I’ve run http://www.clinpsy.org.uk for 9 years now, and built it up to 6900 members, 600,000 users and nearly 10 million page views per year. I’ve put enough hours into that site to add up to more than two years of full-time work, and I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. It is an informative, welcoming community that allows people to network and ask questions. It also levels the playing field of information and reduces the impact of personal connections within the early stages of the profession, and I hope that this will in the long-term act to increase diversity in the profession. Over those 9 years, members have written upwards of 135,000 posts on the forum, and our wiki of information and answers to frequently asked questions has been viewed millions of times, with some posts about preparing for interviews, the route to qualifying, formulation, writing a reflective journal, and transference proving particularly popular – the latter having been read over 115,000 times.

In all of that time we have had remarkably little need to intervene in the forum as moderators. We remove the occasional bit of spam, and we have sometimes anonymised posts in retrospect on the request of the author, and from time to time we have to explain to service users that this is not an appropriate place to ask for advice, but we rarely have to warn or ban forum users. I think the total to date is seven banned individuals and one banned organisation. Not bad when we’ve had 10,000+ sign-ups, and 135,000 posts! This is perhaps a reflection of our clear guidance about how we expect users to behave on the forum, and also of the large number of regulars who act as a more informal feedback loop. We also have quite a large number of qualified clinical psychologists who log into the forum regularly and often act to provide information and correct misconceptions. This is a very important function, as the pre-qualification arena can often become an anxiety-provoking echo chamber, where rumours are propagated and exaggerated without being confirmed or refuted. It also allows us to have a (hidden) peer consultation forum, which is a very good place to discuss concerns with peers in a safe environment in which every member is an HCPC registered clinical psychologist.

However,  the few times when intervention is necessary always tell an interesting story. And the strange thing is, that every single time somebody has been a persistent concern on the forum, this has opened a can of worms that makes us worried about wider ethical issues for the same individual. We had someone who was very unboundaried, and at times threatening to their colleagues and other members in the LiveChat space, and transpired to have caused concern with aggressive conduct in real life. We had a member who was somewhat grandiose and wanted to be a moderator, who attempted to delete and vandalise site content. They later had issues in their workplace, with a similar theme of acting beyond their level of competence. One poster lied to persuade successful applicants to share their applications for clinical training and plagiarised them, and when we identified them it transpired they had plagiarised site content into a publication without acknowledgement and had been unprofessional in numerous other ways. Another odd poster used the same username to post topless pictures on another website. And most recently we have had an organisation recurrently attempt to circumvent payment for advertising on the forum by signing up stooge accounts to promote their service, where it would appear that the appearance of an ethical non-profit organisation instead covers a profitable privately owned tour operator.

It has made me wonder whether ethics and professionalism are the kind of thing people have or they don’t, and that show in numerous domains of their life. Or, is the seeming anonymity of an internet forum a place where traits are exaggerated and played out. Either way, the association between inappropriate use of the forum and inappropriate professional behaviour in other domains seems too high to be a coincidence.

Yet the ethical and professional guidance for psychologists has little that applies in our context. We have had to work out our own boundaries amongst the moderating team (we now comprise ten qualified psychologists and a lay member, although many joined the team as APs or trainees). It makes me realise how much unique our position is, on the technological frontier, and how we are learning case by case. For example, we have had to interpret the balance between confidentiality and risk to apply to our unique setting. We settled on a position that is broadly consistent with what I’d do with clients in real life; we would identify and report a member if we felt they were at risk or presented a risk to others, but otherwise aim to respect the pseudo anonymity of using a posting ID, where only a minority of people choose to be identifiable as a specific professional, or in a way that could be recognised in their workplace. Likewise, we have learnt to log everything typed into our LiveChat space, so that we are able to review the usage of particular members, or read the content if a report is made of inappropriate behaviour. I’d like to think that we’ve reached a good place, and have always been transparent in how we behave. It has been an interesting process though, so I’m thinking of presenting some of the ethical dilemmas and our process at the CYPF conference later this year.