Got it, it still doesn’t seem like that will be much of a problem on a dedicated Discord server like this, I don’t think a critical mass of founders will just randomly wander onto an addiction specific Discord server, but I can pass along the advice to be safe.

Good idea, I’ll edit the post.

Hm, good to know, do you think this will even be a problem on a Discord server though? Unless employers specifically join the server in order to rule candidates out the information won’t be super accessible - certainly not from just performing a search on the candidate’s name. I also think we should have rules, including Jason’s suggestion, that officially ban this behavior.

Interesting, thanks for the information! My own experience with someone very close to me with an eating disorder has looked very familiar to me since becoming an addict myself, so it always seemed like it made sense to categorize them together. I guess my final and most important reason for wanting to include it though is just that we have someone who joined the server with an eating disorder, and wanting to know if they could count. Given this I plan to stick by my judgement, even if it means that technically the group is more “addiction and some related mental health disorders” rather than just “addiction”.

Thanks, I'll have to think over these. I just set up a chat to get things started, but truthfully I am very nervous about running/moderating a group chat like this. I'm not very tech savvy and don't even have social media. I've run a club and a fellowship before, but this was all in-person and I think involves very different skills. I'm kind of hoping the current set up will prove temporary and someone with more experience eventually gets involved if this project grows into something substantial. I'll try to take cues from this document as things develop in the meantime.

Now that a few people have expressed interest, I have decided to create a chat so that we can coordinate a bit and work out possible details. For now it's just a discord server here: https://discord.gg/DwMw9C6p If Discord doesn't work well for anyone and they have a better idea I would welcome it, I also have little experience with moderating or running a server, so if anyone else wants to takeover please let me know. I've just set this up as something to get started with for now. Thanks for your interest!

There was also a commenter on my first, anonymous post who expressed interest in something like this I could try reaching out to.

That would be great! What sort of backup would you need?

I agree, I think there's some holdover influence from psychoanalysis where the basic intuition seems to be that there's always some deeper explanation for mental illnesses relating to underlying complexes or misdevelopment or something, and that therapy is finding and fixing those, but I don't think this was ever a sensible idea to default to. Sometimes the reason someone is an alcoholic is as dumb as "I was a little bored at the wrong time to be a little bored, and alcohol is a socially normalized way to address this".

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