Blogging as Therapy?

Okay...I'll confess that for me, blogging is a fairly personal exercise in venting my liberal rage upon the largely unsuspecting and uncaring world, but I don't think I'd call it a therapeutic exercise of any kind. But for some people, blogging has become a way to deal with intimate and personal issues in a public space:

"Nearly half of bloggers consider it a form of therapy, according to a recent survey sponsored by America Online Inc. And although some psychologists question the use of the Internet for therapy, one hospital in High Point, N.C., started devoting space to patients' blogs on its Web site, a practice Inova Fairfax Hospital is also considering."

"Blogging combines two recommended techniques for people to work through problems: writing in a journal and using a computer to type out thoughts. Some bloggers say the extra dimension of posting thoughts on the Web enables them to broach difficult subjects with loved ones, as well as reap support from a virtual community of people they don't know."

"'I think it's a way of validating feelings. It's a way of purging things inside of you,' said Judith HeartSong, a 41-year-old Rockville artist. As a child, she kept diaries filled with anguished accounts of abuse hidden under her bed, she said, but now she posts entries on the Web.

But there can be a downside to this:

"Although it may feel good to blog, psychologists warn that going public with private musings may have ramifications, and that little research has been done on the consequences of the Internet confessional.'I certainly don't advise anyone to do it. They're taking a big risk,' said Patricia Wallace, a psychologist and researcher at Johns Hopkins University and author of "The Psychology of the Internet.' People open themselves up to cruel comments, and worse: identity theft, for instance, or even losing a job for kvetching about a boss.'"

For pretty much as long as the internet and webpages have existed, somebody's been posting their innermost feelings online for others to see. I can see the attraction in this; though they may be posting extremely personal details about their lives, talking to yourself in a diary no one else is going to see can't be nearly as satisfying for most people as sharing your thoughts with others who can offer their opinions and comments. And...well, I must confess to an unseemly bias against this sort of thing. For one, I'm a bit old-fashioned about letting people I may barely know or not know at all know anything particularly personal about me. But also, most (but not all) of these sort of blogs that I run across consist of people confessing their wants and desires, or their frustrations with not getting what they want and desire, to a relatively sympathetic audience of people who merely affirm everything the blogger says about themselves. As an example, I ran across the blog of a young woman suffering acutely from anorexia; in her blog she detailed her daily struggles with the disease, mostly in the form of what were clearly delusions about her self-image and her family situation which told a lot more about her then any unbiased commentary could. And yet despite her obvious illness, the people leaving comments on her blog weren't doing anything more then offering her nearly complete support for how she felt; if they contradicted her or expressed concern at all, it was done so gently as to hardly be useful to someone in her position who needed blunter and more direct advice. Would she have listened to a contradictory opinion? Probably not. But does that mean that you should affirm or support her delusional beliefs? Absolutely not.

Anyway most blogs, personal, political or otherwise, are usually just a chance for the blogger to get their feelings off their chest and as a result they're mostly harmless. But a blog as therapy? Take a pass.