Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The solitude of the blogger: a case report

Joseph Könrad, Prof., MD, PhD
Stadt Klinik, Munich, Germany

Blogger Solitude Disease (BSD) is one of the clinical manifestations of Robinson´s Syndrome, and constitutes the second more aggressive blog-related disease in humans, after Blog Addiction Disease (related information at El Garrofer). The incidence of BSD is growing exponentially in young adults and naive bloggers, largely due to the increase in risk-exposure to internet resources at both home and job environments, as well as at public premises. However, the etiology of BSD remains obscure, and its symptoms are usually overlooked by non-skilled physicians. Here, an acute case of BSD is reported that affected to a relatively young individual without previous clinical blog-related history. When the case was clinically diagnosed, the patient had already been abandoned by his family and had lost his job. The patient had been sleeping under the shelter of a bridge for weeks, and he was spending most of the daytime wandering at cybercafes and telephone parlors. A very severe solitude crisis (grade III) brought him to the hospital emergencies. Clinical parameters of the patient at the time of admission were as follows:

Number of blogs being run by the patient; NBP = 13
Number of patient aliases in blogs; NPA = 10-20
Number of blogs being run by the patient with others; NBO = 1
Number of patient entries in own´s blogs; NPE/day = 13.5
Number of comments by others to entries in patient´s blogs; NOC/day = 0.01

Following the guidelines of the BSD International Consortium, the case was diagnosed as a paradigm of extreme BSD (X-BSD), with a blogger solitude index (BSI) ranging from 1.1 to 1.6. Since BSI provides a good estimation of the number of real friends of patients with BSD, a follow up of the case was made by telephone calls and email messages to relatives and potential friends of the patient. The lack of answers confirmed the BSI data. There was no positive response of the patient to the standard therapy for Robinson´s Syndrome, consisting of a pencil and writing paper, an assortment of tools, and a Bible. The patient is currently under mild Log-in therapy, and his vital constants remain stable. It is concluded from our study that X-BSD patients are in the threshold of absolute loneliness, desperation, and virtual misery.

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