Announcement: New Forum for Trauma Survivors and People with Serious Mental Illness

I have set up a new support forum for survivors of trauma and abuse and people with borderline personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder, PTSD and related conditions. In order to join, you don’t need to be both a trauma survivor and have BPD or something similar – it’s okay if you fall into just one [...]

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The AQ-Test on Facebook

Even though I haven’t seen it on Facebook myself, I heard from several sources that the Autism Spectrum Quotient test (AQ-test) is now there inbetween quizzes such as “Which Spongebob character are you?” and “What color should you due your hair?”. The AQ-test, developed by Simon Baron-Cohen, is used as a screening instrument in the [...]

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Speak Up on Shutdown

There’s a campaign on November 1 called “Communication Shutdown”. The idea is for people to shut down their Facebook and Twitter for a day as to get an idea of what it is like to have the communication difficulties autistics experience. I am wary of disability simulations in general, but this one is particularly bad. [...]

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Canadian Government Fights Court Battle Not to Make Websites Accessible

I am not a Canadian, but this astonishes me. The Canadian governmnet is fighting a court case in order to not have to make its websites accessible for screen reader users. Anna over at FWD?Forward has extensive coverage. I am as surprised as she is that the government is willing to pour taxpayer money into [...]

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Autistic Teen Enabled to Communicate through Social Networking

I just read a story about an autistic young woman who is enabled to communicate through social networking. The “inspirational” framing of the story is a bit problematic, but I like the emphasis that is finally being placed on the way modern technology can enable autistics who are thought to be unable to communicate, to [...]

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Support Site Used for Drug Marketing

Natasha Singer at the New York Times writes an interesting article on patient social networking sites like PatientsLikeMe, and the way they’re used to collect individual health data fro direct-to-consumer drug marketing. PatientsLikeMe is a community for people with neurological diseases such as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis, where they can share their experiences with various [...]

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Should Mental Health Professionals Google Their Clients?

Recently, some discussion has sprung up in the Netherlands around whether psychiatrists or psychologists should google their patients. The Dutch Association of Psychiatry (NVVP) says that information that has been put on the Internet, is public, so anyone should be able to view it, including psychiatrists. On the other hand, the Netherlands Institute for Psychologists [...]

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The Lack of Information on the Modern Web

Even though I am an avid blogger and not entirely against Web 2.0, I sometimes wish to go back to the good, old days of LiveJournal, DiaryLand and further mostly Web 1.0. Today, I find myself searching Google for a relatively sciencey subject about which I hope to find lay-friendly information. Lay-friendly it gets, but [...]

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Back Online on Mobile Connection

I hereby declare myself an official Internet addict. I’m glad it will not be a clinical diagnosis in DSM-V, or I would have an additional label three years from now. Barely a week into the Internet outage, I arranged for a mobile connection. Thanks to Open University, I qualify for the student computer and Internet [...]

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Internet Hiatus, Timeframe Unknown

One of the ward computers had a virus. As a result, the Internet service provider blocked our connection. Unfortunately, someone deleted the antivirus log files, so we cannot comply with the ISP’s requirements for restoration. All my ward staff are whining about how the ISP is “punishing” them for a virus that they got destroyed, [...]

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