[{"id":"afa2e46","elType":"section","settings":[],"elements":[{"id":"c7e4a90","elType":"column","settings":{"_column_size":100,"_inline_size":null},"elements":[{"id":"3c3da70","elType":"widget","settings":{"editor":"<p class=\"p1\">For years, the generally accepted answer to the question: \u201cShould a therapist have a social media presence?\u201d was <i>No<\/i>. Yet, you can\u2019t help but notice that the mental health profession has responded otherwise by voting with its collective keyboard: Therapists, agencies, schools, and scholars hold professional accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok\/KuaiShou, and more.<\/p><p class=\"p1\">Our profession as a whole is often lampooned for questioning <i>everything<\/i>, but we rarely query the significance of the internet as a medium, especially in how we use it and how we are used by it.<\/p><p class=\"p1\">I suspect this lack of curiosity is spurred by growing discrepancies between the formal ethical guidance and the reality of how healthcare businesses operate and compete. The gap between how we learn to act as business owners compared to how we are taught to behave as healthcare providers is such that I presume many practitioners fear that a thorough reconciliation of the two will send us back to the Dark Ages, while <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/the-failed-promise-of-online-mental-health-treatment-11671390353\">questionable purveyors of online therapy<\/a> \u201cmove fast and break things.\u201d<\/p><p class=\"p1\">There are exceptions: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sherryturkle.com\/\">Sherry Turkle<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/netaddiction.com\/\">Kimberley Young<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.maryaiken.com\/\">Mary Aiken<\/a>, but even among the specialist few, blogs receive little if any scrutiny. Blogs have been around for quite a while and don\u2019t appear to pose the same hazards as, say, social media, which may contribute to their grandfathered-in status.<\/p><p class=\"p1\">Even though blogs started as a soapbox for individuals, today\u2019s blogs are built as a means of driving income or traffic, whether through third-party advertising, regular updated posts and targeted keywords to move up SEO rankings, or advertising posing as unbiased content. You likely know the experience of coming to the end of a purportedly unbiased essay or review, only to realize it was actually a sales pitch. Pity the fool who returns to their search results, only to find it to be sales pitches all the way down.<\/p><p class=\"p1\">Where have all the blogs gone? Geocities was a massive force in creating space for personal webpages and webrings on the early internet, but it was purchased by Yahoo! and then shut down in 1999. Though a webpage is not always a blog, Geocities websites served as a repository for online writing, and webrings linked together communities of writers and other creators. LiveJournal and Blogger also provided writing opportunities with a promise of control over privacy before the first came under Russian censorship rules and the latter was purchased by Google in 2003.<\/p><p class=\"p1\">What is a blog today? A modern blog can be a shout into the abyss, a commentary posted for public consumption, an advertisement, a come-hither. More often than not, it is a marketing tool.<\/p><p class=\"p1\">What is this blog in particular? Let\u2019s be honest: Any blog on a professional website is a marketing tool, and a personal blog would not be appropriate on a professional website. Ergo, this blog is a marketing tool.<\/p><p class=\"p1\">A good blog, even a professional blog, can encourage thinking and action that improve the wellbeing and welfare of readers and their communities. I hope that this blog carries the voice and furthers the wishes of the writer: that in reading this blog, you will come away with a better understanding of the work I do and why I think it\u2019s important.<\/p>"},"elements":[],"widgetType":"text-editor"}],"isInner":false}],"isInner":false}]