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hi all At 23:12 1999/08/11 +0200, ida wrote, in part: >I have to go back to my first years as a student, when I first attended to >lectures in psychiatry. Theses lectures took place in the psychiatric ward >of the university hospital. They lasted two hours with one break of 15 >minutes. During that break all students assembled round a coffee-machine in >one of the corridors. And being young with no serious responsibilities, we >expressed the lightness of our existence in much talking, joking and >laughter. After reentring the lecture-room, the professor did not go on >with his lecture were he stopped it, but did supply us with some other >education. He said that the corridor and the coffee-machine were not only >for use of the students and asked us to emphathise with other people who >used that same corridor but for quite a different reason. They were >psychiatric patients or family of them, whose excistence was much heavier >than ours. He made it clear that patients and their relations, during >hospitalisation go through disconcerting experiences and that having >recently had experiences like that, the encounter with such a happy, each >other mutually amusing group, could be disagreeable,like having to run the >gauntlet... this is an interesting metaphor but i question the degree of relevance you describe different groups of people using the same corridor 1. the students 2. the psychiatric patients 3. the psychiatric patients' families and visitors it seems to me that these three groups had distinctly different reasons for being there unlike the PIEnet subscribers the three groups did not actively 'sign up' to gain access to the corridor in order to share information and support about a common affliction with other users of the corridor you have not touched on the 'personal and private attack' aspect of the current and past problems with david applying that aspect to your metaphor might result in a scenario where one of the corridor users whispers something personally upsetting and deliberately cruel to one of the other corridor users on a repeated basis i have heard recently from some of the formerly active listmembers who left due to those personal and private attacks and they still express fear of exposing themselves to more attacks by posting to the list they feel this vulnerabiliity even when david is not a listmember how would you 'support' such a list-member? the 'humour' that is generated from someone exhibiting this behaviour strikes me as much more questionable than any pig jokes janet janet paterson 52 now / 41 dx / 37 onset snail-mail: PO Box 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada website: a new voice <http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Village/6263/> e-mail: <[log in to unmask]>