Cyberpsychiatry is a new approach to understanding the impact of digital information space on the mental health of individuals and society. Report № 2

Psychiatric science is faced with a large-scale and responsible task — the development of theoretical and therapeutic tools that allow it to cope with the challenges that the «era of the Global Network» addresses to public mental health. A look at the totality of accumulated problems through the prism of social psychiatry is long overdue. At the center of social psychiatry is the problem of distinguishing sociopsychopathological phenomena from the social mental norm, adequate to the concept of «public mental health». This goal is more difficult and requires a professionally responsible pursuit of scientific consensus than deciding the boundary between mental health and mental disorder in an individual. The article examines in detail the topic of mass consciousness and the psychological pathologies developing in it, which began to interest European and Russian scientists at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. The authors express their proposals in terms of reducing and preventing the negative consequences for public health of the essentially total involvement of society in the Global Network. The idea of creating a new research direction within social psychiatry is being put forward—information psychiatry.