Dopers discussing students and patients: harmless or party foul?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Once when I was bored I started searching through LiveJournal to see if there were any public diaries by people working for the same chain of English schools as me. Sure enough there were…and one of them contained stuff I don’t think the teacher should have made openly available. Nothing too shocking really, mostly a lot of bitching about coworkers (using their real first names), but also insults of students and quite a bit about being hot for a student who was sadly too young! I didn’t read enough to be able to tell if the student was actually underage, but either way that’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t want your boss stumbling across.

As the teacher gave the name of the chain of schools, the general region of the school, and the first names of coworkers, I think I could figure out exactly which branch it is and the teacher’s identity using the school directory at the main company website. So could anyone else. If I were teaching in the same region I probably would have been able to figure out the particular school just from the first names, as I would have run into the same people at area meetings.

If you’re going to talk about students, patients, or even coworkers at any kind of job in an open forum, I think it’s best to avoid using any real names at all. Not just names of people, but the name of your place of work too. To be safe, it’s also a good idea to change unimportant details like DoctorJ mentioned, and avoid including too many details that aren’t crucial to the story. For instance, I’ve referred to one of my coworkers as “The OBG” (“Office Bad Girl”), or students as “karaoke-loving office lady” and “teenaged boy who likes Tolkien”. These are pretty generic descriptions, but they’re enough to set the stage. It might be more colorful to refer to some of The OBG’s exploits, but for the sake of any story I’d wish to tell about her it’s enough to know that she is The OBG. You don’t really need to hear about her glass eye, her yakuza boyfriend, or that she put herself through school working as a stripper in Yokohama. :wink:

22

Qadgop the Mercotan. He’s obviously hoping to become famous enough to be featured on Jeopardy! as a clue in the “Q Without U” category.

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Psychologist here. My quick responses, bearing in mind that posters on SDMB are unusually scrupulous about leaving out or changing identifiers.

**It’s also in the clear morally as long as other rules aren’t violated. **

I think if we’re going to discuss moral vs legal and ethical, we do have to ask what the purpose of the disclosure is, and perhaps whether there’s a better audience for it (like a professional colleague or consultant). If we’re talking moral, I have to raise the question of disclosing client, patient, or student information for purposes of getting a laugh or for schadenfreud.

teachers and doctors talk to each other all the time.

Yes, but we are bound by the same legal and ethical constraints as our colleagues, so presumably all involved safeguard the information. We may also have an ethical obligation to help the storytelling colleague to understand why s/he is venting. Similarly, if the story is not sufficiently disguised, we may be obliged to warn that person that s/he is stepping over the line, where as party guests/message board members tend to ask for more information.

**What are the odds that a patent of yours would post on this Board? **

Pretty damn good, actually.

If you dig around and find his website, you can figure out what hospital this happened at, and Dr.J’s first name.

Good point, which illustrates why we haqve to be particularly scrupulous. The Internet has few closed doors. I’ve had clients and students track down information about me on line, not all of which is material that I have posted.

**I see no problem with doctors, teachers, public servants, servers, caddies, or anyone else sharing anecdotes about students/patients/customers/whatever. **

Perhaps, but our licensing boards do. Again, I’ll ask what the purpose of the disclosure is. If it’s only entertainment, perhaps it’s not appropriate–as some have mentioned, you wouldn’t want to see your business (or what you believe is your business) on the Internet for everyone’s entertainment. Psychologists have an ethical (and in some states, legal) obligation to consider how our actions affect the public’s perception of the practice of psychology. If a reader decides not to see a psychologist or other professional because my storytelling seems disrespectful and violates privacy, if not confidentiality, I’ve contributed to that person not getting healthcare s/he may need, and I have not countered the ways that therapists are represented in movies and on television (generally unethical and incompetent).

I’ve never made a big secret of my identity online, so it would be nothing to figure out who I am and where I work. That said, I always try to change some non-important details about the patients–age, sex, particulars of the disease, etc. I look at every potentially identifying element and see if it could be changed without altering whatever point I was trying to make

This is also what I try to do. When my students are presenting cases in class or rounds, this is the hardest point for them to grasp and keep–just changing names isn’t enough to protect privacy, and even in a case conference, unless it’s just the patient/client’s treatment team, there is no need for identifiers.