Web therapy: Kids & adults do it

Let’s hope mental healthcare people are paying increasing attention to what people are saying online – especially in specialty sites such as WrongPlanet.net, for people with Asperger’s Syndrome. The Los Angeles Times reports that, “in the weeks before 19-year-old William Freund donned a cape and mask and went on a shooting rampage in his Aliso Viejo neighborhood, he reached out for help” at WrongPlanet.net. Another example was reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: The blog of Alex Stirlen, 17, at STLpunk.com “came to light … after he was charged with the murder of classmate Erin Mace, 16…. She also had a blog on the local punk rock Web site that linked to Stirlen’s and vice versa.” Those are horrible extreme examples, but research shows that “nearly half of [the Net’s some 15 million] bloggers consider [blogging] a form of therapy,” the Washington Post reports. AOL sponsored the research, which also found that “although AOL provides tools that allow bloggers to limit their audience to selected viewers, most don’t.” Making one’s inner thoughts very public seems to be the whole point of blogging, whether you’re a teenager or an adult – something healthcare professionals should be aware of. Of course, some are. Ron Scott, a St. Louis-area psychologist mentioned in the Post-Dispatch article, has thought a lot about this phenomenon. And the Washington Post cites a warning by psychologists that “although it may feel good to blog … going public with private musings may have ramifications, and … little research has been done on the consequences of the Internet confessional.”