Jumpstarting a Dead Blog

Jumpstarting a Dead Blog

It’s Saturday night and I say to FD, ‘I can’t believe I’m resurrecting the old blog.’ He’s noncommittal. In 2006, when I first started blogging, there were virtually no blogs on mental health and mental illness. Now you can get whatever you want, whatever you need, in all kinds of places online. So what’s the point in blogging, my thinking the past five years. FD, ‘So what’s the point again?’ I go, ‘Well, to market a book you have to network on social networking sites and for me to do that would mean establishing some kind of Internet presence, which therapydoc had at one time then frivolously let it waste away. Everyone Needs Therapy didn’t even go to hard cover as an agent suggested it should. In those days literary agents scoured the Internet for bloggers with content that might make a good book.’ Did you even start the book? Well yes, of course. I even have copyright on the title! That's how much of it is on paper. Virtual papers. Why didn't it ever become a thing? A source of income and inspiration? Did I ever tell you how hard it is to write a book? And that agent disappeared into a black hole before I even had a chance to reply to his email. ‘You make writing books seem easy. You knocked off The Book in two years. And I read it as you went along, which isn’t something I do. You know that I only read non-fiction.’ 'That’s because you can’t make that stuff up. It’s from my life. Our lives. Except the historical fiction parts. ‘Which are very good! I never knew much about Ho Chi Minh.’ And now you do. ‘Yes, now I do, thank you.’ So this year there shall be blogging is what I tell him. I will start next week with a case that is in The Book. He will recognize it. A woman sees the world from her balcony because she suffers agoraphobia. She beats it with the help of her cousin the psychiatrist. ‘She beats it! Ah. That’s refreshing.’ It is. So my dear friends, please G-d, we’ll get back to the business of explaining in plain language and silly conversations how people get sick and how they get better because that’s SO easy and fun and so possible, like, all the time. To everyone, because we believe the entire world and everyone in it was created on this coming day: Have a happy, healthy, successful, meaningful year, a year full of laughter, song, prosperity, and heartfelt prayer or just meaningful one-way discussions with Her. With love, therapydoc

Those Active Therapeutic Agents

The research is likely to be weak and suspect. A sample of six hundred bloggers out of twelve to sixty million, basically tell us that blogging is therapeutic.

In all honesty, the concept is not that far off the mark. There is likely to be a great deal of truth to the idea; that purging thoughts, issues, events, annecdotes and stories, the whole gestalt of writing and publishing, people hearing us, feels good. Not just in the short run, either. Make it a habit, and who knows?

On the other hand, Hemingway killed himself.

But when it comes to blogging, it's that complaining thing we've been talking about that matters. The talk dynamic in therapy, the narrative, is the active ingredient. That and a few psychotropics on occasion.*

Anyway, who cares about research validity/reliability of a survey? Blogger references ENT in the post.

Bean Jones tells us that Blogging Is More Than What it Seems; it's good for you. So concludes the 2005 AOL survey about the reasons people blog. CNN followed this year, you might remember, with other research and a wink in our direction. It was a good week.

I have to write that book that Empath Daught told me to write ages ago. If only people still read books.

Wait. Maybe they do. Even though it's likely you watch YouTube whenever you can steal away, and even though you read blogs when you're not whipping up a gourmet recipe or eating pizza, my hunch is that most of you read books, too.

Here's a bit of what Bean Jones tells us over at the Blogger website, Simple.ology

Lately I've been worried over what to blog about. (Chalk it up to my brain going fuzzy from decongestants.) But then a friend gave me a link to an article discussing the results of a 2005 AOL survey done by Digital Marketing Services Inc. and I found myself energized.

A total of 600 bloggers--men and women aged 18 and above--participated in the survey.

About 48 percent of the bloggers revealed that they kept a blog because "it serves as a form of therapy" while around 40 percent stated that blogging "helps them keep in touch with family and friends."

Bill Schreiner, Vice President and General Manager of Community Programming for America Online, observed: "In a way, blogs serve as oral history. When it comes to sharing blogs and reading other people's blogs, we like to connect with people, learn about their lives, and find common ground."

An inspiring CNN article affirms blogging's therapeutic benefits. In it, journalist Anna Jane Grossman cites the results of the polls done by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2006. The results revealed that "roughly 12 million Americans have blogs...and many seem to use them as a form of group therapy."

Indeed, many blogs have transformed into informal support groups. They range from the low-key Everyone Needs Therapy to the bold and busy TreeHugger.


Bean goes on.

For those of us who like attention, this was a very nice thing, Simple-ology's recognition of a low-key (what could be better description than that) blog.

Hmmmm. Do you think that this might be one of the reasons people do it, blog? Could it be that attention thing?

therapydoc

*There are many active ingredients in therapy that works; the greatest of all, for sure, something we call a therapeutic relationship with a therapist.