Volunteer day at the TMS Wiki

Hello dear forum members. It is truly inspiring to see how supportive everyone is to each other here. From extending warm welcomes to the newbies, to sharing your personal experiences and helpful tools, this is a wonderful community of people at all levels of healing and wisdom. Your contributions are what make it possible for the Wiki and forum to exist and to thrive as a valuable tool to help those still suffering. The journey to wellness can feel overwhelming, lonely and frightening but here at the forum and Wiki, no one need face their challenges alone.

In our continuing efforts to be the best support we can be to the TMS and PPD community we review our efforts and brainstorm new ones. Over the next couple of weeks we will be launching and reviving several projects and we wanted to give you a heads up.

One of the projects that we are excited about is the success stories database. This database offers a hand curated clickable list of TMS related symptoms and diagnoses that visitors can search. The current version of the database can be found here:
http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Success_Stories_by_Symptoms_&_Diagnoses
Many patients doubt that their condition could be PPD, so reading a success story by someone with similar symptoms or diagnoses can help them accept the diagnosis and build hope that they can heal.

We have Alicia Batson, MD who is involved with the PTPN who has offered to expand the database. As we function by the generosity of our volunteers we jumped at her offer. To best support her and this project we would like to ask for a few volunteers to jump in and help. This will be time to support the project and not a time to ask for medical or therapeutic advice from the practitioners who may be involved. We will be hosting "kick off" project support teleconference on Wednesday May 6, 2015 at 12:30 pm PT / 3:30 pm ET. This will be for anyone who would like to be involved. You will need access to a computer and phone to be able to follow along and join the conversation. We will go through aspects of this project, learn about wiki editing and more. Don't worry if you can't attend this teleconference you can still participate.

If you would like to join in and help on this project or donate your success story please reply to forestfortreesweb@gmail.com. We would love your help and support.

We thank you in advance.

Forest

 

That's terrific! Thanks so much for your help, @North Star. It will be nice to have a chat with you again.

 

By the way, the Dr. Alicia Batson who is helping us out is also the Dr. Batson who shared a very inspiring success story last month:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/a-physicians-tms-story-rsi-hyperacusis-and-much-more.7658/

A TMS Therapist named Pam Dobbie, LMHC will also be there:
http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Find_a_TMS_Doctor_or_Therapist#pdobbie

It's terrific that we can have practitioners and peers (us) working together for a common goal of improving the success stories database to help everyone.

 

Excellent! I'm really looking forward to this! Thanks for pitching in!

 

Thanks for taking the time to write that up so carefully, Ellen. We will definitely add it to several pages.

By the way, for anyone thinking of participating, the first step is to look around the existing database of success stories. It is a terrific resource for people who are looking for hope. So many people struggle with the question, "could this symptom be TMS?" It can be very helpful to read a story by someone with similar symptoms who overcame those symptoms.

It was actually the first project that I began working on back in 2008, because it was by reading success stories of people who had symptoms like mine that I finally accepted the diagnosis and began to heal. However, after that big initial burst of work, the list hasn't been updated much even though we have many new stories to add. It's time to update them.

www.tmswiki.org is divided into two halves: the forum half and the wiki half. You're looking at the forum half now - the wiki half looks more like pages on Wikipedia look. Despite this, the wiki half is crucial to our organization as roughly half of our 140,000 monthly pageviews come from it. Google is very good at figuring out which web pages have excellent quality content, so the carefully written wiki pages tend to be an important part of how people find out about our forum community and about TMS.

For anyone who would like to help out, the first step is taking 5 or 10 minutes to get to know the success stories database as it is now:
http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Success_Stories_by_Symptoms_&_Diagnoses
It's a great resource already and we're going to make it even better. The first step to making it better is getting a good sense of how it works today.

 

Today is Volunteer Day! At 12:30 PT 3:30 ET I will host a teleconference about our most recent volunteer opportunity and launch of this project.

We are improving and expanding the success stories database. This resource is often the first place people learn about TMS and begin their journey through reading the inspirational success stories that have been shared. This is a place of valuable connection and information for those new and those still suffering. It brings hope and an introduction to the amazing community here at the forum.

We are pleased that some of you will be joining us. It is not too late for others to join in to see what we are up to and to connect with other members. Even if you can't make the teleconference today you can still help with this project, just let us know and we will help you get on board.

• As for today join us at 12:30 PT / 3:30ET at http://go.tmswiki.org/volunteer or click here to see the schedule and written information we will discuss today. Open this document. It will have helpful instructions and links. Also, if you have any questions, you can ask them in the chat room on the right.

• Call our teleconference line. Dial 1 201-479-4595. When prompted, enter the meeting number 18311499, followed by the pound key ( # ). We will use the teleconference line to introduce ourselves and to help each other out. Forest will say a couple of words at the beginning and can help you if you get stuck.

Looking forward to it!