September 10, 2004

Dear diary, you make me sic. Keeping a diary is bad for your health, say UK psychologists. “In fact, you’re probably much better off if you don’t write anything at all."

[this space intentionally left blank, because of headache, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness.]

posted by mare 20 years ago
  • But she acknowledges that her experiment could not demonstrate which came first - the diary writing or the health problems. Keep blogging, my pretties.
  • Correlation and causation are often correlated, but while causation causes correlation, correlation does not necessarily entail causation.
  • Seems a flawed study, and I wouldn't trust its concusions as afar as I could throw the author.
  • You know what else makes people sick- hospitals! I did my own study ands the average person in a hospital is far sicker then the average person not in a hospital! And they have the nerve to say they help people!
  • I've always wondered after the motive for diarists. With the constant internal dialogue that goes on in each of our heads, what reason would someone have for writing things down save for (a) reviewing at a later date, or (b) secretly hoping that someone else will find and read it? Additionally, diaries at once typically seem both banal and prurient - if the point of keeping a diary is (a), what sort of frisson would one garner from replaying such thoughts, and if the point is (b), then is not the whole point of keeping a diary ultimately exhibitionistic? Why not just post some upskirt pics on the net and have done with it? Blogs, although the content is often the same, are a little different imo due to their public nature. Personally, I think the impetus behind personal blogs is fame, not catharsis. Everyone wants to be Dong Resin, after all.
  • Who's Dong Resin?
  • Point 1: I really hate bad scientists. They should be ashamed of themselves if they're saying, on the basis of that study, that journal writing causes illness. Point 2: It might have been kind of cool to have at least a journal of my younger days. Nothing so personal as a diary, perhaps, but just the little day to day things that I've forgotten as an adult. If I had siblings of my age or close, that might serve much the same function, but there are whole swaths of my earlier days that I can't remember.
  • Fes, as an occasional journal-keeper I can attest that writing down one's thoughts can help one work things out in one's mind a little better. More than once while depressed I have written a screed, then immediately read what I'd written and realized that things really weren't so bad after all.
  • I've been keeping a diary/journal off and on for about 16 years now. Granted, I would also consider myself a writer, and so therefore writing rather makes sense...and it is mainly for my benefit, though I have occasionally started writing short story ideas or musing about concepts besides my daily dealings. I could definitely see how completely undirected personal writing could spiral down into self-fulfilling gloom, but it seems the organizers of this study are unaware or not acknowledging either cognitive therapy or even the basic notion that writing things down can organize your thoughts.
  • Dear Diary, you make me sic [sic]. Sorry, a rare opportunity that had to be seized.
  • With your bad knee, you better not throw anybody, Beeswacky.
  • dd42: dong_resin wrote a diary.
  • my reaction was similar to that of middleclasstool (can i call you mactee?), except i saw it as "dear diary, you make me (sic)" are we no more than the sum of the entries in our journals? if so, i should start keeping a journal...
  • Dear Diary, you make me sic [sic]. Sokissmequick?
  • Just ask Winston Smith.