Psychologists and other mental health professionals are
exploring the various opportunities for doing clinical work online. For
many, that involves one-on-one psychotherapy and counseling, such as e-mail
and chat interventions. Another possibility is working with groups. When
consulting to virtual communities, or leading, facilitating, and creating
online groups, the mental health professional confronts a range of issues
about how to maximize the well-being of the individual member as well
as the whole group. This work involves a mixture of principles and techniques
from traditional group therapy, community psychology, and organizational
psychology. But it also involves some rather unique situations that demand
new ways of thinking and intervening. Let me briefly describe four scenarios
from my own work to illustrate these kinds of situations:
-1- A well-know psychologist leads
an online message board devoted to a discussion of his theory of psychotherapy.
All goes well until one day a person shows up and challenges his theory.
At first the psychologist responds to the challenge very politely. He
explains and clarifies his points. But this newcomer is what some experienced
onliners call an "energy creature." He very vigorously, very persistently,
and eventually very disrespectfully tries to convince everyone that the
psychologist is ineffectual, unethical, and even harmful in his work.
With this particular message board software, there is no way to block
the person from the group. What should the leader do?
-2- Mary is a well-liked member of
a chat community. Her online friends are very upset when she tells them
that she is chronically ill with AIDs. In fact, she is dying. Weeks later
someone receives a message from Mary's mother saying that she passed away.
Her online friends are very distressed by this. They decide to hold an
online memorial service for her. A few days pass, and the lingering sadness
in the community changes drastically when the truth is discovered. Mary
never died at all. She never had AIDs. She staged the whole thing. In
fact, like a modern day Tom Sawyer, she attended her own memorial service
in disguise in order to see how people would react to her death. The community
exploded in an uproar. Was this a deliberate, hurtful deception? Should
Mary be banned from the community? Was she perhaps suffering from a form
of online Munchausen's Syndrome and needed professional help. Or was this,
in some strange way, acceptable behavior? After all, in this particular
chat community, it was well known that some people did assume imaginary
identities.
-3- In a closed, rather intimate e-mail
group of 10 members, people discuss how their online and offline lives
affect each other. One member of the group becomes silent for many months.
Even when directly asked a question in the group or contacted privately
via e-mail, he doesn't respond. Maybe it's a very passive-aggressive act
on his part, or more likely he isn't even reading the mail. But the group
members don't know for sure. The people start to wonder why he might not
be reading the mail. Is he OK, or very busy, or just doesn't care about
the group anymore? Does he have his mail program set-up to filter their
personal discussions into the trash? Why doesn't he just leave the group
if he's no longer interested? He becomes the ultimate blank screen onto
which everyone projects all sorts of ideas. Should someone contact him
by phone? Should he simply be deleted from the group?
-4- A socially shy, unassertive woman
doesn't want to be shy and unassertive anymore. She decides to go into
an online community, pretending to be a male so she can develop the assertiveness
and social strength that she imagines men possess. Or in a reverse situation,
a male who is having trouble relating to women in "real" life decides
to go into an online community as a female, so he can better understand
what it's like to be a woman. His psychotherapist is not sure about this.
Do these gender-swapping strategies work?
Now I deliberately didn't provide answers to the questions raised in these
scenarios, and I didn't reveal the end to the stories. If you feel a bit
teased or frustrated - GOOD! Because I'd like to use these situations
to motivate us to think about the pathological and therapeutic aspects
of life in online groups and communities. Rather than offer answers, which
aren't necessarily the right ones, and rather than reveal the end of the
stories, which weren't always happy endings, let me instead highlight
some of the important issues about online groups and communities. These
are issues that help online psychologists understand and maximize the
well-being of such groups. Also, understanding these issues will help
any psychotherapist work with clients whose life online is important to
them. I'm going to run through these issues rather quickly, but links
within the text will take you to other chapters in this book that contain
supplementary information. So, a la David Letterman, here are:
Suler's Top 10 Issues
in Understanding Online Groups and Communities
You have to use some kind of software - a media or communication
channel - to create an online group. Different software have different
communication features that affect how people express themselves and interact
with each other. Synchronous or asynchronous
communication, member profiles, whispering, avatars,
message linking, audio-visual enhancements....
This is a huge topic unto itself. It's what human factors engineering
of online community software is all about. Right here, all I want to do
is emphasize how important it is to think about how the communication
tool is affecting the group's dynamics.
9. The
Dynamics of TextTalk |
In most online groups we use typed text to communicate.
This has a big impact on people in many ways. Voice and body language
cues are missing, which is a loss of important social information. On
the other hand, that partial anonymity
can disinhibit people. They'll say things that they wouldn't say in-person
- sometimes nasty things, but sometimes personal things. Also, writing
is a skill. Some people have it and they turn TextTalk into an art form.
Others don't and they may never join such an online group. It's a self-selection
process. Or if they do, they find themselves at a disadvantage. People
who are very expressive and influential in-person, verbally, may not be
in an online group. In fact, people who are shy in-person may find themselves
as leaders in cyberspace. That contrast between in-person and online behavior
can greatly influence the group's dynamics.
8. Membership
and Identity |
The basic elements of group boundaries for in-person groups
also apply to online groups. Who is the group intended for? How big should
it be? Is it open or closed? The problem with some cyberspace groups is
that you don't know the answer to some of these questions. You don't know
how many people are seeing your messages. You're not even sure who the
other people are. Groups in which people role play imaginary characters
are fine, as long as you know other people are role-playing. It's in the
groups where you don't know who is being real and who is play acting that
problems come up. The governing rules of the group should be clear about
identity, even if the rule is that people
may or may not be themselves. This issue leads to number 7....
How are people supposed to behave in the group? The people
running the group should be clear, from the start, about acceptable and
unacceptable behavior. There should be sanctions
for gross misconduct and they should be applied when necessary. In cyberspace,
privacy and lurking are very sensitive issues - so the confidentiality
of the group's discussion is important to consider. Also, it should be
clear who's in charge of the group. Some people seem to think that every
nook and cranny in cyberspace is a democracy where there is absolute free
speech. That's not the case.
Who are the leaders who shape
the group? What's their agenda, their vision? What are their personality
styles and unconscious motives? It's very easy for almost anyone to create
an online group, including support groups in which people are discussing
sensitive, personal issues. But the leaders may not know what they are
doing and they may not be fully aware of all their motives for why they
are doing it.
In asynchronous communication, like e-mail and message
boards, people participate at different
rates. Some are online all day. Some maybe once a week or so. It's
important to recognize and adapt to other people's paces. When you don't
get an e-mail response from someone when you expect, try not to project
all sorts of fantasies into that non-response! Each group also has its
own pace, its natural ebb and flow. You can massage that a bit, but don't
fight it. It's better to notice and understand the meaning of changes
in that ebb and flow.
4. Integrating
Online and Offline |
Cyberspace is great, but let's not underestimate the importance
of in-person realities. A healthy online group is one where at least some
of the people know each other f2f. It's one in which at least some of
the people know about other people's real lives and identities. It's one
in which the group members talk, at least a little bit, with their family
and f2f friends about what they are doing in the online group rather than
their online group become an isolated, secret world. I think this "integration
principle" is one of the most important issues in maximizing the well-being
of an online group.
People who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat
it, right? The group should have some concrete way to convey its history,
including lessons learned. Newcomers should know something about that
history and old timers need some reminding. Remembering and celebrating
the past can pave the way for the future. I was a member of one online
community that failed to celebrate its own birthday, the day that the
community was created several years earlier. To me that was dead give-away.
Something was wrong with this picture - especially since this particularly
community loved to throw parties and a birthday celebration seemed to
be the perfect opportunity. Was there something amiss in the development
of the community's identity? Was there a discontinuity with its past,
perhaps even a rejection of its past?
I've already hinted at how cyberspace can be very amorphous
and ambiguous. There are no voices, no body language, no physical space
other than the window you're typing into. In e-mail and message boards,
there's no sense of time. It's all the perfect blank
screen onto which we project all sorts of fantasies and transferences.
Be on the lookout for this in online relationships and groups!
1. Structure,
Purpose, Product |
Online groups need structure. You don't want to over control
them, you want to allow them to express their own intrinsic nature, but
it does help a lot to answer such basic questions as: What are we doing
here? What's our mission, our purpose, our philosophy?
Groups devoted to the discussion of a particular topic are OK - and there
are many thousands of these in cyberspace - but they tend to flounder,
fizzle out, and sometimes people get argumentative and a bit crazy when
there is nothing at stake except their words and ideas. It's good sometimes
to have a concrete objective. It's even better sometimes to have a specific
PRODUCT to create and show for your efforts. A good example of this from
my own work is the Clinical Case Study Group of The International Society
for Mental Health Online, which is devoted to in-depth discussions of
psychotherapy cases in which the internet plays a significant role. There
were several specific activities and products that helped center the group,
that gave it a sense of direction and accomplishment - for example the
report that describes its first year of work,
as well as the ongoing document that articulates its working hypotheses
about online clinical work.
Assessing and intervening in an online community demands a consideration
of at least some of these ten issues. In some cases, "fixing" a problem
may mean adjusting some feature of how the community operates. In others,
it may mean working one-on-one with the individual person, or with a subset
of members. Sometimes the intervention will be a combination of both strategies
because the problematic experiences of the individual can be both unique
and indicative of a defect in the community. Some of these interventions
will be aimed at the psychological and social dimensions of the group,
while others will involve technical changes in the media channel itself.
For example, working individually with people who attempt to disrupt the
group may be necessary, but every online group should have some software
feature enabling the removal of problematic members.
Maximizing the well-being of an online group also involves more than just
remedial interventions. Following the principles of secondary and primary
prevention in community psychology, it requires an early detection of
small problems before they escalate into big ones, as well as a sensible
design of the community so that some problems can be avoided from the
start.