Whilst I think that facebook and twitter have something to do with it, I think that the economy and how family carers are doing in their personal lives have more weight than social media.
Once upon a time on Chill members would discuss just about anything. It was not unusual to have 150+ posts a day. Now, we are lucky to get a page and only the same few people will contribute to the discussions. There's a lot of factors involved but mostly I feel, that people have drifted away because of changes in their lives. Some carers have lost the person they care for or they have got better, changes in jobs and businesses, and just plain busy lives. With all the cut backs, I think things have become much more difficult for the family carer so they have less time to use the internet for their own pleasure. You can't fault that. Or because of lack of time, the carers just like to use facebook to ‘lurk’ on what is happening, where they feel no pressure in having to do anything in return.
Also over the years the tone had changed. Instead of a very supportive group where we felt we could bring our problems, it turned out that everyone had problems and maybe they didn't want to contribute to the weight of others. I really miss these discussions, where everyone (meaning at least 30 people) checked in everyday and said at least hello.
I really think it is the stress in life that doesn't give people time to contribute or they don't feel comfortable enough sharing problems. We all have them. It is just often easier to throw it in the closet and try to forget problems at home.
If you look at other carer forums, they too are struggling and these have more money that we have in our Peer support website.
What do you think has caused the demise of the forum?
Statistics: Posted by wendy — 04 Feb 2014, 14:15
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