On Wed, 29 May 2002, Dan Minette wrote: > The title of this thread is meant to be whimsical, not unplesant. It is a > statement that I'm drifting my thread with Marvin on purpose. > > Why does it suggest a clinical diagnosis? I specifically excluded doing a > DSM-4 diagnosis based on posts. The mental health community also tends to > give general rules for functional families and good mental health that are > applied across a large number of situations. Saying that boundaries is good > for > mental health is like saying exercise is good for physical health. I > wouldn't think that one would > argue that saying exercise is good for physical health is a clinical > diagnosis?
In a very general sort of way, I think I agree. But IIRC there was a fair amount of people offering fairly specific diagnoses of Mark on-list (by people other than just you, Dan). I think that once one gets past the "X sounds really unhappy" or "X is posting loony gibberish" level of analysis of a listmember, one rapidly finds oneself speculating without a lot of grounds to work on. I just think it's unnecessary and fruitless and, yes, rather insulting to the person being discussed. > I don't want to presume, Marvin, , but your posts do not indicate a > familiarity with the mental health profession. I've slept with a > therapist for 20+ years and have some feel for what goes on. Indeed, I am > particularly sensitive to the use of therapy as a technique in arguement. > Way back at the start of our marriage, we had to establish that doing > therapy > during an arguement was playing dirty and merited the punishment of losing > the > arguement due to the foul. However, general discussions of things like > boundaries were just part of the language we used. You're quite right, but it's not the mental health profession I was criticising. I'm willing to grant that mental health language can be applied by analogy to a list just like nearly any other language can. In fact, it's precisely the attempt to do therapy on a listmember in the midst of an argument, by more people than just you, that I found disturbing. (I didn't mean to make you feel singled out, Dan.) And while I think that establishing boundaries are important, and I don't object to the language as such, I don't think we know enough about Mark or each other to credibly suggest that by setting a given boundary we'd be doing him or anyone else a favor in the sense of his mental health. It might do him and the list a tangible *social* benefit, but that's about it. > > Analogy: some guy tries to get rough with me in a bar. In self-defense I > > punch his lights out. > > I won't agree with the analogy. Violence and a week ban from a list are two > different kettles of fish. One cannot equate rearranging someone's face > with what is essentially a time out. I'm not equating them, I'm comparing them. As non-terminal but coercive responses to unwanted harrasing behavior, the two are perfectly comparable, each in it's context (one physical, the other verbal). Kicking (there's that physical analogy again) Kyle off Brin-L was a lot like kicking a rowdy drunk out of our hypothetical bar and telling him not to come back until he'd changed his ways. See? The analogy works. "Equate" implies I think it's just as OK to punch Mark in the face as is it so ban him for (allegedly) spamming a mailing list. Ummm...no. That's not how analogies work. (For the sake of this analogy I'm assuming there are no police within easy reach of the bar, just as there are no exterior police for Brin-L.) > > > But there's no medical, clinical analysis at stake, and if I tried to > >justify my self-defense in clinical psychological terms any listener > >would (I hope) consider me a nut for trying to do so. > > You live in a different world than I do. We talk about such things fairly > frequently here. Its just like talking about a diet not being healthy. > FWIW, I deliberately did not use diagnosis jargon. What I used were words > that are generally used by people who work with youth, are on the AIDS care > team, with people working on improving their marriage, etc. Again, my indignation wasn't intended just for you -- if you felt you got the brunt of it, that was a mistake. And I don't think it's wrong to use clinical or psychological terms to help figure out how on-line communities should work, or to help figure out what's going on in one's marriage assuming both people understand the procedure and assent to it. What I object to, and what I thought I saw happening, is the singling out of a listmember by a group of people for some kind of public and slipshod and unrequested "analysis;" and I feared that people were about to vote on a ban using that analysis for justification rather than an honest consideration of the speech principles at stake. > > > > So, I agree that people need to be taught when their behavior is > > unwelcome. I agree that we, as individuals and as a community have to > > take reponsibility for establishing "boundaries" for our own protection. > > I'm even willing to agree that you can draw a strong comparison between > > what the mental health community says and what happens on line. > > > > I don't believe it's sound to use the language of mental health to justify > > the kind of decision we're discussing, however, because I don't believe we > > have enough knowledge about Mark, or about one another generally, to apply > > any kind of reliable clinical standard. To act as though we do have that > > knowledge is, IMO, overly familiar and insulting to the person being > > discussed. > > So mental health ideas are only to be discussed in a clinical setting? No...(and how did you come to get that meaning?)...I felt that the combination of several people's comments had the effect of using ad-hoc "therapy" on Mark in an unfair manner. As a rule I'd say it's not necessary or appropriate to try to figure out what's wrong with an allegedly disruptive listmember and use that to justify an action (which is what I felt was happening in the aggregate); all that's needed and appropriate is to define what's acceptable to the community and then evaluate the behavior using those standards. Why? > The discussion of boundaries doesn't require any diagnosis, just an > understanding of what makes a healthy community. I'd be willing to accept > that you differ with my understanding, but I think a high threshold is set > when you call it "insulting and insane." Indeed, I'd argue that you've come > much closer to diagnosing me when you use this statment than I am when I > discuss boundaries. :-) Ok, the word "insane" was a bit of hyperbole that should have been chucked along with the profanity. "Insulting" I'll stand by, as long as we understand I'm talking about the ad-hoc analysis of a listmember (as opposed to list dynamics in general). However, I think that what makes a healthy on-line community is probably very different from what makes a healthy RL community, which in turn will be somewhat different from what makes a healthy family, which in turn will be different from what makes a healthy relationship, etc. All are related but they'll also have distinct aspects to take into account. Participation in an on-line community is far more voluntary than in many RL contexts, and such a community's "health" is far more contingent on what people want to get out of that specific forum, wants that can be determined by factors often different from what one wants in a RL community. For these reasons, the application of psychological or clinical concepts developed for RL to an on-line list needs to be done cautiously. I'm willing and happy to live with far more verbal strangeness and discord on Brin-L than I would be willing to live with in a RL circle of friends, for instance. In Mark's case, the "nuisance" factor came IMO from an unusual degree of frankness and frequency which, though challenging, were not unwelcome to me because I often found Mark's words really interesting and diverse, and of course I have total control over whether or not I want to continue reading them. Kyle, by contrast, was about nothing but directly shocking and insulting people for no particular reason whatsoever, and there's nothing intriguing to be found there. Marvin Long Austin, Texas There ain't no Devil; there's just God when he's drunk. -- Tom Waits
