I don’t remember where I saw or read this, but recently I learned that therapists tend to be slow to get on board with technology, particularly social media. I don’t know why that is, although I can venture to guess it’s at least partially related to concerns about how to talk about what we do provided we’re bound by confidentiality and the stipulations of HIPAA. Art therapists even have the added bonus of patient/client artwork to illustrate what we do, but that’s part of the confidential records. Without releases to show the art, we can’t show it, and it’s hard to convey what we do without it. Also, while engaging in social media anonymously is a viable option, adopting such an approach isn’t necessarily a panacea. Conversely, there are a lot of issues regarding self-disclosure that occur when you put yourself out there as who you are.

I continue to teeter-totter in an effort to find the right balance, stumbling along hoping I’ll eventually figure it out. My experiments in social media dating back to listservs and message boards in the mid-90’s before it was even known as “social media” were solely for personal reasons. I tinkered with that on and off for several years, but it wasn’t until maybe 4 or 5 years ago, that I really became engaged in message boards and online communities, giving and receiving support back when I was thisclose to finding my way with diabetes, and then when I was firmly on my way to better diabetes management.

My active presence on message boards led to interviews about my personal experience with diabetes, but once I had pulled myself together, diabetically speaking, and started to consider the direction in which I wanted to take my career, there was this little matter of an awful lot of my personal business being publicly available. Clearly, while my intentions to help people by talking about my experience were good, I hadn’t clearly thought through the ramifications, particularly those of a professional nature. Do-overs not being an option, I decided I needed to roll with it and make the most of it.

So as non-kosher as it is to be a mental health clinician with my own considerable psychiatric history, that’s who I am – or perhaps more precisely, this is who I’ve become because of it. I’ve visited this issue of straddling the line between personal and professional before. It’s an ongoing theme because it’s an admittedly awkward process with no cut-and dry resolution, so I expect to continue to explore it.

I didn’t set out to use social media for career purposes, but I suppose as invested as I’ve been in it for my personal diabetes care, and since diabetes has everything to do with the direction my career is going, that’s what is evolving. Thus, I’ve kind of backdoored my way into the slowly blossoming art therapy corner of the social media universe. As comfortable as I am using social media for my personal diabetes purposes, I’m much less comfortable using it professionally since there’s this unconventional overlap between who I was and what I’ve become personally and who I am and who I hope to be professionally.

Save for a handful of art therapists who have websites with more dynamic content, like Cathy Malchiodi and Gretchen Miller, the International Art Therapy Organization, and the Art Therapy Alliance, of which I am a member and which is paving the way for art therapy to enter the age of the intertubz, there isn’t a whole lot of art therapy stuff happening online, relative to other professions, but progress has been occurring at an ever-increasing rate as far as I can tell, and I’m all about doing my part to further the cause.

In an effort to get the word out about art therapy for people with diabetes, I’ve turned to the social media staple, Facebook. I had created a fan page for The Butter Compartment a while back, just for the heck of it mostly. Now I’ve created a fan page for my art therapy practice. I got the idea a few days ago, but dilly-dallied because I didn’t want to call the page “Art Therapy for People with Diabetes”. While that’s an accurate name, it didn’t seem all that catchy. I pondered some possibilities for something that seemed to have a better ring to it, and finally I settled on Draw-a-betes. So if you haven’t already caught it. I hope you’ll check out Draw-a-betes Facebook Fan Page. There’s not much there yet, but give me time. It’s a work in progress.