cybertherapy meets facebook, blogger and second life: an italian experience

Abstract

Our project is based on the study of Cybertherapy in the international sphere (USA, Northern Europe) and on the application of this discipline to the Italian psychiatric and psychological reality. CyberTherapy can be used as an "aim", referring to it as real and proper therapy, which lives on personalized paths created by a qualified staff, conceived as ludic, for recreational, psycoterapic, and educational purpose. Moreover, Cybertherapy can be used as a "mean" (and in this way we want to propose it) with the aim of making the user, who feels a psychiatric or a psychological uneasiness, to become closer to qualified staff; a considerable advantage of this discipline is to reduce to a minimum the initial embarrassment which is created between the specialist and the psychiatric patient, uneasiness stirred up and accentuated by the problem, which is unfortunately not resolved in the Italian sphere of the Stigma