cyberculture Archives - Kate Anthony

Happy Birthday Online Therapy – 20 years old!

September 7, 2015 by Kate Anthony

During one of my infrequent bouts of insomnia last night, it occurred to me that in 2015 we ought to be celebrating the 20^th birthday of online counselling and therapy. It now also occurs to me that thinking about such things at 3am is a bit odd, but then those who know me know that the practice and ethics of online work is the thing that keeps me awake at night, so I’ll choose the word passionate rather than odd…

Anyway, as outlined in my 2010 book Online Therapy: A Practical Guide, co-authored with the lovely DeeAnna Nagel (now of Havana Wellness – check it out!), it’s established that the first paid-for online mental health services started appearing in mid-1995, led by pioneers such as Leonard Holmes, John Suler, David Sommers and of course, John Grohol of PsychCentral. There’s a timeline here up to 2002 from the old Metanoia.org site, one of the first websites I came across when starting to look into the emerging field in 1998.

20 years old in 2015 – that means the field is almost an adult! So I am constantly surprised when it is referred to as “new” – it may be young and dashing, but at 20 years old, it’s not exactly new anymore!

In fact, it also now occurs to me that my training programmes first emerged in a face-to-face capacity in 2000, so the sub-field of training for online services is already a teenager (read my recent BJGC paper about that here)! And let’s not forget Supervision and Coaching also taking place online!

So I was pleased to be invited to Switzerland next year to speak at a conference being offered by the University of Basel. The conference theme is “Typing Yourself Healthy…”, and I was reflecting how nice it is to see the original online therapy modality being aired – a part of online therapy which remains robust despite the great technological developments we have seen over the years, particularly with video now being a reliable method of communication with clients (this wasn’t the case back in 1995, trust me!). Even if you picture “online therapy” as “video therapy”, I’m pretty sure that there is a lot of text-based work involved. And if you have joined the excellent free-to-sign-up platform PlusGuidance, you’ll know that text-based work is very much a part of the communication tools you can use with clients.

So, apart from making me feel very old, what can we take from the history of online therapy? Our 20-year old is maturing, no doubt – BACP will shortly publish new Good Practice Guidance for working with both text and audio/video – the latest set of ethical advice from a professional organisation that first looked at the area back in the late 90’s, and first published guidelines in 2001. The number of doctoral-level studies in the field has increased since my own was awarded back in 2010, and I see many on the horizon as trainees with the Online Therapy Institute find their own burning research topics as a result of their studies. The media is less shocked by the concept of using the World Wide Web for mental health support, although they still love a story about it going pear-shaped (and always will, I suspect). Even using avatars and virtual environments for therapy doesn’t raise too many eyebrows these days.

So join me in lighting a candle for the 20^th anniversary of online practice going live! It’s been a thrilling (and sometimes frustrating) journey to adulthood, as the Internet became an everyday part of our lives and more and more clients reached out through their personal devices rather than calling their medical practice. Having an online element to your practice shouldn’t be intimidating – the pioneers of the field have had your back for ages – so maybe it’s time to reach back out to the clients who are trying to find you online!

Cautionary Tales in Using Social Media

April 29, 2015 by Kate Anthony

I saw this story from my news source Naked Security this morning, and it set me thinking about just how important our social media presence is as professionals who have a client base.

In brief, a judge (yes, an actual County Judge) overseeing a troubling case about a man who allegedly imprisoned his 9-year old son as a punishment took to Facebook to comment on what was going on inside the courtroom. Her status updates included comments on items of evidence being submitted and links to news stories about the case. By doing so, she cast “reasonable doubt” on her own impartiality, and the defence team moved to have her struck from the case (successfully).

Now, without getting into a discussion about what her rights are under the USA First Amendment itself (which I don’t think any of us have time for at the moment), this story does give us an important reminder about the responsibilities we have to preserve the confidentiality of our clients, whatever our profession.

When you, as a professional, see something on the internet go viral, consider what the impact would be on your client if the same thing happened to your post, however well intentioned it was and however much you had thought you had disguised the client information. The nature of social media is in the title! It’s designed to be “social”. Therefore, what you post on social media isn’t meant to be a private observation about something – and if it can be shared, it runs the risk of being shared to people who know your client and can identify them. That’s the first consideration of confidentiality gone out of the window straight away.

I’ve seen colleagues on Facebook express relief in a status post when a “difficult” client cancels, and I’ve seen them note being late hitting the road to a client appointment the “morning after the night before!” These posts may be done flippantly, or even intended not to be taken entirely seriously (the second example included a winky, btw). But before you post anything to the unforgiving (and permanent) internet, remember what it will look like out of context and before a client complaints panel by your professional organisation. If you are in any doubt at all about the implications of what you are about to post – just don’t post it.

All our trainees taking our Certified Cyber Facilitator or Certified Cyber Therapist course get training in using social media as a mental health professional. If the story about the Texas Judge makes alarm bells ring about what you are putting out there on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN or any of the other social networks, please do consider joining them!

🙂

Trolls .v. Abusers – Let’s Clarify a Bit

October 19, 2014 by Kate Anthony

I’ve posted about trolling before when I returned from a conference – and feel inspired to do so again having returned from another! I went to a colleague’s workshop on CyberTrauma recently, and spent a very enjoyable day with counsellors, teachers, and other people with an interest in e-safety when it comes to working with children. One of the most interesting debates was around trolling, and how this can be misunderstood in the context of the Internet as a result of media attention that aims to highlight the negative behaviours online that we encounter.

Here’s how I see it: it’s all down to the intention of the poster.

Cyberbullying is not trolling. Nor are flames or flamewars. Nor is downright online abuse of another human being or beings online when done anonymously through a public forum such as Twitter. I do feel that the recent legal moves towards prosecution of those who engage in online abuse is a good thing, as I do feel that this addresses the incongruent gap between what is “real” abuse and what is “unreal” (as in: “it’s virtual so it doesn’t exist” – a phrase that has haunted my career when looking at the validity of online relationships, and which inspired one of my favourite self-penned articles back in 2001).

But trolling itself need not be abusive. It certainly can be irritating, frustrating, annoying, and create hours of time spent moderating forum posts, tweets, and blog comments when time could be better spent on something else. And it is true to say that it can often be abusive in nature and appear insulting (at best). But while trolling can be abusive, that does not mean that that is the central aim of trolling behaviour. The central aim of trolling is to lead the audience away from the intention of the initial poster. It’s a smoke and mirrors exercise to draw attention to a new topic – one that is seemingly related but in effect creates a different conversation, ensuring the original point-of-vi bluehaired_troll ew is lost. Take away the insults, threats, verbal abuse and (usually) bad spelling/use of caps and what you can see is an artform. Done well, trolling is actually quite clever. And a lot of the time, it’s actually quite funny (remember Rickrolling? That’s a classic example of trolling).

There are plenty of lists of the top examples of trolling over the last 25 years online, and plenty of articles discussing it (here’s a good simple one from Urban75). I’m finding that within my work conversations it’s getting increasingly hard to distinguish between good old trolling and internet abuse, and that makes life difficult when training and offering informed opinion about how society could or should treats trolls, particularly within the field of mental health.

In the past few years the phrase “don’t feed the trolls” became a meme in itself – and when re-dressed as “don’t feed the online abusers” it makes perfect sense (although that attitude has changed in light of online abuse being (rightly) taken as a criminal matter rather than simply an annoyance).

But let’s be clearer in our definitions of what is trolling and what is online abuse – it’s going to make addressing mental health issues caused or exacerbated by types of online behaviour WAY easier.

🙂