Do You Share Your Blog with Mental Health Treatment Providers?

Sharing my blog with treatment providers came up for me for the first time recently during my inpatient hospital stay. The fact that I had a blog came up during my first meeting with a psychiatrist in ER, as he’d asked what I do with my time since I’ve been on disability.

My psychiatrist here on the inpatient unit asked if I’d be okay with him looking at it, and I responded that I wanted to take some time to think about it. I was thinking that I would share it with him, but then I decided that it wouldn’t help my cause if I ended up having to go ahead with the review panel to contest my Mental Health Act Committal (which didn’t end up being necessary). The question of whether or not he should look at my blog never came up again, but as the half-deaf fill-in doctor last week was flipping through my chart, I caught sight of my blog’s logo, so clearly somebody had found it and printed off a page from it to stick in my chart. At no point had anyone asked me the blog’s name or URL, but I’m very easily findable using Google, so it doesn’t surprise me that someone could track it down (although I am a bit surprised that they would). No one has ever had any kind of follow-up discussion with me about what they found there.

I know that some people do share their blog with their treatment provider(s). I’m not sure if that’s something I’d ever be all that keen on, although I’m not sure how to articulate why that is. Maybe it’s because I like to compartmentalize my life, and things crossing over into different compartments makes things messier in my head. I don’t like the idea of a treatment provider looking at the dialogue going on in the comments; discomfort with them reading that is more the issue for me than discomfort with them reading the posts themselves.

I think that I’d probably feel the need to self-censor somewhat if I knew treatment providers would be reading my blog. With all of you, I don’t feel the need to use much, if any, filter, and I like that feeling of freedom to write whatever I want using whatever kind of language I want.

So those are my thoughts. Now I’m curious to hear from you – have you or would you share your blog with a treatment provider? Why or why not?