Anti-bullying signal-boost.

[gaudior]

People have been talking about bullying lately. Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project has drawn attention to the suicides of gay teenagers, and has inspired the Make It Better Project, to give youth and concerned adults the tools they need to stop bullying in the schools. (I strongly recommend MIBP's Take Action page, which has such useful links as information about The Safe Schools Improvement Act (H.R. 2262/S. 3739) and how you can support it). And both homasse and seishonagon linked to an insightful and useful article by Kate Harding, On Good Kids and Total Assholes.

I'm glad people are talking about this so much-- it's making me think about my own childhood, and how much I accepted kids making fun of me, ostracizing me, and generally making me miserable as "just the way things are." That understanding of the universe and my place in it had long-lasting effects, and I am delighted and grateful that people now are talking seriously about how to stop bullying.

(I may at some point make a larger post, but at the moment, I wanted to signal-boost. Yay, signal-boosting.)

--R

Comments

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

I can tell you what I learned in medical school about communicating with patients. We learned the stages of change model. Basically, for someone to make a change, it doesn't work to tell them to change and then walk away. That's actually a great way to make them discouraged and not change anything at all or want to come back to see you ever again. People make changes slowly. Most of the research in this was done with smoking cessation counseling, and the phases are:

Precontemplation
Contemplation
Preparation
Action
Maintance

The idea is to figure out where the patient/client is, and go from there. You can generally help someone go one step. So if a person hasn't considered smoking cessation, you don't tell them to quit. You ask if they would think about quitting, point out some of the health risks in a non-judgemental way. If a person is thinking about quitting, you can then help them create a plan. Even then, you don't give them a pre-printed generic plan. You help them figure out a specific, personal plan.

That's what I was taught in the classroom on a few specific occasions and have rarely seen used in practice. What I was taught by observation in most cases was generic advice being handed out without a current understanding of what the patient actually is or isn't doing. And then behind the scenes, an awful lot of judgement and ridicule.

[pastwatcher]

Now that you mention it, I think I may have learned something like that in high-school health class. I've never stories of doctors applying such a technique, so as you imply it would be good if they did. Thanks for your answer, and your other comments are interesting and useful.