Psychology
 Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/29/2008 - 09:56 (Check me out!)
I had a wonderful weekend ‘horse camping’ with my wife and youngest daughter. I am finally home, in front of my computers and trying to reconnect and sort through thousands of emails.
I have spent a little time digging through the emails to the Group Psychotherapy mailing list and wanted to hit on several of the themes that have come up. In the discussion about online therapy, Charlie had a great line,
'Where are you?' which can be taken in so many ways. Either as a demand, a simple request or a plaintive cry.
My initial reaction is that ‘where are you?’ can also be a question showing caring, connectedness. I want to know where some of my friends on the list are. I think about Toby and her mother and her Aunt. I think of Ofra and her grandchildren. I think of Sheila, and too all of them I think of asking them ‘where are you?’ as more of an emotional, psychic temperature taking. A telling of the other, I care, I want to know how you are doing. I suspect this may be part of the aspect of constant partial attention that I talk a lot about.
Digital natives need to feel constantly connected with their friends. Perhaps some of it has to do with the age of many digital natives. Teenagers spend time trying to define their identity. Identity is tied to the groups we are part of, and as people work on defining their identity, they need to feel especially connected to their groups.
Carol had a wonderful comment about this saying
I wonder how many old issues of inclusion and exclusion get activated when one is "invited".
...
the facebook phenomenon feels very "junior high" to me when it comes to internet networking
Yeah, that sounds about right. It is probably amplified in cases because all we have is the generic text asking someone to be a friend, with perhaps a little added personal text. There is the ability to write it off as if the person didn’t get the request. There is less of the shuffling of the feet, looking away from the person out of embarrassment, shyness or fear. So, we send more messages to be connected. We explore new ways of using text. We put up pictures of ourselves on Facebook and join groups to define ourselves and the idea of simply leaving Facebook or not putting up personal information just isn’t realistic. This gets back to a discussion from Computers, Freedom and Privacy last week that I want to explore more.
However, I want to get back to the emails from my friends on the Group Psychotherapy list. In the discussion about whether of not therapists should add clients as friends on social networks, or accept friendship requests from clients may require another variable in the calculation. Are the clients digital natives? Are they digital immigrants? Is there a digital aborigine in the mix? Is it some sort of mixed group?
I suspect that accepting or declining friendship in a social network may have very different meanings to people who have grown up in a digital world, where everyone is on social networks and everyone is everyone else’s friend, from people who have come to online social networks later in life and experience them as a foreign way of connecting and communicating.
To push this a little further, Marv commented,
we encourage patients to choose therapists with knowledge of their qualifications, although it¹s startling to find how many new patient¹s are choosing therapists based only on internet research.
As I read this, I wondered how important is it for a therapist to understand the culture that a client is part of. I’m sure this is a topic that people can run a long way with. How much must a therapist understand digital culture when dealing with digital natives? Perhaps this goes back to some of the questions that Bob deals a lot with.
So, I post these as ideas for my friends to ponder.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/22/2008 - 06:51 (Check me out!)
This morning, I have gotten up early to write a blog post about yesterday’s sessions of Computers, Freedom and Privacy, and to try and read at least some of the more important emails before I head off to today’s sessions. The Group Psychotherapy mailing list has been having some fascinating discussions which I’m trying to stay on top of.
In one email, a friend wrote about a client who spends much of her life flying. She was talking about a recently failed romance where she and her new lover flew off to some exotic destination. They had a wonderful time, yet on the flight back, her new lover jacked in to his iPod and they didn’t have a chance to talk about there relationship and what had happened to them on the sunny beaches. The therapist suggested that perhaps the lover didn’t have the skills to talk about the relationship. I presented a different interpretation. I like the way the email came out, so I’m posting it here.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/17/2008 - 10:31 (Check me out!)
A perennial discussion around online social networking sites is how do you decided who to add as a friend. MyBlogLog has a new service called friender that has caused me to think about this again recently and the topic has emerged in two different groups I’m part of as well as in a discussion on Twitter.
The Friender service raises a bunch of interesting questions. It goes out and searches other sites and finds people that you know on those sites that are also on MyBlogLog and asks if you want to add them as a contact. In addition, MyBlogLog has taken everyone that has added me as a contact and listed them as pending contacts for me.
This raises several issues to think about. The first is what do we mean by a ‘contact’. For me, in MyBlogLog, a contact is someone that writes a blog that I’m interested in reading, or is interested in reading my blog. Since I like to read lots of different blogs and since I like lots of different people to read my blog, I am very liberal about adding people as contacts. Currently, I have 283 contacts at MyBlogLog.
A second issue is symmetry. Contacts in MyBlogLog do not need to be symmetrical. I can add someone as a contact in MyBlogLog without them adding me as a contact back. I think this is very useful and a better way of thinking about contacts online.
The third issue is data portability. The information that I provide in other sites can be brought into MyBlogLog. In addition, MyBlogLog provides a Friend of a Friend (FOAF) file listing the services that MyBlogLog knows that I have as well as the contacts I have. This data can be read and processed by computer programs to build maps of friendships, see who is in other services where you haven’t subscribed to them yet, and so on. Yet many people don’t realize how much information is available this way and the implications it has for privacy.
Lets now take this to a discussion that occurred on the Group Psychotherapy mailing list. One therapist mentioned that a client had asked about adding him as a friend on Facebook. The therapist suggested that this is a discussion that should be had in the group, including an exploration of why the person wants to add the therapist as a friend and how the rest of the group feels about it. A different person said that he believes that therapists shouldn’t be on Facebook.
Robert Hsiung, who works at University of Chicago and has done some very interesting work on how clients online activities affects groups presented his suggestions for how therapists should deal with Facebook.
Dr. Bob hopes to talk about this more at the American Medical Informatics Association 2008 Annual Symposium. in Washington DC this coming November. There is plenty to talk about in this subject and Bob’s suggestions provide a good starting point.
One of the things to note about Facebook friendships is that that are symmetrical. To add someone as a friend, the friend has to agree. As with MyBlogLog, I have a fairly loose policy about who I add as a friend on Facebook, and currently have around 570 friends on Facebook. However, Facebook requests from people that I don’t know anything about or that have pictures that don’t resonate with me don’t get added.
This takes me to John Herman’s comments about Facebook friends. John is a teacher who has been asked by students about adding him as a friend on Facebook. He speaks about only adding students as friends when those students didn't have anything on their Facebook pages that could damage their reputations his own. It has resulted in many great pedagogical opportunities and seems to be a particularly wise starting point. To the extent that adding Facebook friends comes up in the first therapists group, I hope both Bob and John’s talking points get brought into the discussion.
Relationships on Twitter are asymmetrical. Following someone on Twitter simply means, at least for me, that you think the person is writing something interesting. As a result, I’m currently following 414 people on Twitter and 723 people are following me. Major Twitter personalities like Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis follow and are followed by twenty to thirty thousand people. I don’t know how they could read very many of the tweets from everyone they are following, let alone have much of a sense of who the people they are following really are. After all, we are talking about twenty times the number of people that Dunbar believed was the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships”
Yet there is something a little creepy sounding about ‘followers’ and people have been talking about whether Twitter and sites like Seesmic, which have picked up the ‘following’ language might want to change their nomenclature.
There are plenty of different approaches to adding friends, followers, contacts, or whatever else you want to call them. They depend on the nature of the community, how portable the data is, whether it is symmetrical or not, and plenty of other factors. For me, I’ll continue to have a fairly liberal approach to adding friends, but will constantly be re-evaluating. How about you?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/15/2008 - 12:59 (Check me out!)
I spend two days away from my computer and come back to over 2000 unread email messages and several interesting discussions. Last year, Gartner, “the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company”, predicted that 80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A "Second Life" in the Virtual World by the End of 2011.
Not everyone is happy about the prospects of this. Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois is pushing for legislation that would Ban 'Second Life' in schools and libraries. Needless to say, educators that use Second Life for pedagogical purposes in schools are not particularly supportive of the proposal and there has been a lot of discussion about this on the Second Life Educators list.
Meanwhile, on the Group Psychotherapy mailing list, there has been a backlash against the discussion about the therapeutic potential of virtual worlds. Some of it seems to be motivated by discomfort with Second Life. Some of this may be motivated by concerns about possible dangers to children in Second Life, particularly related to sexual content, that is the big concern of Rep. Kirk, it seems like other concerns are more prominent, such as people spending too much time in Second Life at the expense of face to face social interaction.
This concern sounds fairly similar to concerns about kids watching too much television, and it is interesting to note that one therapist talked about how one of his patients had increased time for Second Life by decreasing time watching television. From a McLuhanesque perspective, this is perhaps a positive step, since Second Life is much more immersive and interactive.
It may also be that some of the concern comes from a fear of the unknown. For many of people, Second Life is something they haven’t experienced. They’ve read about it in various places. They’ve read about the dangers of video games. Second Life and video games remain a foreign and threatening technology to them.
There is perhaps another underlying theme on the Group Psychotherapy list, the concern about ‘alternative therapies’. The discussion about therapy in Second Life often centers around art therapy or psychodrama. People aren’t sure what to make of alternative therapies.
Yet this ties into yet another parallel process. As I was driving by daughter home from college yesterday, she talked about what she wanted to do. She is a musician, an actress and an artist. She is interested in psychology and was very interested in alternative therapies.
One of my todo items for today, as I tried to dig through emails that have piled up was to ask friends on the group psychotherapy list for good material for my daughter to read to find out more about alternative therapies.
So, I’ve read through a bunch of emails, I have many more to go. Let’s see what the folks on the Group Psychotherapy list have to say.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/21/2008 - 20:44 (Check me out!)
Go read Rafael Noboa's The Twenty Percent. Right now. I mean it.
(Hat tip: David Isen)
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/13/2008 - 09:57 (Check me out!)
Below is an open letter that I sent to the American Group Psychotherapy Association in response to my experiences as a blogger at their annual meeting. It has generated some interesting discussions and I look forward to the next steps.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/09/2008 - 17:44 (Check me out!)
On the Group Psychotherapy mailing list that I am part of, there has been a lot of discussion about what is going on in Gaza. This is intermixed with discussions of conferences and issues that people run into in their practices. It seemed to me that these threads were more interrelated than they initially seemed, so I wrote the following:
I've been struggling to keep up with all the emails on this list and make sense of them. So many of them call out to me to say something and I've just not had the time or energy, and if I had, others would be feeling overwhelmed with the amount of emails In generate. So, I am glad that V. has given me a chance to try and tie together all my reactions.
It seems like there is an important underlying theme, how do we respond to injustice. We see a parent bullying their child. Do we walk away and say that the parent had terminated therapy and there was nothing more the therapist could do? Or do we try to find some other way to get through?
When we see a peace process breakdown, do we walk away and say that the different sides are hardened in their positions and it is useless to talk about it, or do we seek to find empathy and help others find empathy, and perhaps even a shred of hope?
When we see callous youth, do we blame it on the education system or the media, shaking our heads as we walk away, or do we own our own roles as educators as part of the media landscape and seek for ways that we can bring a little empathy and hope into yet another situation that might appear hopeless?
Four years ago, my wife ran for State Representative in Connecticut. It was a seat that a Democrat had not run for in around ten years and a Democrat hadn't won in around a hundred years. Republicans outnumber Democrats in the district two to one. There was very little chance that she would get elected, but it was important to run. In the election she received 44% of the vote, much greater than anyone ever thought was possible.
Afterwards, people who hadn't seen the election results would ask if she had won. I would always reply, that yes, she had won. She hadn't gotten elected, but she had won. I didn't know exactly what her victory meant, and I still don't know exactly, but we saw increased dialog about the issues our little part of Connecticut faced. We saw other people become more involved and find their own voices in politics. I believe I even see a little more civility in some of the discourse.
It is with that in mind that I complement V. on her successful intervention. Would I have done things differently? Perhaps a little bit, but I'm not sure. Did the presenting case for the intervention get
resolved, the parent finding help? We don't know. We might never know. Did V.'s action send forth a little ripple of hope? Yes.
"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of
energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." Robert F. Kennedy
So, with that, I want to thank V. for her contribution to trying to find peace in the Middle East, for her contribution to trying to help students in the United States learn more about the battles for justice that we have faced in the past and face in the future, and for her contribution here.
(Note: I post this with permission of the person on the list who brought the vignette, and have changed some of the details to protect privacy and confidentiality.)
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/06/2008 - 14:20 (Check me out!)
Some people may wonder what the two topics, Mental Health and the Executive Branch have to do with each other, especially these days, but they are two important issues that came up this morning on a conference call for bloggers and online journalists with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
The announced purpose of the conference call was to discuss the contempt charges that Congress will be filing as a civil lawsuit against Joshua Bolten and Harriet Miers for their refusal to respond to subpoenas from Congress. At the center of this is the issue of executive privilege. How far does it extend? The same issue came up in the discussion about FISA. The positioning around the FISA bill seems to be all about attempts by the executive branch to usurp power from the legislative and judicial branches.
So where does mental health fit into all of this? The call started with Speaker Pelosi talking about congress passing the Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act on Wednesday. She described it as a tremendous, historic victory and spoke about the late Sen. Wellstone’s son, David Wellstone and Former First Lady working hard to help get this bill passed.
On Wednesday, I met with a past president of the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) to discuss how AGPA could better get its message out. Group Psychotherapy has played an important role in helping people deal with issues that disasters like 9/11 or Katrina have caused. Some of the early work in Group Psychotherapy was around treating soldiers traumatized by their experiences in World War Two, and it would seem like Group Psychotherapy could be very useful in helping veterans returning from the Iraq War.
We spoke about how AGPA can better interface with the media, including bloggers, about its efforts on Capitol Hill and its work with Roslyn Carter to promote awareness of group psychotherapy.
This brings us back to the Presidential Branch. Roslyn Carter has done great work in help our country address issues of mental health. Both Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama have spoken about the importance of mental health parity in their health care platforms. Let us hope that our current President sees the importance of addressing issues of mental health.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 03/01/2008 - 18:36 (Check me out!)
A lot of my therapist friends are talking about HBO’s series, In Treatment. They argue about whether it is a realistic representation of therapy. They question whether it is misrepresenting the experience of therapy because of problems of how it was translated from the Israeli series “Be Tipul”.
The New York Times reviews the series with an article, He Listens. He Cares. He Isn’t Real. In the article, Diane O’Rourke, a medical writer from Chicago is quoted, “There is an old saying that most men would rather have you hear their story than grant their wish.”
When asked about this I responded that as a blogger, putting my story online daily, so I might not be the best person to ask this, however, I've often felt that the deepest wish that many people have is simply to be heard.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/29/2008 - 17:51 (Check me out!)
The self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks. Anyone who has read my blog post, R, will recognize that as coming from a keynote at the AGPA annual meeting and will know how I’ve been mulling it around.
Yesterday, I went to a talk on Augmentation and Immersion in Second Life. I left the talk feeling very unclear about what people were trying to say or why they thought it mattered, but it seemed something like this: The Immersionists view Second Life as some sort of ‘other world’, a fictional environment. Their avatars a creations like characters in a story. They are acted out, role played, perhaps even some sort of fan fiction.
The augumentists view Second Life as just another communications medium that helps, or augments, our ability to communicate. Their avatars are extensions of themselves. They represent some aspect of who the typist is.
It sounds an awful lot like discussions about MOOs fifteen years ago about how real or not the communications in MOOs were. I tend to lean towards an augmentist view of Second Life and to not take these discussions all that seriously. There is a real typist named Aldon Hynes. He writes blog posts and emails. He talks on the telephone and with people face to face and he moves the avatar Aldon Huffhines around Second Life. The shape of Aldon Huffhines may vary. Sometimes it might be in a wheelchair. Sometimes it might be a close approximation of the typist. Sometimes it might be a young boy, or even a cat. There remains a real typist behind the avatar and the different shapes that the avatar presents reflects different aspects of the typist.
So, does the avatar exist as some aspect of our internal neural network, an idea that we present a little of online? Is it more about our external network, and how we connect with one another? Perhaps the interesting part is about how our internal neural networks and the avatars that exist in our imaginations intersections with our external social networks.
This goes beyond just Second Life. On the mailing list of Group Psychotherapists one person wondered “whether the increasing ease of (internet) communication that we are enjoying could give rise to greater difficulty in maintaining our embodied relationships.” This too, seems to go to the augmentation versus immersion discussion. Does the concern about great difficulty in maintaining our embodied relationships grow out of an immersionist perspective, that somehow our experiences online are different in some significant way from how we connect with others using different media? Does it come from a belief that online personae are different in some important way from our offline personae? Does it come back to issue of ‘self’ as that intersection between our internal neural network and our external social network? Are we using media to make that membrane more or less permeable?
Today, I went to a discussion on credibility and reputation online. That too seems related to this whole idea, but we didn’t get to that point. Likewise, there are a lot of tools springing up to look at aggregated personal content. That is another area worth exploring in a separate blog post.
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