It seems like there is some interest in this:

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/539305

I’ve used https://reddit.com/r/cptsd as a support group for awhile. It never felt right to post such sensitive discussions onto a platform controlled by a tech company trying to monetize its content, so I was really happy when things like Lemmy began taking off. In my opinion, support communities belong in user-owned spaces like this.

I use Beehaw as a provider, and I thought it might be a good place to host a CPTSD community because of Beehaw’s rules and ethos. I had a look at what’s existing, and this is the closest one I could find. There’s !cptsd@lemmy.ml (am I referring to that correctly?), but it’s dead.

Is anyone aware of a good CPTSD community, or would there be interest/support in creating one on Beehaw?

  • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    speaking as a user for a moment and not as an admin: i do think this is a good idea for the site and community as a whole, and i’d like for us to eventually be able to accommodate stuff like this.

    but speaking as an admin and not a user: …the main issue (besides specificity) is that we’re grappling with how we can responsibly facilitate any kind of mental health-focused community on here. in our current position, i don’t think we’re capable of doing that, nor do i think we’ll be able to any time soon. this is why we balked on anything closer to that space than !neurodivergence@beehaw.org and !disability@beehaw.org, which we think mostly avoid what we’re worried about. (even then, we have three mods covering the first and i regularly keep special eye on the second.)

    you’ve probably noticed that we really care about making sure our community and everything about it exists responsibly and ethically–and that also applies here. there are very real, immediate harms that can be caused by irresponsibly moderated health and mental health spaces and we don’t want that. but ensuring stuff like that doesn’t happen takes a lot of work and we’re just not in a place where we can do that work or promise we’ll get around to it.

    while we also appreciate that people out there would volunteer to moderate such spaces, we’re also not in a place interpersonally where we can trust someone to watch over such a community. we’d ideally want legitimately qualified people to watch the space, and we just can’t promise that kind of thing. this obviously isn’t just a matter of pruning hate speech or getting correct information about how to take care of a plant–bad information in a (mental) health context can irreversibly harm or kill people. (and obviously there’s potential threats of violence, self-harm, and/or suicide that are really opened up to being expressed in such communities that must be handled with care. we’ve been fortunate to not deal with something like this yet.)

    all this to say: this something we want to be able to have on the site, but i hope everyone can understand why this is a thing we’re not able to right now, and probably won’t for awhile.

    • a_cat@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thank you for the excellent explanation! I can certainly appreciate this stance and why you and the other admins might want to be sure to do this in the right way, if ever. It’s enough for me to know it’s in the back of your minds.

      In the meantime, do you have any suggestions for a provider to host such a space?

      • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        In the meantime, do you have any suggestions for a provider to host such a space?

        hmm, good question. i’ve paged other people who i think are better able to socially or technologically answer this one than i, and hopefully they’ll be able to direct you and others toward something

    • flora_explora@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks a lot for your response.

      I just need to vent somewhere that it really hurts being thrown out of reddit this way and now realizing that after being very hopeful that Beehaw will be my new home that very crucial communities won’t be established over here for awhile :'( Not sure if I will stick around then…

      I still get why you decided this way and am not trying to tell you to do otherwise. I’m just really frustrated and sad right now

      ETA: searched on raddle and even there I cannot find any mental health related forums :/

  • Sunspot@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I was thinking about something similar yesterday. On Reddit, I was part of a number of religious trauma/ex-Christian groups. I was always uncomfortable posting in a place like Reddit, but reading others’ posts was greatly comforting to me.

    I’m not sure how similar CPTSD and religious trauma are, but I’d be interested in a community like you mentioned to learn more about it.

    • a_cat@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Thank you, I’ll check it out!

      I still think an individual CPTSD community is warranted though. I just don’t think it works if posts about anxiety are next to posts about things like being trafficked, tortured, etc.

      There’s a joke about people performing in the “trauma olympics”, and comparing each other’s experiences to see whose is worse. I’m explicitly not trying to do that, but it’s difficult to describe why I think these kinds of communities should be separate without describing the difference in severity and amount of issues people with CPTSD are generally working with. I’m afraid posts about CPTSD might make people with “more common” (this feels incredibly dismissive) mental health struggles feel like their issues are small in comparison (they’re not!), and that maybe they shouldn’t post. I wouldn’t want that.

    • a_cat@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      This was cross-posted from the neurodivergence community, but I don’t think it’s a very good fit. Without getting into the nuances, CPTSD is situational, or it’s caused by a confluence of factors, and is a negative aspect of people’s lives requiring support. Neurodivergence is more often something that’s biological, and not usually negative, and can be celebrated.

      A more appropriate broad categorization would be something like a mental health community, but even then, sadly, people who suffer from CPTSD have been through some horrific, NSFL, things. Having a separate community would probably be best for both sides: those who have CPTSD, and those who don’t, and probably wouldn’t want to read some of the things in people’s posts.

      Anyway, I was wondering if there was a place people could request new communities, but it sounds like the admins largely decide based on what they see on the fediverse?

      • noughtnaut@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Without getting into the nuances, CPTSD is situational, or it’s caused by a confluence of factors, and is a negative aspect of people’s lives requiring support. Neurodivergence is more often something that’s biological, and not usually negative, and can be celebrated.

        I just want to say that this is eloquently and quite beautifully put.