Teen Blogging–Good for Anxiety?

I recently attended a session for graduate students about managing stress and keeping perspective during graduate school. During this session with Dr. Jim Marsh, he mentioned that, at Baylor, they are seeing a higher number of students with depression and anxiety then they ever before. Over 40% of the students coming in for counseling cite struggles with either depression or anxiety.

This week, I came across this post from Slate about teen blogging and how it could possibly benefit students as a way to alleviate anxiety, so I wondered how that would apply to our students. The author, Caitlyn MacNeal, says that recent studies have shown that public journaling may be better for teenagers then private journaling, specifically because public journaling allows for commenting, which was shown to improve the blogger’s “negative emotions” and help them handle difficult situations in their life better. Blogging is a way to facilitate learning in the class and building writing skills, but I hadn’t really considered it to be a form of classroom therapy.