society dramatically. The characteristics of those changes have a snowball effect on the layers of society. It is presumed that when people change, so are immediate consequences, and impacts are followed. The transformation of society ultimately dominates the way we think, feel, behave, and the way we use language. Nevertheless, the concepts, terminologies, and issues that are used in the present academia are now much more blurred compared to the clarity of the old modern days. Hence, creating a common and mutual language is plausible to comprehend the mental problems and the society with inclusive perspectives and views of digital habitus. Keeping all these digital reformations in mind, scholars try hard to keep pace with stunning developments. It seems inevitable that all academic references and mental archives should be re-read and digested accordingly.

For the well-being of public health, traumas should not be confined to individual levels. People in all walks of life are likely to suffer from PTSD. On a much broader scale, to help the victims of PTSD, diagnosis and therapy alternatives can be presented to society as a whole. If new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches regarding PTSD cases focus solely on personal levels, psychiatrists can easily fall into the trap by ignoring its widespread effect on society and on the culture of the individual that s/he lives. It is, therefore, significant to design unique therapy alternatives for PTSD patients by taking the cultural, social, and geographical facts into account. In addition to these alternatives, the experts should focus on cultural differences as well as individual differences. For example, the socio-cultural development in Turkey is in an eclectic form where the transition process from the traditional to the modern and postmodern period does not work in line. For this reason, the specific conditions of Turkish society and culture should be taken into account in social interpretations of individual problems.

*New Diagnosis and Treatment Approaches to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104098*

Owing to the particular reasons mentioned above, social psychiatry should work for the benefit of the whole society counting PTSD patients. It is a challenging standpoint to offer a therapy that can work for the whole society. In the PTSD context, if social psychiatry utilizes cutting-edge approaches by wisely utilizing the technological advances of the cyber era, the mental and social well-being of society can be reached. It is, therefore, recommended to use new communication media, such as webinars, supervisions via the Internet, mental health apps, and developing "mind wares". These new discourses will automatically maximize the impact of social psychiatry particularly for PTSD cases [86].

#### **6.2 Media and trauma**

Media and television have a dangerous role as they can easily traumatize and continually retraumatize people with the vivid and graphic and horrifying pictures and videos that are broadcast on newscasts. They usually warn before they expose people pictures and videos full of violence. This is media violence. This warning cannot prevent people from trauma. So, they keep traumatizing people visually. Almost less than five decades before the digital reformation took place, George Gerbner, proposed in his Cultivation Theory that television negatively affect the mind of people [87]. TV news and programs usually exaggerate the violence of the outside world and depict the whole world as a bad, mad and cruel one. When particularly old people are exposed to media too long, they start to perceive the world as full of traumas, chaos, and tragedies. This is called Mean World Syndrome. As a result of that syndrome, three types of behavior or mood appeared: aggressive, depressive, and escaping. Unlike the world in which Gerbner lived, mass media today diversify with new technological opportunities within digital systems and affect the social sphere in a much shorter time and on a larger scale. While it is necessary to find an extra effort and time to encounter the mass media of the modern era, such as watching television, in the postmodern era, digital forms of communication tools have infiltrated the fabric of daily life. Now, without a special time requirement, individuals encounter multi-media messages in any part of daily life.

This infiltration of media in postmodern culture leaves us nowhere to escape. The risks of trauma are now scattered everywhere. Simmel associates the identity and mental problems of modern society with the over stimulus in the city life in his article Metropolis and Mental Life [88]. Whereas, in the postmodern age, we face a shift of paradigms as the rules of the game had changed. In the postindustrial society, identity and mental problems have different characteristics. Bernard Stiegler has correlated emotional problems with the digital revolution, as an inundation that carries with traumas, or at the very least the tensions.

The tsunami-like transformation of the communication landscape caused the sharp transformation from modern life to Information society that largely affected identity formation as the fragmented and episodic one [89]. People, for example, lost their feelings of belonging, and even their authentic ideology amidst uncertainty, which can be defined as social autism. The reasons highlighted here doubled the burden of psychiatrists in the post-capitalist/post-truth era. Conventional therapies, therefore, can miss embracing the overwhelming realities that those people experience.

#### **6.3 Searching new discourses in digital therapies for PTSD**

Digital media are now full of spiritual platforms providing solutions for people in trouble or suffering psychological disorders. There appeared new types of

narration that quickly become popular in cyberspace. Some approaches like collective healing streams which offer to heal the past wounds of the society may have genuine reasons and philosophy behind them [90]. However, they are not free from problems. Disinformation is ubiquitous and misleading. Therapy-based applications and contents addressing PTSD are largely held in esoteric and unprofessional ways. Unfortunately, their popularity can be hazardous and confusing regarding a large number of PTSD cases.

When the whole world was haunted by the chaotic and sudden emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, people were not ready to cope with this storm fully. This chaos and crisis have their unique problems. Many people suffer from that not only because they try to avoid being infected but also to escape from the harsh and odd situations that affected them mentally. It seems that it is hard to find isolation from this undefined fear atmosphere for everyone. People from all walks of life have suffered from the burden of digital works, ambiguity, and economic recession. As Chul Han discusses in *The Scent of Time*, the perception of time and its management worsened the situation [91]. While digital violence and crimes have been increasing, people have been pushed to live by the strict structures of discipline society and capitalism [92].

In these dark times, Turkish popular media resort to products that contain psychological consultancy contents. Here we come across a newly fledgling genre about digital media that works for Psychological Consultancy [93]. Some digital therapy contents, for example, act like postmodern witchcraft as they underestimate the real role of designing a therapy. These forms, which are grown in popular culture, also have an important function in maintaining the capitalist system. Expertise knowledge in the improvement of life created a new field outside of scientific knowledge and created a mystical field in postmodern culture. In places where modernization of society does not develop well, these forms of knowledge replace rational and scientific knowledge and present themselves in a form of reality.

Therefore, it takes professional psychiatrists to end this widespread cacophony and reverse the negative situation to positive ones [94]. If wisely used, digitalization gives several opportunities to implement new techniques regarding PTSD cases. Digital therapy sessions, awareness-raising activities can reach millions of people online. People can take online therapies or watch videos related to their problems. This is the natural outcome of the advent of the Internet and changing communication environments that widen the possibilities of civil protection services and emergencies [95].

As stated earlier in the study, changes in society challenge psychiatrists to diagnose and offer therapy by adding new perspectives to their conventional practices. Psychiatrists' role has changed as they now have to adapt these changes into their therapeutic diagnosis to follow the recent changes in society and find proper treatment. The pros of advanced technology should be used for the benefit of the people on the whole. It is true, digitalization challenges the psychiatrist to take PTSD cases by taking and addressing full sides of problems but digital narration opportunities allow them to lead fresh approaches in their discourse. Bennegadi, here, throws further questions: "Does the presence of a digital tool complicate the notion of empathy? Is confidentiality guaranteed? Is nonverbal language considered? And finally, how do we define the role of digital as a transitional element in the relationship?" [86]. The frame of these questions indicates that this is just the beginning of a new era. The methodology and their discourse that are shaped by the hegemony of the digital habitus must be arranged to offer the maximum of possibilities to the citizens in the art and the way of preserving their well-being.
