Gamertherapist

Dear Rejection,

Thank you for visiting me this week. I’m sorry I didn’t greet you kindly when you first arrived. I had been busy making other plans, expecting great things, and then there you were.

Thank you for reminding me of my family and friends, their love and presence as I became absorbed in trying to entertain you. They groaned at my self-pity, sat quietly with me as I grieved a little over a future that swung shut a little. Even the dogs noticed my sadness at your arrival. Warm eyes and muzzles, a rump plopped solidly on me as I struggled valiantly under the covers to stay in bed and feel sorry for myself. My companions would not let me slump: there were walks to be had and games to be played, and a slow steady stroke of the fur that led me to be present.

Thank you for reminding me of my privilege, Rejection. Although you visit everyone, you come to see me rarely, and you never stay long. Yet, each time I am surprised and insulted that I have failed or lacked or not been chosen. As if I didn’t have more than I need, as if I was above failure and you. I treat you as a mugger and murderer as if my life were really in danger. Yes, you break things when you visit, but you have never broken me.

But mostly, thank you for reminding me that I had been waiting on others’ approval, when I should have been busy being myself. I had been scanning the horizon for so long for someone to come and say I was ok that I’d forgotten my eyes were mine. I’d strained my vision filling out so many applications, reading for signs, until it seemed that I was just a hungry gaze waiting for some email or letter or message on social media would what—make me solid?

The gift you always bring instead, ultimately, is resilience. You connect me with my humanity and my strength, urge me on to new creativity and challenge me to settle into myself. You remind me that I am already a wonder. I hope I will remember this for a while.

Even though you are already packing to leave I know you will be back. You have so many of my neighbors to visit each day, and I wish I could pin this letter to your lapel for them to read, with an note on the envelope that says “Please Welcome Rejection, They Want To Remind You.” Maybe if we did that we could take up better residence in ourselves and the world.

In this collegial conversation with Diana Clark I discuss video games, flow states & the power of gaming for our mental health.

If you have a minute today, please consider subscribing to one or more of my channels, in order of need:

Follow Me on Twitch
Follow me on TikTok 
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel 

These allow me to access creator services and amplify my reach to people

For those of you who missed it, this is part one in a series I am producing with CIBER, the Center for Innovations in Behavioral Health and Education Research at Simmons University. This training discusses the interplay of race and mental health in the treatment room and in a world amplified and accelerated by technology. Dr. Johnnie Hamilton-Mason and I engage in a dialogue informed by their individual practice experiences, interpretations of theory from differing racial perspectives, and their shared interests in internalized racism and subjectivity, psychological liberation and resistance.

Find this post interesting? I can speak in person too:  Click here for Public Speaking info & Press Kit. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. 🙂

As I write this, human beings are in the midst of mobilizing public health and psychological defenses against what will most likely be declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization this week. WHO and the CDC as well as state and local governments have issued guidelines, countries have begun self-quarantine, and as I write this Harvard just made the decision to move to virtual classes until further notice.

On a interpersonal and sociological level, we have begun to see the signs of adjustment reaction in conversations with others and on social media. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism has a page on Covering Pandemics which is very salient to us all in explaining adjustment reaction. It refers to the ways people attempt to recalibrate themselves psychologically during such traumatic and disruptive events, vacillating between overreaction and underreaction, minimizing and denial vs panic in their attempts to master confusion and anxiety in ways both adaptive and maladaptive. Perhaps you have noticed that (to paraphrase a comic I saw this week) all of your friends on Facebook who were constitutional scholars last month are now epidemiologists.

Recently I was seeing a longterm patient of mine, I’ll call her Randi*. Randi is 65, and began seeing me 10 years ago for help with dual diagnosis addiction and major depression. She also has a chronic pulmonary condition. I’ve been seeing her online for the past several years, most recently from her home in Costa Rica. This session was full of uncertainty and questions: She was scheduled to return to the US to renew her visa, should she come? Should she be holding hands at AA meetings? Should she be attending them? She has begun to follow the CDC recommendation of social distancing, and was worried about the impact of this on her mental health.

The guidelines we are being issued by public agencies are as clear as they can be during a time where data is still changing and community responses are fluctuating. At this time several suggestions are consistent from the CDC and can be found here.

As clinicians it is not our responsibility to learn epidemiology or get a degree in public health. However, we have a very important part to play in addressing the mental health issues that will accompany and/or be exacerbated by COVID19. I am listing the ones I have seen emerging in the hopes that we can help provide ancillary support for the mental health and behavioral health of our patients. If you are a therapist, please consider these. If you are a lay person, these are for you too.

1. Reality-testing requires research. One of the main goals a therapist provides to the patient is supporting accurate reality testing. As mentioned above, reaction adjustment impacts our reality testing. Patients may present minimizing or panicking. To intervene, we need to know what the research as it is current says. Currently the mortality rate is 3.4% so yes, it is more lethal than the flu. We also do not know how this figure will change when more people are tested. But that is what we know. So the therapist needs to model both an not-knowing stance and assert what is currently known. This includes implicit communications (hand sanitizer in waiting room, offering teleheath sessions) as well as explicit ones (confronting extreme statements on either end, sharing what you know and verifying the source of your information.) Keeping abreast of the research allows you to help patients who are in higher risk populations shift their thinking and behavior to the new situation, while reassuring patients in lower risk populations understand their risk. Pointing out overreacting and under-reacting requires us to know what it is possible to know at this time, as well as manage our own countertransference response as we go through our own period of adjustment reaction. As this is all in flux be prepared to have discussions that are in flux.
2. Address the needs that public health agencies aren’t in regards to social distancing. While it is becoming clear that more people are being advised to practice social distancing, the impacts of that on mental health are not being adequately discussed. This is absolutely understandable as the primary goal of public health in is to reduce infections to increase population survival. But helping the individual person-in-the-environment is where we come in as therapists. We know the importance of decreasing isolation for good mental health. We need to anticipate an increase in depressive symptoms, anxiety, and substance relapse may occur if the psychological impact of isolation is not addressed. We will need to help patients explore how to renegotiate boundaries as they rethink whether to hold hands at an AA meeting or a second date. We will need to help people shift to online therapy and self-help groups rather than avoid them. Social connection will need to be more planned and intentional, more technologically dependent for many. We may need to assert that immunocompromised individuals stay out of our physical offices for their safety, and explore the feelings this evokes for them.
3. Support patients in preparation for managing their psychopharmacological needs. Help them anticipate pharmacy delays and encourage them to follow the recommendation that they get 2 months worth of prescriptions whenever possible. Be prepared to offer more case management with them as they negotiate resistance with health insurance companies.
4. Confront and redirect the inadvertent demonization of touch. This one is huge. This past week many have become acutely aware of how often they touch their face, or others without asking permission. To control the spread of infection this is crucial, and yet we need to also resist the urge to begin to perceive touch as unnecessary or lethal. Touch and reaching is a part of healthy infant development (Beebee, 2016.) It plays a significant role in focusing attention and attachment security in adolescence (Ito-Jager, 2017.) Children need to touch themselves as part of learning motor imagery (Conson, 2011) body ownership (Hara, 2015) and the assembly of “self” (Salomon, 2017.) Research has shown that adolescents in America already touch each other less and are more aggressive to peers than in another country sampled (Field, 1999); and for all of us touch quite probably helps us with emotional self-regulation (Grunwald, 2014.) Self-touch is a cornerstone of mindfulness and compassion meditation practices. Therapists need to help patients and their families practice everyday precautions while at the same time reminding them of the necessity of touch for basic neurological and psychological well-being. We need to anticipate that we may be asking people to do something which conflicts with adaptive self-soothing responses to distress. We may be unintentionally causing a reenactment of a trauma survivor’s bodily domination by the abuser when we start telling her what she can and cannot do with her body. We may be taking away a kid with ADHD’s main way of focusing. So the goal of therapy becomes the reduction of shame and irrational demonization of touch, and the development of adaptive ways to continue giving ourselves touch so we do not become a planetwide Harlow monkey experiment.
5. Last but not least, hold the therapeutic frame. The majority of our patients were working on things in therapy before the events of the past two weeks. I have asked each in the last portion of the session “what do you imagine you would have been talking about in therapy if you hadn’t been discussing the coronavirus.” In the case of Randi, that question prompted her to remember that someone had attempted to break into the apartment where she lived alone, itself a pretty distressing event! Another patient, a 30 year-old male with Dysthymia, had made two major and difficult behavioral changes that week, a success that would have been crowded out by COVID-19 if we hadn’t paused to discuss earlier events. We need to keep an eye on the ongoing work, how the patient’s neurotic styles vis a vis pandemics are often in keeping with their style overall,and what other events have occurred in their week.

These are some of the most important “new” responsibilities I see us having as therapists when dealing with the emerging coronavirus crisis. I imagine more will be revealed, and I imagine that at some indeterminate time in the future it will become more clear what the psychological impacts of adjustment reaction, social distancing and touch aversion had on human development. In the meantime, please consider sharing this with your colleagues and patients so that they do not lose sight of important impacts on their mental health caused by necessary public health precautions.

Such interventions and frame maintenance model an adaptive stance in that they are hopeful: That there is a lot of work to be done is always an expression of hope, never despair.

*patient identification changed to protect privacy

References

Beebe, B., Messinger, D., Bahrick, L. E., Margolis, A., Buck, K. A., & Chen, H. (2016). A Systems View of Mother–Infant Face-to-Face Communication. Developmental Psychology, 52(4), 556–571. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0040085

Conson, M., Mazzarella, E., & Trojano, L. (2011). Self-touch affects motor imagery: a study on posture interference effect. Experimental Brain Research, 215(2), 115–122. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2877-7
Field, T. (1999). American adolescents touch each other less and are more aggressive toward their peers as compared with French adolescents. Adolescence, 34(136), 753–758.

Grunwald, M., Weiss, T., Mueller, S., & Rall, L. (2014). EEG changes caused by spontaneous facial self-touch may represent emotion regulating processes and working memory maintenance. Brain Research, 1557, 111–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2014.02.002

Hara, M., Pozeg, P., Rognini, G., Higuchi, T., Fukuhara, K., Yamamoto, A., Higuchi, T., Blanke, O., & Salomon, R. (2015). Voluntary self-touch increases body ownership.(Brief article)(Author abstract). Frontiers in Psychology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01509

Ito-Jäger, S., Howard, A. R., Purvis, K. B., & Cross, D. R. (2017). Attention focus and self-touch in toddlers: The moderating effect of attachment security. Infant Behavior and Development, 48(Pt B), 114–123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2017.05.001

Salomon, R. (2017). The Assembly of the Self from Sensory and Motor Foundations. Social Cognition, 35(2), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2017.35.2.87

Triscoli, C., Olausson, H., Sailer, U., Ignell, H., & Croy, I. (2013). CT-optimized skin stroking delivered by hand or robot is comparable. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00208

Find this post interesting? I can speak in person too:  Click here for Public Speaking info & Press Kit. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. 🙂

Let me start by saying I’m a huge fan of meditation. I’ve done certificate trainings in mindfulness and clinical practice, classes on guided imagery and visualization, and meditation to enhance neurological development. I’ve seen the research on how meditation positively impacts the brain in general and specifically white matter connectivity as we age. More personally I have been a lifelong student and practitioner of meditation in various forms: I’ve chanted in ashrams, done walking meditation, participated in Dzogchen talks and practice, engaged in mindfulness practice, Benson’s relaxation response, yoga, the Eight Gates of Spontaneous presence, and many more. That’s a lot of meditation! I don’t do it as consistently as I wish, but I have a healthy respect for the various forms of meditation, and refer patients to it regularly.

This is one reason why I find it troubling how so many fans of meditation hate on video games and gaming. The same folks who are speaking about compassion and mindfulness and calm sound like raging fundamentalists when they start speaking about “screens” and the spurious research that video games are adversely affecting our lives and neurology. They seem to think that meditation has to occur on a bamboo mat in a candlelit rock garden to be meditation. Cultural misappropriation aside, this really limits the potential audience who could benefit from meditation.

Part of this is due to the recent popularity of mindfulness meditation, which made DBT sexy and available to the mainstream, much as psychoanalysis expanded from treating hysterics to the general population with our neurotic styles. This is wonderful, mindfulness meditation is very useful and effective. And it is only one form of meditation. Less talked about nowadays are the focusing or concentration meditations, and guided visualization meditation. But when we do remember those, the impulse for many is to imagine that the object of focus has to be something low tech. We think candles and mandalas, but what if video games could also be objects of focus? In fact, what if playing video games is a form of concentration meditation?

Recently, I decided that I wanted to do my part to make meditation more available and gamer affirmative. In particular, I have developed a guided visualization meditation called “Your Powerful Video Game Avatar.” Through the support of Insight Timer, I am now happy to share it with you. I hope you will find it of benefit. If you are a gamer new to meditation, I hope this may be the Welcome mat that invites you to try meditating. If you are not a fan of video games, I hope this deepens your insight and compassion into that art form. Mostly, I hope it brings maximum playfulness and status bar boosts to all sentient beings. 😊

Your Powerful Video Game Avatar

Find this post interesting? I can speak in person too:  Click here for Public Speaking info & Press Kit. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. 🙂

I can’t believe I almost went a whole year without blogging! This has been a full one, and to give you a sense of what I’ve been up to, and what’s to come, I wanted to share this podcast:

Recently, and frequently, I have heard colleagues describe me as being on “a crusade” about video games and technology.  On no occasion has it been used in an attempt to speak positively about my work, but it did get me reflecting on crusades in general.

In many ways, the term Crusade has always been used with an air of critique and generalization.  The most famous “Crusade” in medieval Europe was actually never named that by the people living in it; the term crusader began to be used 400 years after the fact.  Some famous crusades, such as the Children’s Crusade, may actually never have happened.  Additionally, there were actually numerous Crusades spanning 200 years rather than just one long one and they had both positive and negative far-reaching impacts on the world.  They fostered both genocide and the arts, opened trade routes and disease vectors, and were in short as complex, violent, and impacting as most human endeavors.

I have had some difficulty embracing the identity of crusader when used by colleagues, because it is often a passive aggressive dig at my work.  They can’t quite get away with calling me militant or intolerant in polite circles, but they do float out these ideas when considering my take on video games, technology and therapy “unbalanced” and “evangelical.”  Lately I have been reminded that it is not just me who has to deal with this–for some reason many mental health professionals tend to single out any one of us who gets too “passionate” about one element of the work.  I had a consultee recently begin to describe his practice vision, grow very excited and then check himself with me as if somehow that excitement was an unseemly thing in a therapist.  Here he was describing something that made him revolutionary and special, and that was somewhat suspect.

The mental health and education systems in the United States beat down many, patients and therapists, alike.  Rather than an expansive fount of creativity, the mind is seen as a widget traveling on a conveyor belt with hundreds of other widgets to be stamped with a DSM-V label or pathology so insurance companies will dole out money and providers dole out care.  I have overheard young clinicians spend hours talking with each other about what code to use and not once mention what it feels like to sit in the room with a patient or wonder what is going on in their inner world.  And when we do talk about mindfulness, we often talk about it in an over-scripted way that implies a specific time, place and type of activity that is “mindful,” rather than see that mindfulness is a stance we can take with any activity, including, yes, video games.

One of the reasons that social media is so powerful is that each of us experiences the feeling of being alone in life. It is this, our yearning for the imagined other, that makes social media so compelling. Whether we feel alone in our sadness, bewilderment, pride or confusion, we long to call out to the other. The parent wondering if she is doing a good enough job, the adolescent unnerved by the changes in his very body, the student who just aced her exam, the toddler who just fell and is looking up to his parent: Each of us at some time needs to call out to the imagined other to help us know how we are in the world, and help us realize ourselves.  So, yes, I am passionate and on several crusades, and since this is my blog I get to write about them.  They are varied in size and scope and sometimes tangentially connected.  Here are a few soundbites from the Crusade:

Video Games and Play Therapy.  I tell as many clinicians I can that if you want to do play therapy in the 21st century, start using 21st century play.

Video Games are Social Media, and Everyone is Playing.  The only reason you don’t have patients who tell you they game is because you don’t ask them.  Young, old, male, female, Xbox, smartphone, the overwhelming majority of people play something several times a week, often online and in highly social ways.

Let Smartphones and Laptops in Your Office.  If you want to meet your clients where they are at, let them show you their life in social media.  Bemoaning that Facebook is unraveling the fabric of society doesn’t change the reality that the majority of your patients use it.

Education Needs to Change.  We need to make more room for the quirky student, the adult distance learner, and the team player.  We are training people to work in the 20th Century, and then blaming them when they function poorly in the 21st.

Starting Your Own Business is Risky and Rewarding.  Therapists are often unwilling to spend any time or money to launch their own practice, and buy into what I call the “hazing” model:  Work long hours for low pay at your “main” job, sublet a tiny space, and when you’ve had enough lumps you too will get to have a private practice.

Not All Ideas are Great, But ANYONE Can Have a Great Idea.  Years of working with children and adults who learn differently has taught me that this is possible.  Anyone, regardless of race, class, orientation, learning ability, or past history is capable of having a great idea.  To rule someone out is a violence you do to their very humanity.  So stop it.

Look, we live in such an exciting and enriching time, and we could so much more with our lives if we could embrace more of that.  Sure it means change and fear, and yes, there are lots of obstacles.  We have a lot of work to do.  But let’s stop siloing down in our own little offices or classrooms regurgitating the same old APA-style blah blah, and let’s stop training future generations to be automatons of despair.  Let’s stop peer-reviewing everything and privileging those few who play the academic game with expertise.  Of course we don’t have to do away with everything in academia and health care but we can certainly make room for diversity, passion, and expansive thinking.  And if you can’t do that, the least you can do is not rain on the parades of those of us who are taking risks, the crusades we are on aren’t of the genocidal variety.

I don’t like being the recipient of these sorts of microaggressions, but I am so grateful that I have things I care passionately about.  My life of the mind and soul is so important to me, and ultimately it is not for me to decide whether my ideas are great or my crusade is just.  You can call me a crusader, but as Maya Angelou said,

my description cannot
fit your tongue, for
I have a certain way of being in this world

What about you?  What crusade are you on?  What makes you passionate?  Who is the next right person to talk about it with?

Interested in setting up a consult for your practice?  I have some openings come March.  Like this post? I can speak in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

Because my vision for my work is to help integrate emerging technologies with clinical social work and psychotherapy, I don’t have the luxury of relying on moral panic for my information when a new social media arrives. Actually, I’m a bit late to the game with Snapchat, which has been around since September 2011. But I take comfort that I am in the fastest growing user demographic for it, namely people in their 40s.

I am fortunate to have a cohort of clinicians, educators and early adopters in my personal learning network.  Folks such as Nancy Smyth and Jonathan Singer, who are also committed to approaching technology with an NCPTI (No Contempt Prior To Investigation) attitude.  So this week I invited them to partake in a foray into Snapchat with a few other friends and clinicians.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Snapchat (and for those of you who say, “isn’t that about teen sexting?” you aren’t familiar with Snapchat,) Snapchat is a photo messaging application that allows you to take photos and share them with members of your Snapchat social network.  The photos are temporary; once a person views them for 1-10 seconds they disappear forever.  There is an option to keep them on a feed called your “Story” for 24 hours, but after that they too are gone forever.  Viewing them on your smartphone requires keeping your thumb touching a spot on the screen, and when you lift it the photo is gone, forever if the seconds run out before you touch again.

In reality the photos may be stored on the servers for up to a month if they are not viewed, but the initial viewing starts a countdown to deletion and impermanence.  Technically there are possible workarounds, such as taking a screenshot on your iPhone, which I managed to do at least once successfully with only 5 secs and some thumb dexterity.

Snapchat has become synonymous with teen sexting in the popular media, there is not a lot of research specifically on it.  My preliminary look showed that one study mentioning photo images, which tended to conflate teen sexting with grooming for pedophilia.  Pew Information that predates Snapchat by 2 years shows that a minority of teens 12-17 were sending (4%) or receiving (15%) “sexual” photos, and that 1:3 ratio itself is worthy of wondering about.  The number goes up at 17 with 8% sending and 30% receiving them. That said, another study by Mitchell et al (2012) found a lower number of students reported receiving sexual images at 2.5%  Even more significant was how that percentage dropped to 1% when the definition of images was reduced to sexually explicit as defined by showing naked body parts.  The 1:3 receive/send ratio remained the same, but once the research drilled down to specifics about the images, a clear minority of teens emerged.

Every teenager is important, but 1-4% of a population is not an epidemic.  In terms of how many kids may be using snapchat, it is hard to tell.  Anecdotally the media tells stories of kids who believe “90% of my class uses it,” and yet the data I’ve seen on comparable products such as Twitter or Instagram is much lower than that, with 26% of youth in 2012 using Twitter and 11% using Instagram, per Pew.

Back to Snapchat.  So far the my impressions have been these:

1. Snapchat may actually encourage privacy relative to other platforms.  The fact that adolescents are using Snapchat, with its fleeting images and transient nature may indicate their growing interest in digital privacy.  Future surveys need to specifically ask the question “Do you take screenshots when you get a Snap so you can keep it?” to see if teens are doing just that.  An equally important question is “Do you know you can do that?”  Here’s why:

2. Teens may mistakenly think that the images are more permanent than they actually are.  We often assume youth are more sophisticated in technology use than adults, but even if that is true, it means that we have limited ability to ask them the specific questions to understand their understanding of it.  If we discover that a majority of children understand they can work around the temporary nature of Snapchat, yet don’t do that, does that indicate a heightened interest in personal privacy and respect for the privacy of others?  Does it indicate a lack of premeditation when viewing a picture? Does it indicate something else?

3. Snapchat makes adults anxious.  I base this on the number of folks I chatted with trying to enroll in my experiment who joked about whether we would engage in sexting or not.  Answer: No, we won’t.

4. Snapchat has potential to change the way we converse.  As I exchanged photos I realized that the real fun was in snapping the photo to “reply” to the friend’s photo.  If I just snapped pictures and sent them the conversation tended to peter out.  Captions allowed me to frame the picture with humor and engage.  Or you can refrain from captioning and see how strong the image is in its ability to convey meaning.  My favorite to date was when Nancy Smyth sent me a Snap of her latest Starbucks Refresher, and I replied with mine as if to say “This is all your fault.”  I’ll be curious to see if that is how she interpreted to image.

5. Snapchat seems to encourage whimsy and humor amongst my cohort.  Perhaps it is because we are not in the throes of adolescence, but the images we have sent are more latency age from a psychodynamic point of view.  They have included:

• A leaf
• A book by Julian Barnes
• A Do Not Enter Sign (in response to the book by Julian Barnes)
• Several beverages
• A glowing ghost
• Someone sporting a V for Vendetta masque
• A screenshot of Call of Duty: Ghosts
• Flowers
• One child, presumably an offspring.
• 2 Cat pictures with veterinary injuries circled and labeled

What has been emerging is a playful portrait of everyday lives, curated surely, but informative and engaging nonetheless.  Are these trivial images? Maybe, but I prefer to think that human engagement that is playful is meaningful regardless of how trivial it may seem, and I’d encourage skeptics to try Snapchat out a bit rather than adhere to the CPTI model.

6. Snapchat could have potential for social work.  I’m thinking about how it could be used to contract for surveillance with runaways and their caregivers.  I’m thinking of how it could raise awareness on homelessness if we had people create “Stories” to be viewed temporarily what homelessness looks like.  I’m thinking how teen groups could use it to send each other encouragement between groups in the form of pictures of resilience, warmth or whimsy.  Remember, the title of today’s post is “First Thoughts” not “Best Practices.”  Now is the time for innovation and reflection, and I’m sure there are a number of ways we could utilize this platform to supplement the work we do with children if a few of us mental health types think for a few minutes beyond the “It’s about sexting!” line of thought.

Technology amplifies thoughts and feelings, and so it will be unsurprising to me if it amplifies sexual expression and flirtation in adolescents.  Our real problem with adolescents has always been that they have a sexuality to begin with, and a life that is diverging from the adults in their world.  Snapchat isn’t really the problem here.  Our larger problems are as always the proprietary sense of control we exert on adolescents, our anxiety about their sexuality, and our tendency to want to avoid those two emotional conflicts by finding a way to control the adolescents who trigger us.

But it may just be the case that our youth are starting to request and require more privacy from their technology, and if so that is a great thing.  The main danger I see is that they have been raised by a generation that often yearns to find a privacy setting to “park” their children on, rather than educate them about critical thinking and digital citizenship.  If teens don’t know the whole story about the settings on Snapchat and other platforms that’s a problem.  If they don’t learn how to be good digital citizens that’s a problem.  But if they don’t know because all we ever taught them was how to “park” their privacy settings or turn the App off, then we have failed them.  And that’s our problem.

By the way, if you are a parent and want to understand more about Snapchat and your child’s  safe use of it, Snapchat actually has a Guide for Parents

Like this post? I can speak in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

Earlier this year, my co-therapist Boo had to have an emergency surgery at Mass Vet Referral Hospital.  She came through it with flying colors, but I was reminded of how important hospitals are every day, even though I may not use one every day.  And then on Marathon Monday, Boston citizens and the world received an painful reminder that hospitals are called on to do extraordinary things every day, often with not enough resources to do them.

This year, as in year’s past, Team Boo will be participating in Extra Life.  What is it?

“On an Autumn Saturday each year since 2008, tens of thousands of gamers have joined together to save the lives of local kids in a celebration of gaming culture that we call Extra Life.  From console games to tabletop RPG’s to even lawn sports, Extra Life gives people that love to play a chance to do what they love to save lives and make a difference.  To participate you need only sign up (free) and gather the support of your friends and family through tax-deductible donations to your local CMN Hospital.  Then on Saturday, November 2nd (or any day that works for you!) play any game(s) you want on any platform(s) that you want with anyone you want for as long as you want.”

(http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.event&eventID=512)

As always, Team Boo will be gaming close to home, for Boston Children’s Hospital.  Each year, BCH has approximately 25,000 inpatient admissions each year and their outpatient clinics schedule 557,000 visits annually. Last year the hospital performed more than 26,500 surgical procedures and 158,700 radiological examinations.  That’s a lot of kids!

If you read this blog with any regularity you know that I believe that anyone can have a good idea and change the world.  Few people would argue that hospitals and a public infrastructure for health care are not good ideas.  But we live in a world where ideas alone won’t always save us, and Extra Life gives you and I an opportunity to raise awareness and money for that.

So please consider joining Team Boo as we game on tomorrow to raise money for Children’s Hospital in Boston, or the Children’s Health Network nationwide.  If you want to donate you can do that here.  And even if you can’t do either, please pass this post along to amplify the idea.  Because you never know when you or someone you love will need a hospital, but we do know that every day many kids do.

Like this post? I can speak in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

Many social workers, psychotherapists and counselors work as consultants to school districts, either as school employees or visiting experts.  That said, 21st century mental health providers are often lax in providing strong consultation about improving digital literacy and digital citizenship.  A few mental health “experts” provide consultation in the form of hysteric responses.  “PROTECT THE CHILDREN,” “PROTECT YOURSELVES” their workshop ads proclaim.  But when you drill down into these expert opinions, it usually consists of very little proactive, just things to scare you and even the exhortation to lock down kids’ internet usage by telling them to stay off of Facebook.

School personnel, when faced with the fear-mongering and suggestion of lockdowns, have few other options to choose from. Some districts adopt a combination of lockdown and denial:  They set up a firewall that allows a small fraction of the internet in, and then act as if the rest of it is none of their business.  This might have worked (or seemed to) when 91% of Americans weren’t on the internet and 78% of adolescents didn’t own cell phones, but gone are the days when schools can turn a blind eye to internet usage.

I think it is the responsibility of Twenty-First Century educators and clinicians to help kids learn how to be good digital citizens, and to help their parents help them do that.  So I wanted to share an idea and a freebie with you so you can work with your own local school to increase awareness of Facebook and privacy settings.

You see, 25% of people don’t bother with their Facebook privacy settings, according to AllTwitter, and according to research from the Pew Group it is even higher in the adolescent population, 40% of whom report keeping their Facebook all or mostly Public.  Is this a factor in identity theft and online harassment? Yes.  But is fear-mongering the solution? Absolutely not.

So I took an half hour today to draft a letter schools can send home to help them hold a “School-Wide Settings Day,” an awareness-raising event that can educate parents and kids by showing them how to preview their Facebook page as if anyone in the public world could see it.  I threw in a couple of reflective questions about the imagined viewers, and links to how to set your privacy settings.  So now I am posting it on my blog for educators and school administrators to access for free.  I designed it for high school students, but encourage you to edit it a little and use for middle-schoolers as well.

Here you go: School-Wide Settings Day Example Letter.

Why am I doing this?  Several reasons.

1. Digital Citizenship and Youth Digital Literacy are important causes to me.  I believe that my colleagues and I have an ethical responsibility to educate the next generation in areas of digital citizenship and literacy whether we like it or not, feel busy enough, or just don’t wanna.  I’m tired of colleagues wailing about media-hyped concepts like “Cyberbullying” and “Sexting” and confusing their emoting with learning more about what research says about teen internet use.  To that end I am also including a free Prezi for you on the topic, which you can probably view in 10 minutes or less.

2. I’m tired of people confusing worry and discussion with effort.  In the time some administrators or educators take lamenting about kids these days on the Internet, I created a project and a mailing that you are free to use, modify and reproduce to effect change in your school.  As a former school employee I know how limited time and personnel is, so the letter is designed to be a minimal amount of both.  It requires someone to hand out the letter and a homeroom teacher to collect them.  I’ve also modeled what I think is an attainable school goal: %100 privacy setting awareness on Facebook.

3.  I want you to hire me.  Yes, I said it.  These freebies are a loss leader for my business.  I do nationwide presentations, teaching and consultation on issues involving mental health and emerging technologies.  And I am painfully aware that many schools and administrators find consultants of little use because they don’t offer tangible solutions and innovations.  So, here, have a tangible solution and innovation on me, then think about hiring me for much more.  🙂

4. I want to see what happens next.  Will school administrators embrace this challenge?  Will colleagues and parents download the letter and approach their school districts to hold a School-Wide Settings Day?  I don’t know.  But if I can take 30 minutes to try to change the world American adolescents live in and raise their digital literacy, can’t you?

Like this post? I can speak in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

By now, most people have gone back to school in the U.S., be it teaching or a being a student.  According to the Department of Education, 50.1 million students will attend public elementary and secondary schools. Of these, 35.3 million will be in prekindergarten through 8th grade and 14.8 million will be in grades 9 through 12. An additional 5.2 million students are expected to attend private schools, and 21.8 million students will be heading off to colleges and universities.

During the next few weeks the reality of a new school year will begin to set in, and before that concrete dries I thought it might be nice to share an idea from game theory with you.  Whether you’re a parent of a kiddo starting school, a returning grad student, a teacher, administrator or anyone else involved with education, please take a moment to consider James Carse’s idea of finite and infinite games.  (If you are a teacher, please teach your young students about this concept as soon as you can in their young lives, we’ll all be the better for it.)

In his book Finite and Infinite Games (1982) James Carse, a professor emeritus at NYU defines these two kinds of games like this:

“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play.”

Too often we link the idea of education to careers, money, success, and in short winning.  If a child graduates high school they will have had approximately 12-14 years of learning.  Here in the U.S., the average life expectancy is 78.7 years, with unfortunate variations based on gender and race.  That leaves the average person with nearly 60 years of life during which they could be learning.

1. Learning should be an infinite game.  The core curriculum of public education should be the instilling of an interest and excitement in children to be lifelong learners.

In finite games, there is only one winner or winning team.  There may be a ranking of all players, but there can only be one number one.  In infinite games, the goal is not to reach the end zone and declare a winner; instead the goal is to continue the game, and often invite more and more players into it.

2.  Learning should be an infinite game:  We should be having as many students feeling successful and engaged as possible for as long as possible.  To have it set up where people go through life thinking of themselves as stupid or failures diminishes our species as a whole.  There are simply too many things a human being can do and know that any one of us can’t excel at some of them.

In finite games, the rules must be strictly adhered to so that the game can end and a winner be declared.  In infinite games, if the rules are running the risk of ending the play or excluding players, the rules need to be changed.  As Carse puts it, Life is such an example of an infinite game.

3.  Learning should be an infinite game:  Teachers, administrators and parents need to rethink rules and allow for more flexibility and creativity.  The minute we think of school or education as something to be gotten through in a certain way, something precious has been lost.  That this loss may be hard to quantify in terms of test scores, district-wide achievement levels or time on-task may be true, but it is also trivial in comparison to the loss of human potential that such rigidity entails.  Put another way, name one police state that has not resulted in a major revolution or revolutions.

Let’s stop making education such a finite game with winners and losers.  Let’s stop trying to get students into the “right college.”  There are plenty of right colleges.  Plenty of people graduate from schools you’ve never heard of and go on to do magnificent things; in fact many people who don’t choose to go to college go on to do magnificent things as well.

This concept of scarcity of possibility for our children’s futures creates the stressed-out kids and emerging adults that we see today.  I’ve seen dozens of adolescents who are in a club every day of the week, work after school, take AP or Honors everything.  Somebody needs to tell them to go spend a half hour walking and kicking a rock down by the river.  Remembering that there is a river you can walk and kick a stone by to take time out for your mental health is a life skill.

Unfortunately, the phrase life skills has gotten a bad reputation.  If we started adding an academic track in schools called Life Prep people would probably avoid it or think of it as stigmatizing (in fact in some systems “Life skills training” is considered just that.)  As it is, the current education system is great job security for therapists like myself:  The high-achievers need to work with therapists because they are so stressed, and the kids who don’t fit the mold get pathologized and sent to us to be cured.

Look, you have probably never heard anyone come out and say, “when I grow up I want to stop learning” but most of us have heard kids and adults say “I can’t wait to graduate.”  It reminds me of how traumatized and abused children often say “I can’t wait to be a grownup.”  In a way it is saying “let this game end already, I’ve had enough.  If I can’t be the winner or runner up let me at least take my marbles and go home.”  This is where I think mediocrity comes from, not relaxing standards or not having a grading system.  My graduate program didn’t have a grade point system, everything was pass and fail.  I think I turned out okay.

You really can’t have ranking without a herd mentality.  If we keep thinking of education as a finite game, sure, someone will end up getting to claim the title of Grand Poobah.  But a herd of water buffalo ranking and rating itself is still a herd.

Going into this school year, let’s try to make school into an infinite game as much as possible, in fact let’s try to do it one step more than what we think is possible.

Like this post? I can speak in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

You can learn a lot about a culture by its obsessions.  This week, anyone with access to social media has been aware of the coming Mayan Apocalypse.  It will happen (or has happened, or is happening, depending on where in the world you are) on December 21, 2012.  The world will end, somehow.  Maybe the planet will explode, maybe the sun will flare, or something will hit us and destroy everything.  I think for many of us it felt like it was ending last weekend.

In 2009, Nintendo released a game about the end of the world, called Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.  The game took place over 3 days, the same three days that kept occurring over and over until you finished the game.  As the days progressed, the moon drew closer and closer to the earth until it crashed into it, destroying everything.  Each time, all of the characters the player had come to know and like (or dislike) burned up.

The player’s job as Link was to persevere through these three days.  The only way Link could stop it was to release four giant beings who together managed to hold the moon suspended above the world long enough to defeat the Boss and reverse the process.  Time and again I’d play, release one, two or three giants, only to see them buckle under the weight of the moon and witness the end of the world.

Fantasies of the apocalypse can be seen as a manifestation of what Freud called the Thanatos drive.  There have been many different interpretations of what the death drive is; the aggressive counterpart to the libidinal drive, the enemy of the vital Eros drive, or just plain drivel.  But I think there is something there to be understood rather than dismissed.  Just why do we want to build sandcastles and then destroy them?  Why are we so fascinated with images of violence as well as images of desire?  Let me offer you another interpretation, a gamer therapist one.

The death drive is about quitting, not failing.  As some research has noted, 80% of all of the time you play video games you are failing at them.  Yet, we continue to play video games over and over.  There is always the optimistic hope that this time we just might win.  Over and over in the talks I give I hear the same thing from the children and adults who often feel like failures in life, that at least they stand a chance to win in the game.  I urge hundreds of parents every year to not take away the one thing their children feel capable of winning at.  Video games remind them, and us, that there is no such thing as utter failure.  It is a cognitive distortion, often reinforced by a society devaluing you, to think that there is absolutely nothing possible for you to achieve in life.  To think that way is the become the bad object, and to become the bad object is to quit.

There is a concept in Hasidic Judaism called the Tzadikim Nistarim.  These are the 36 righteous people on the earth who serve as a reminder to God that humanity has a purpose.  They are all important, if even one of the 36 were to be missing the world would come to an end.  Like the giants in Majora’s Mask, they bear the burden of holding back the world’s end.  Like the giant’s in Majora’s Mask every single one of them is important.  The Tzadikim Nistarim do not stand out, though.  They are concealed in the world, even to themselves.  Their humility prevents them from realizing their importance.  And since we don’t know who the tzadikim are, any and every one of us could be them.  We have no idea how important we are, but we do know that if any one of us falls it could be disastrous.

This is not a story of how the world ends, it is a story of how the world keeps from ending.

I recently heard an archaeologist compare the Mayan calendar to an odometer, which doesn’t end as much as turn over and resets.  This idea of a reset, of a beginning, seems to me to be very important as we go through the despairing and scary end of days of 2012.

It is so much easier to quit, to think that the world is coming to an end.  Why worry about anything or anyone?  We could do anything we want, or just do nothing.

But the scary truth is that the world is not ending, it is beginning, over and over again.  We have so much work to do.  If we were to allow ourselves to see that the world is coming to a start, think of how differently we would feel about trying, risking and caring?

Like this post? There’s more where that came from, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!