MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT: CLINICAL APPLICATIONS OF E-MAIL

A Professional Meeting at
Behavior Online (http://www.behavior.net)

Clinical Applications of E-mail

Sunday, March 28th, 3:00-4:00pm Eastern US time (Universal Time: 20)
chat login: http://www.behavior.net/chat
Moderator: John Suler, Ph.D.

In this meeting a panel of internet mental health experts will discuss a series of questions about clinical uses of e-mail that will be posed to them by a moderator. After the panel discussion, the meeting will be opened up to questions and comments from the audience. Some of the issues to be explored will include:

- email contacts with in-person clients
- psychotherapy conducted primarily through e-mail
- support and psychotherapy groups
- consultation and supervision
- ethical issues
- hypothetical clinical scenarios

The panel discussion will begin at 3:00pm (Eastern US time). You are welcome to come early - and stay after the hour - to talk with colleagues. During the panel discussion, please refrain from sending public messages. You are welcome to "whisper" (send private messages) to other attenders, but keep in mind that if you whisper to someone, the chat program places a series of dots next to your name. You will not see the dots, but other users will. After the panel discussion, when the meeting is opened up to questions and comments from the audience, indicate that you want to speak by typing the message "hand."

We strongly recommend that you visit Behavior Online ahead of time and test out the chat software (see the address for chat login at the top of this page). For this meeting, we will be using the chat software "FreeChat." Read the help page. It's easy to understand. There are some disadvantages to FreeChat as compared to other chat programs, but it requires no downloads and is stable across many platforms. We suggest you set "refresh" to 5. This will refresh the window of messages every 5 seconds or so.... technically, this is not "lag".

If you're interested in some background reading about e-mail, here's an article you might find useful: www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/emailrel.html

THE PANELISTS:

CRAIG CHILDRESS, M.A. is a family therapist and doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Pepperdine University in California. He first became interested in delivering online, e-mail interventions with his dissertation involving parent skills training using a structured behavior program and e-mail consultation. His efforts to obtain IRB approval for his research resulted in his publication of an article in Ethics & Behavior offering guidelines for the ethical conduct of Internet intervention research and necessitated his becoming knowledgeable about the many ethical and practical issues involved in delivering e-mail psychotherapeutic interventions. He has presented at APA on the potential risks and benefits of online interventions and has authored an article published online by the International Society of Mental Health Online on the same topic. He has used e-mail adjunctively with select in-person clients and as an aid in clinical supervision, and he currently has an article in submission which offers a model for providing e-mail therapeutic interventions as a form of interactive journal writing. Mostly, though, he's the father of two incredibly wonderful children, Jack, age 4, and Annie, age 1.

MICHAEL FENICHEL, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a diverse background ranging from research into the process of psychotherapy to teaching and supervising graduate students, to working in clinical inpatient, online, and school-based settings. Author and observer of research into public opinion and social behavior, "Dr. Mike" also publishes an award-winning psychology reference guide, Current Topics in Psychology (www.tiac.net/users/Current.shtml), which is widely used as a reference by high schools and universities. Dr. Fenichel is on the adjunct faculty at NYU and Yeshiva University in New York City, is a board member of the ISMHO, and currently President of the NYS Psychological Association, School Psychology Division.

ROBERT HSIUNG, M.D., is an active Internet psychiatrist and an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. He develops innovative web resources for his Virtual En-psych-lopedia.* He has presented his work and taught courses at national and regional meetings. He has been a peer reviewer for JAMA and Applied & Preventive Psychology. He serves on the editorial boards of CyberPsychology & Behavior and Psychiatry On-Line. He is a Founding Member and the current Secretary-Treasurer of the International Society for Mental Health Online and a member of the Steering Committee of the Psychiatric Society for Informatics.

STORM A. KING, M.S. is a doctoral candidate in a clinical psychology program. He has been researching the value of online self help groups for several years His dissertation in progress is "The therapeutic value of virtual self-help groups," a corralational study investigating the therapeutic value perceived by members of email groups that function as self-help groups. He has been quoted as an expert on Internet addiction or on the value of online self-help groups in the following major media publications; Newsweek, The Chicago Sun Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Home PC, Fox News Online and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He created and maintain a web site that lists resources for researchers interested in researching the psychology of virtual communities at http://www.concentric.net/~Astorm He has presented at several APA conventions, including co-teaching a full day CE unit workshop on "Clinical implications of Internet use." He is coauthor of a book chapter titled "Internet therapy and self help groups - the pros and cons" and has been published "Ethical guidelines for on-line therapy." At this years APA convention in Boston he will chair a symposium on online group therapy. He is the current president of The International Society for Mental Health Online. His CV may be viewed at http://www.concentric.net/~Astorm/cv

KIMBERLY YOUNG, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and Founder and President of the Center for On-Line Addiction, a consultation firm and training institute for corporations, educational institutions, mental health clinics, and law enforcement agencies dealing with Internet misuse and online deviancy. In addition to conducting seminars, Dr.Young has served as an expert witness for divorce initiated by cyberaffairs and for criminal cases involving deviant or deceptive acts on the Internet. She has recently authored "Caught in the Net," the first recovery book for Internet Addiction, already translated in four languages. Her research has been featured in over 510 newsprint publications such as The Wall Street Journal, USAToday, The New York Times, Newsweek, and Time Magazine, and she has appeared on CNBC, MSNBC, Inside Edition, Good Morning America, and ABCs World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. She currently serves on the editorial board of CyberPsychology and Behavior and recently served as the National Spokesperson for Reuters International, Inc. regarding their study "Glued to the Screen - An Investigation into Information Addiction Worldwide." Dr. Young is a member of the American Psychological Association, the National Council for Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, the International Society of Mental Health On-line, and the Society for Computers in Psychology. In March of 1998, she created virtual clinic to assist in the healthcare of Internet-dependent individuals and their families.

JOHN SULER, Ph.D., (moderator for the panel) is Professor of Psychology at Rider University and a practicing clinical psychologist. His online hypertext book The Psychology of Cyberspace (www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/psycyber.html) describes the results of his ongoing research on how individuals and groups behave in cyberspace. His work has been reported by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, the Chicago Sun Times, CNN, MSNBC, and US News and World Report. He is consulting editor for Behavior Online, a member of the editorial board of CyberPsychology and Behavior, editor of The Contemporary Media Forum for The Journal of Applied Psychoanalysis, and staff writer for Cybertowers Self-Help and Psychology Magazine. He also created and maintains several other large web sites, including Teaching Clinical Psychology (www.rider.edu/users/suler/tcp.html) and the award winning Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbors (www.rider.edu/users/suler/zenstory/zenstory.html). He is father to two daughters, Asia and Kira, who among many other things, inspired John's online nickname "AsKi."

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