AGPA
Posts related to the American Group Psychotherapy Association
Mental Health and the Executive Branch
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/06/2008 - 14:20Some people may wonder what the two topics, Mental Health and the Executive Branch have to do with each other, especially these days, but they are two important issues that came up this morning on a conference call for bloggers and online journalists with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
The announced purpose of the conference call was to discuss the contempt charges that Congress will be filing as a civil lawsuit against Joshua Bolten and Harriet Miers for their refusal to respond to subpoenas from Congress. At the center of this is the issue of executive privilege. How far does it extend? The same issue came up in the discussion about FISA. The positioning around the FISA bill seems to be all about attempts by the executive branch to usurp power from the legislative and judicial branches.
So where does mental health fit into all of this? The call started with Speaker Pelosi talking about congress passing the Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act on Wednesday. She described it as a tremendous, historic victory and spoke about the late Sen. Wellstone’s son, David Wellstone and Former First Lady working hard to help get this bill passed.
On Wednesday, I met with a past president of the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) to discuss how AGPA could better get its message out. Group Psychotherapy has played an important role in helping people deal with issues that disasters like 9/11 or Katrina have caused. Some of the early work in Group Psychotherapy was around treating soldiers traumatized by their experiences in World War Two, and it would seem like Group Psychotherapy could be very useful in helping veterans returning from the Iraq War.
We spoke about how AGPA can better interface with the media, including bloggers, about its efforts on Capitol Hill and its work with Roslyn Carter to promote awareness of group psychotherapy.
This brings us back to the Presidential Branch. Roslyn Carter has done great work in help our country address issues of mental health. Both Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama have spoken about the importance of mental health parity in their health care platforms. Let us hope that our current President sees the importance of addressing issues of mental health.
The Virtual Self
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/29/2008 - 17:51The self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks. Anyone who has read my blog post, R, will recognize that as coming from a keynote at the AGPA annual meeting and will know how I’ve been mulling it around.
Yesterday, I went to a talk on Augmentation and Immersion in Second Life. I left the talk feeling very unclear about what people were trying to say or why they thought it mattered, but it seemed something like this: The Immersionists view Second Life as some sort of ‘other world’, a fictional environment. Their avatars a creations like characters in a story. They are acted out, role played, perhaps even some sort of fan fiction.
The augumentists view Second Life as just another communications medium that helps, or augments, our ability to communicate. Their avatars are extensions of themselves. They represent some aspect of who the typist is.
It sounds an awful lot like discussions about MOOs fifteen years ago about how real or not the communications in MOOs were. I tend to lean towards an augmentist view of Second Life and to not take these discussions all that seriously. There is a real typist named Aldon Hynes. He writes blog posts and emails. He talks on the telephone and with people face to face and he moves the avatar Aldon Huffhines around Second Life. The shape of Aldon Huffhines may vary. Sometimes it might be in a wheelchair. Sometimes it might be a close approximation of the typist. Sometimes it might be a young boy, or even a cat. There remains a real typist behind the avatar and the different shapes that the avatar presents reflects different aspects of the typist.
So, does the avatar exist as some aspect of our internal neural network, an idea that we present a little of online? Is it more about our external network, and how we connect with one another? Perhaps the interesting part is about how our internal neural networks and the avatars that exist in our imaginations intersections with our external social networks.
This goes beyond just Second Life. On the mailing list of Group Psychotherapists one person wondered “whether the increasing ease of (internet) communication that we are enjoying could give rise to greater difficulty in maintaining our embodied relationships.” This too, seems to go to the augmentation versus immersion discussion. Does the concern about great difficulty in maintaining our embodied relationships grow out of an immersionist perspective, that somehow our experiences online are different in some significant way from how we connect with others using different media? Does it come from a belief that online personae are different in some important way from our offline personae? Does it come back to issue of ‘self’ as that intersection between our internal neural network and our external social network? Are we using media to make that membrane more or less permeable?
Today, I went to a discussion on credibility and reputation online. That too seems related to this whole idea, but we didn’t get to that point. Likewise, there are a lot of tools springing up to look at aggregated personal content. That is another area worth exploring in a separate blog post.
R
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/28/2008 - 10:30The self exists at the intersection of our inner neural network and our external social network. That is a loose approximation of what Dr. Jeremy Holmes said in the opening plenary address to the 2008 American Group Psychotherapy Association's annual conference. The phrase has rattled around in my mind ever since, as I walk back and forth from my friends' house where I was staying, as I drifted off to sleep, and at other times when my mind wasn't otherwise activated. What does it mean?
I've always been interested in how artificial neural networks learn. In a simple model, input is fed in through the neural network. The inputs are multiplied by various factors until an end result is obtained. The predicted result is then compared with the actual result and changes are back propagated through the artificial neural network to adjust the factors in the network. I've often wondered if this process of back propagation could be applied to the online social networks we are in. Social networks often represent relationships as binary symmetrical values. Either two people trust each other, or they don't. Either two people are friends, or they are not. In reality, one person may trust the other more or less than they are trusted by the other. What if our online social networks gave us the ability to quantify such trusts? What if they used such information to predict friendships and ideas that would be interesting to us? What if they learned from our reaction to such predictions?
I've thought and written about this for years, but I just haven't been able to get anywhere with it. My mind wanders to Mr. Ramsey in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse. Mr. Ramsey is a bright scholar, but he is stuck. He cannot get beyond R. These thoughts about the self existing at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks have brought back my thoughts about artificial neural networks and online social networks, but I feel stuck at R with them, along with Mr. Ramsey.
Dream
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/26/2008 - 16:25This morning, I woke up in the midst of yet another strange dream. It seems like I have a lot to process from the AGPA conference. In this dream, I was part of a small group of people that were engaged in a war. It had overtones of the 1950s and the cold war. The enemy was ambiguous, unknown. It felt almost as if we were kids playing at war, or perhaps like the kids in Lord of the Flies, and I never saw the enemy. At night we all laid down in a circle around a roaring campfire, each of us facing outward to guard against whatever it was that was out there.
It was then that I noticed, not far away was a large safe house, which reinforced the feeling of being kids on some camping adventure. Beyond the house was the sea. It was dark and mysterious. There was no moon or stars in the sky. Yet the sea was inviting and I went for a swim, not knowing about the water I was getting into and staying close enough to shore to keep an eye on the house and the campfire, as well as watching for any of the enemy.
Immersed in this mysterious, deep dark see, I awoke before there was any sort of resolution.
I am sure that wiser people than I will come up with interpretations of what this is about.
Exploring the Angry Crowd at the Gate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 17:41The scenario presented to the demonstration group for the Co-Creation of Leadership session centered around a hypothetical village where a book had been published talking about what a wonderful place the village was. Everyone was buying the book and talking about it, until a newspaper article came out alleging that the author was a child molester. The town turned ugly, burning the books and wanting to lynch the author. The members of the group were supposed to explore how leadership emerged in the ad hoc group as they attempted to address this.
Of course, it was all hypothetical. No community would change so rapidly and drastically to lynch someone, would they? No community would act upon an untested allegation in the media, would they? No community would devalue the work of someone simply because they found out the person had done something inappropriate elsewhere, would they?
Upon returning home, the question became a little more immediate. Since it started, I’ve been writing positive articles about Central Grid. There efforts to create an alternative grid focused on the community and financial aspects of virtual worlds is laudable to me and I hope they are successful.
However, as I alluded to in my Second Life Notes the following morning, there allegations have been emerging about “notorious scam artists” being back in Second Life as well as involved with alternative grids.
In response, I received an email from a person named Frank Corsi. Frank wanted to know if I was calling him a notorious scam artist. Frank is better known in Second Life circles as Jasper Tizzy. In his email, he said it was no secret that he is the person behind Central Grid and asked me not to hurt Central Grid with bad news about this. He then went on to present his side of the story on various issues from the past.
In a discussion today, one person who has been involved with banking in Second Life as well as the emergence of the financial sector in Central Grid, asked why people would hide information about the backers of a venture, if the backers are innocent. I pointed out that even though someone might be innocent, if the crowd thinks they are guilty, the crowd will lynch them anyway. The person went on to speak about the group they are working with, asserting that it has always operated away from scandal and dishonesty. I noted that the organization was associated with banking, and by many people is probably guilty by association.
So, what will happen with Central Grid now that Jasper Tizzy’s involvement is more widely known? Will the crowds tear it down because of the reports they’ve heard of Jasper? Will they stick around even if they think of Jasper as a scam artist, because they think the idea is good in spite of Jasper? Will they give Jasper the benefit of the doubt and consider the possibility that he isn’t a scammer?
On one level, this is much more complicated than the scenario I was confronted with at the AGPA conference. There is the issue of whether or not you can trust the company hosting the grid. People have expressed concerns about how trustworthy Linden Lab is and now, people are bound to question how trustworthy Central Grid is.
In the demonstration group, I tried to get people to step back from their desire to lynch the author of the book and to hold onto what was good. Yes, they should let justice follow its path, but they should not rush to vengeance instead of justice. It feels like I need to do something similar with Jasper and Central Grid. Will I be any more successful than I was in the demonstration group? Time alone will tell.
