See the Benefits & Learn How to Start
Have you ever considered blogging for mental health?
This post will explore the history of blogging for mental health and why we do it. We’ll also discuss the benefits of blogging for mental health.
From there we’ll transition into how to start a blog, followed by some topic ideas for your own mental health blog. By the time you finish reading, you’ll be equipped with all, or certainly most, of the necessary knowledge you’ll need to start blogging about mental health.
Let’s get started!
📚 Table of contents:
Why we write about mental health: then vs now
If you think about it, people have been “blogging” about mental health since human literacy increased to a level where it was accessible to the wider population. They may have not had the precise terminology at their disposal to refer to it as such, but writing one’s thoughts down as a way of releasing emotions has been going on for far longer than the invention of the internet.
While this earlier activity doesn’t technically meet the strict definition of what blogging is, since via-the-internet is built into the meaning of the word, it does speak to the fact that the underlying reasons for why people did it, were largely the same as they are today:
- Writing about mental health from a personal viewpoint provides an outlet for processing emotions.
- It allows individuals to connect with others who might be going through similar mental health struggles.
- For mental health professionals, blogging about mental health helps to showcase their professional expertise to more people who might need their assistance.
- If you connect with enough people and build a large enough audience, you can start monetizing your mental health blog as well. This goes for both mental health professionals and everyday folks.
From writing to blogging
The difference with blogging, and the internet in general, is that while previously people may have shared their written experiences and observations with others, their audience was much more limited. Only professionals who studied the mind and wrote books about the subject received any sort of wider distribution (à la Sigmund Freud).
For the average person, most (probably all) of the feedback came from people who had some sort of personal relationship with the writer. If they provided feedback, it was out of a sense of personal obligation, not because they had an actual passionate interest in mental health or a relatable mental health issue they were also dealing with.
These days the landscape looks a lot different. When people blog about mental health, it allows them to connect to a global audience of others who either going through the same mental health challenges. A mental health blog can also be a great way to connect with professional mental health workers helping those who face the challenges being blogged about.
Whichever umbrella you fall under, we encourage you to get started with your own mental health blog. In the next section, we’re going to walk you through exactly how to do it.
Benefits of blogging for mental health
Blogging for mental health comes with a host of benefits.
If done for personal reasons, it can help with:
- Calming down an overactive mind. For those who suffer from anxiety and find that their mind is constantly racing, the process of collecting your thoughts and working on a blog post can have a positive calming effect.
- Connecting with others in the world who are going through something similar. Depending on where they are in their journey, they might be able to give you advice or console you by sharing their experience, or vice-versa.
- If you stick with it for a while and build a large enough audience, you can also transform your mental health blog into a source of income. This could be through affiliate marketing, courses, coaching, e-books, and more.
If blogging for mental health as a professional, you’ll benefit by:
- Sharing your professional expertise with the internet is an excellent way to help those who could benefit from your knowledge. This could also help you get new clients.
- Although you’d still need to put in the work to develop an audience, as a mental health professional, you already carry some clout by virtue of your profession. This means that people are more likely going to want to read your e-book, take your course, or sign up for one-on-one coaching with you than they are with someone who doesn’t have your credentials.
How to start a blog about mental health
Choose a blogging tool
The estimated number of blogs on the entire internet is close to 600 million [1]. Due to this massive popularity, we’ve seen a steady rise in the ways that someone can publish a blog on the web.
While that’s true, there’s a very clear frontrunner, and that is WordPress. To put a number on it, WordPress is used by roughly 43% of all websites on the entire internet [2]. That’s all websites, not only blogs. There’s a whole list of reasons why that is, but in the interest of time, we won’t get into that here. The takeaway is this:
If you plan on blogging for mental health, then it pays to go with the crowd on this one.
WordPress really is the best choice (in our, and almost half the internet’s humble opinion). Just so there’s no confusion, in case you’re not already aware, there is both a free dot org version of WordPress, and a not-free dot com version, which is a separate company. For our purposes here – and yours too – anytime we mention WordPress, we will be referring to the dot org version.
Okay, so if WordPress is free, does that mean that starting a mental health blog is free too?
Not quite, but it’s not expensive either.
Choose a hosting provider for your mental health blog
While the actual WordPress content management system (or the “software” if you will) is free, you’ll need a hosting provider to run it on, and you’ll need a domain name for your mental health blog as well.
Those two components – hosting and domain name – are what you’ll need to pay for. In most cases, you’ll be able to take care of both simultaneously.
That is certainly the case with Bluehost, which is our recommended hosting provider. It’s one of the best hosting companies in the industry with lots of support for WordPress bloggers. Plus they have absolutely killer deals on their hosting plans for new customers.
Choose a niche for your mental health blog
So now you know the best blogging and hosting platforms, you’re good to go, right?
Actually, there’s still one decision to make: what particular niche within the broader mental health genre you’re going to focus on. This will allow you to choose a domain name and other website elements that tap into a specific audience.
If you’re a mental health professional, this is fairly intuitive; just lean into your existing professional expertise. For non-professionals, you can write about whatever personal mental health issues you’ve faced or are familiar with through some other experience. Ultimately, whatever niche you choose needs to:
- Have enough depth
- Be something you’re passionate about
Both of those will make it easier to maintain an ongoing blog about mental health.
Set up your website
The next thing you’ll need to do is set up your website. This means choosing a domain name, buying your web hosting package, and setting up WordPress. The good news is that Bluehost practically does the last part for you with only a few clicks. You can even buy plans with preinstalled WordPress.
Of course, there’s more to do after WordPress is installed. You’ll need to choose a theme (website design) that highlights your blog, customize it to fit your blog’s themes, and add plugins for things like spam protection and social media sharing.
For more details on how to get started with WordPress, please check out our full guide 👉 on how to start a blog and make money.
Blog topics for mental health
Once you complete the blog setup process and build some basic pages like your home page, about page, etc, you’ll be able to move on to the actual blogging about mental health part of this process. There are plenty of mental health blog topics that you can focus on. We’ll list some below, but keep in mind that you might need to adapt them to whatever your particular mental health niche is. Use them as a guideline and adapt them as necessary.
- Post-partum depression tips
- How to prevent an anxiety attack
- What is PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder)?
- How to deal with ADD / ADHD (attention deficit disorder)
- Self-improvement topics (self esteem, focus, gratitude, etc)
- Dealing with a narcissist or surviving narcissistic abuse
- How to process your childhood trauma and when to seek professional help
- Self-care tips during a divorce
- How to deal with grief and loss
- Mental health statistics
- Best books on (your mental health niche)
- 10 habits that lead to positive mental health
- 3 ways you’re sabotaging your mental health
- 5 signs you might want to speak to a mental health professional
- Mental health challenges faced by unique population groups (e.g., those who were adopted, third-culture kids, etc)
Final thoughts on blogging for mental health
In this post, we covered the underlying reasons why people blog for mental health and how they haven’t really changed much since the dawn of widespread public literacy. The only difference is that with blogging and the power of the internet, we are now able to reach more people across the globe and connect in ways that we weren’t able to before.
This means that everyone from the average person who wants to blog about their own mental health to the mental health professional who wants to grow their business can take advantage of the power of blogging.
Before you can start blogging for mental health, though, you’ll need to make some key decisions. You’ll need to choose a blogging tool and web host, pick a niche to focus on, and set up your website.
You’ll also need topics to blog about. We’ve shared some topics related to mental health above and you can also check out our 👉 guide to content creation.