MentalHealthCamp – a whole conference about mental health and blogging

northern voice 2009 logo by bascocoping digitally, a session at the 2009 northern voice blogging conference that talked about the intersection of blogging and mental health and how social media can help derease the stigma of mental health was a real success.  raul did a live blog of the session. thanks, raul!

the overwhelming feedback, during and after the session, face-to-face and digitally, was that the conversation needs to be continued.

so – we are thinking of putting together MentalHealthCamp, an (un)conference that will deal specifically with the topic.  raul (@hummingbird604 on twitter) already did a post on it!

right now the idea is to put together such a conference in vancouver some time in april, with sessions that are at least 90 minutes – these are topics that we can’t just plow through, there needs to be time for reflection and conversation.  we could run concurrent sessions if we have a lot of proposals.

in the meantime, feel free to continue the discussion digitally here on my blog. i’m thinking about writing specific blog posts about the issues that have arisen so far.  anything you’re burning to talk about, let me know!

and once again, here are airdrie’s blog and tod’s, the two other people on the panel.  a huge thanks to airdrie once again for getting this ball rolling so well!

questions to you, my good readers and commenters:

would you be interested in participating in MentalHealthCamp?

“participating” means anything from attending the conference to volunteering to put it together to giving presentations.

right now my thought is that we might even be able to do a mixed online/face-to-face session where people who cannot make it to vancouver could perhaps participate via a combination of live-blogging and twitter.

UPDATE: here is the wiki for MentalHealthCamp – for those of you who want to participate.

(the northern voice logo shown here was created by “teh ossum” street artist basco)

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