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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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AskBeehaw
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An open-ended community for asking and answering various questions! Permissive of asks, AMAs, and OOTLs (out-of-the-loop) alike.
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Don't know how to do quotes here but:
"Any community always ends up attracting downvotes and trolls, and the conventional resources such as the suicide hotline chat are only meant to keep you talking and don't help discuss chronic problems."
This is pretty much it right here. It boils down to qualifications, money, and the anonymous nature of the internet. It's hard to give real and useful advice to someone based off of only a couple of internet posts.
Offline, are you gonna run into shitty therapists who deserve to have their license revoked? Yes absolutely. But the people who can help have qualifications and charge a lot of money for their time. They're not gonna come on the internet and dispense useless or generic advice to strangers. It would be a waste of everyone's time, not to mention the whole issue with separating work from life.
This is it, and it's really a broader issue with online communities for a lot of professional services in general, whether it be mental healthcare or medicine or legal services, etc. I'd argue it's not just difficult to give real or helpful advice through these communities, but also irresponsible and potentially negligent, and that's not even going into professional ethics issues like patient confidentiality or attorney client privilege or a whole host of other ethical concerns.
Professional services generally fall into a bucket of "above the internet's pay grade." You really need a licensed professional, but a licensed professional isn't going to be distributing advice over a community forum, both because it's typically a paid service and because they really can't even if they wanted to.
Options are at least expanding for remote professional services, and I'd recommend looking into those options if you need specific help. I'm also not saying communities are bad and they can be great for general support and community, but they're not a replacement for licensed professional services when those services are needed.