Depression and the social media trap

CC image courtesy of Penelope's Loom on Flickr

It is amazing the ripples that news of a celebrity suicide can trigger in social media circles. Since the first reports of Robin William's death started circulating earlier this week, half a dozen friends and colleagues "came out" on blogs or social networking sites about their own depression and accounts of suicide attempts.

Mary Hamilton, from the Guardian, who never made secret of the her battles with mental health, wrote an excellent post on her blog, later published in the Comment is Free section, condemning the way in which some newspapers reported suicide, with little consideration to the increased risk to the vulnerable and the depressed.

A Facebook friend publicly admitted she has been on "happy pills" for years since her divorce and still relies on them to function normally, despite her having found happiness again. A colleague revealed in a blog post that she tried to kill herself as a teenager and questioned why the event has always been shrouded in silence.

While I read in the Guardian that less than a third of people with mental health problems in the UK get treatment at all, a journalist friend was posting on Facebook horrendous details on the way in which her partner had taken his life under the care of the NHS. And how she too subsequently became suicidal.

Chain reaction
Each depressive that "came out" triggered a few more "me toos".

Had Facebook been in the midst of conducting their cheeky experiment on emotional contagion through social networks, to prove that a controlled feed of mostly sad posts would invite other sad posts, they'd have had a field day.

Sighs of relief were almost audible on Facebook, as everyone realised they were not the only ones battling inner demons, that there was no shame is publicly admitting they too suffered or had in the past suffered from mental health issues.

I don't believe this was a case of misery loving company, however; more an act of liberation: each confession giving permission for more to come to the fore.

Taboo
Depression has long been a social taboo, a no-no topic of conversation, secretly worn like a scarlet letter of shame, as homosexuality once was.

People don't like talking about subjects that force them to confront their deepest fears. It is like tapping into that dark place in your soul you're well familiar with but are too frightened to admit. Silence is a form of self-denial, head in the sand.

Attention-seeking bitch
The other day, while having a rant online to a couple of friends about some work-related frustrations, I was called an "attention-seeking bitch". It was meant as a joke, a humorous way of telling me to stop being so negative. I laughed it off and didn't take it personally, but it later occurred to me that, had I been so low to the point of needing medical help, being labelled "attention-seeking" would have made me retreat even further into the dark recesses of my mind.

I stopped ranting after that and apologised for having caused stress to everyone who had been on the chat. Yet, inside, I felt sick that I had to say sorry for feelings I had no control over. Feeling bad for feeling bad. What the heck.

No one said, "Shall we go for a drink later so you can tell me how you feel?"

Every man for himself
Such is modern life. Everyone's too busy dealing with their personal crises, up to the brim with their problems. Very few people have the head space and time to truly listen. It is not so much that people don't care. Everyone is stressed, suffering from anxiety, insecurities, phobias, paranoias, having dilemmas about their relationships, their jobs, their finances. They are barely coping with their daily lives; they don't need your negativity and your problems to burden them even more.

I include myself in this category. When I've been working late for weeks on end, sleeping badly at night, suffering from exhaustion, generally burning the candle at both ends, I find I need as much solitude as possible outside working hours in order to recharge. I do not mean to be selfish or uncaring, but sometimes life becomes so overwhelming, I need to cut out all the noise from outside, and actively ignore people and their demands so I can listen to myself, attend to my own needs.

Communication overload
The internet and social media have made it almost too easy for people to connect and share. On a typical day I am bombarded with messages from friends on Gmail, Messenger, What's App, mobile SMS, Twitter, then I come home and find my mother, who doesn't own a computer or a mobile phone, has left several voice mails on my landline complaining I haven't called her in weeks.

Bloody. Too. Much.

Friends want to share stories, links to interesting articles they've read, update you on gossip, their love lives, the course they've signed up to, show you their latest holiday pictures, they want you to sign a petition for a cause they're supporting, or they just want to see you for lunch. If you're not out there frantically "liking" people's updates and photos, replying to emails within 24 hours, texting back within five minutes, you look unsociable and unfriendly, so you multi-multi-multitask your messaging back and forth.

But is anyone online really listening, or just talking fast over one another?

Maybe I'm getting old, but I often find this pace of communication far too intense and fragmented. Especially when I'm at breaking point, I need quality rather than quantity communication. What happened to the good old heart-to-hearts, those intimate conversations over a glass of wine that dragged into the wee hours? The eye-to-eye contact?

Happy people only
On Facebook there seems to be a tacit understanding that you should only share things that are positive, or funny, or critical of an issue but not on a personal level. Personal negatives are to be kept private so as not to spoil everyone's fun, although some would argue that seeing our friends 'happy' on Facebook can actually make us sad.

There's no room for sorrow, except communal sadness, like shared grief over the death of a celebrity. Facebook is a massive playground where everyone comes out to play, and anyone spoiling the fun will be blocked out of the game.

The rule is "don't be an attention-seeking bitch", although the irony is that everyone is doing just that – hoping for an audience, for "likes" and comments.

So where do depressed people go?

Isolation
At a time when we socialise and share far more online than anywhere else, I wonder how much social media is responsible for making people feel ostracised and inadequate for not being "as happy as they should". If people can't come to the common playground to declare they're as depressed as hell, for fear of making themselves unpopular, the only alternative is to hide behind a curtain of silence.

There is also the question of how much to share.

Your boss, your colleagues past and present, your exes' family and friends, your ultra conservative friend of yore, your parents and siblings may all be on your Facebook network. Where do you draw the line on what you share? The flip side of sharing too much is not sharing at all. Or sharing only the innocuous, harmless and superficial stuff, which do not give away how you're feeling, even if you've just swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills because there was no one "real" to talk to.

Help, I need somebody...
Wanting to talk is not about soliciting attention; it is about having your negative feelings acknowledged and understood, feeling less alone in the darkness, seeking reprieve from the hell you keep getting sucked into. Yet many a cry for help falls into deaf ears.

A few days ago I saw a journalist on Twitter reacting to someone's tweet "Why is it a bad thing if people kill themselves? If living is total agony it's sadistic to maintain life," with the comment: "I assume you are trolling?" This, only a day after the journalist had tweeted the Samaritan's guidelines on reporting suicide. It was clear to me the person wasn't a troll at all; just a depressed person needing to vent.

What is the point of a journalist sticking to best practice codes on reporting suicide if they cannot even empathise with the suicidal?

Clown
I am not suggesting depressed people can be effectively stopped from harming themselves by being showered with sympathy on Facebook or Twitter; they'd probably be best helped by a trained mental health professional. But since so much communication already happens on social media, we need to remind ourselves that sometimes all people need is a little space and the right to say "I'm hurting and I need help," without being ridiculed in return.

The suicide of Robin Williams is particularly tragic because he was a man who made a living out of making people laugh. Just because someone is always cracking jokes, it doesn't mean they can see the funny side of their own life.

Is a clown really laughing or is his face a weeping one?

Please let us judge less, listen more. With open hearts.

Are journalists who tweet value for money?

So are journalists among the British workers losing businesses £1.38bn a year in wasted time through using Twitter and Facebook at work?

Not likely.

ABCe vs. Twitter stats
The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail's websites topped 30 million unique users for the first time in September, according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) figures.

In an attempt to establish a correlation between them and Twitter, digital marketing specialist Dan Thornton (@badgergravling)looked into which newspapers were mentioning Twitter the most and published the results in the microblogging news blog 140 Char. The Guardian and Telegraph topped the list while the Daily Mail was fifth, though Martin Belam from the Guardian’s website development team explained, if the use of the word ‘Twitter’ in “Follow us on...” was counted as one, stats may be skewed.

In the meantime online communications consultant Stephen Davies (@stedevies) updated a list of UK journalists with Twitter accounts, which can now be viewed on Listorious or divided by their corporate affiliation on PR Blogger.com

The top two slots by number of journalists in Davies' list are, again, occupied by the Telegraph (32) and the Guardian (31), followed by MSN UK (27). The Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday combined produced only four tweeting journalists.

The list of course may contain outdated data on journalists who no longer work for the paper and some, who didn’t identify their affiliation on their profiles, may have been missed.

Nevertheless, the possibility of some correlation between ABCe figures and the number of journalists from each paper who are active on social media sites cannot be dismissed. Every tweeted and retweeted link attracts new hits to their newspaper’s sites.

Even looking exclusively at accounts without a named journalist, UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers on Twitter at the beginning of October, a growth of 13.1% over the previous month, although 78% of the increase was down to one account – GuardianTech, as Malcolm Coles (also of TheMediaBlog.co.uk) reported on Online Journalism Blog.

Dual function
What about the Mail’s ABCe success then, when their journalists do not seem to be the ‘tweeting types’? Even taking into account the established readership of the tabloid, a significant amount of extra traffic is likely to be from users posting links to the Mail’s polls, or to their often highly controversial articles, such as Jan Moir’s recent column on Stephen Gately’s death.

Media people are using Twitter as an instrument for sharing and crowdsourcing, for networking and live-reporting. A journalist with a popular blog or social media presence can only be positive for the publication’s brand. If Twitter is a waste of work time, time has never been so well wasted. Furthermore, if a journalist is creating content while simultaneously publicising the content carrier, isn’t that doing two jobs for the price of one?

Time to rethink the value of (Twitter) time.

(This blog is also published in The Media Blog)

Why breasts on show miss the point of breast cancer campaigns

Another October, another breast cancer awareness month. Besides the ubiquitous pink ribbons and charity goodies on sale everywhere, I could not help but notice the number of bare breasts that started appearing everywhere in the name of cancer awareness.

Last month Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden stripped down to a pair of leopard print knickers and was photographed with only a pair of silver stilettos to cover her modesty. The London Evening Standard reported this was part of a charity campaign to raise funds for research into women's health issues.

This week some women on the social networking site Twitter started uploading photos of their cleavages, while tweeting the hashtags #BreastCancerAwareness and #BCAwareness to turn them into trending topics.

While a handful of good-humoured twitterers opted for publishing images of two watermelons, fried eggs, or man boobs, a few ladies replaced their normal avatars with images of their exposed bosoms – to the delight of the male Twitterati.

Below are some of the avatars available on the site as of today. Happy viewing:

Interestingly, all breasts on display were perfect, healthy-looking ones. Not a single mastectomised boob.

Put 'em away, love

It always floors me how women with no experience of breast cancer can think that exposing their bosoms in public can in any way promote awareness for a serious disease, which affects one in nine women in the UK.

The majority of women diagnosed with breast cancer will undergo surgery, either a lumpectomoy, removing the cancerous lump, with some of the healthy cells around it, or a mastectomy, in which they will lose one or both breasts.

Breast reconstruction is possible post-mastectomy, but as I mentioned in a previous blog, it is not a straightforward process, involving skin grafts and separate operations for adding nipples. And despite advances in plastic surgery, they will never look the same as real breasts.

As the mutilation affects one of the female body parts most closely associated with sexuality and femininity, losing part of a breast, a full one, or both breasts can have long-term devastating psychological effects on the patient.

I speak from experience – I am a breast cancer survivor myself. Although I only needed minimal surgery for an early stage cancer, my relationship with my body has never been the same since.

The gratuitous breast exposure samples on Twitter infuriated me because they do not take into consideration the feeling of those women who have lost their breasts, or whose breasts were deformed due to breast cancer treatment. It is not my business what part of her body a woman decides to expose on the Internet, but if their aim is to help breast cancer patients, I would borrow the words of a gay friend and say:

"Darling, put those tits away."

Publicity ...for whom?

Making one's avatar into one of a beautiful cleavage may excite men and raise...erm...alertness of a certain type, but it does zilch towards helping the cause of preventing breast cancer, nor of improving treatment and the patients' chances of survival.

At the risk of causing offence, I will go as far as to say it is a meaningless narcissistic act, which demeans the plight of breast cancer patients and trivialises the importance of a serious health issue.

If anyone thinks I am being extreme, I would invite them to go visit the breast care unit of a hospital and ask to be shown a mastectomised chest, speak to patients undergoing treatment whose hair, eyebrows and eyelashes have fallen out due to chemotherapy, patients experiencing acute menopause symptoms because they are on Tamoxifen. I challenge them to go round the ward in a low-cut top, flaunting perfect cleavage, when these women's are being butchered.

Breast cancer does need as much publicity as possible. The more aware women become, the sooner the cancer is diagnosed, the less radical the treatment will be, the higher the chances of survival. Taking one's kit off, especially in the case of celebrities, may help fill the fundraising kit-ty faster. But it must always be done with care and sensitivity, and never be used in a self-serving manner.

If you want to genuinely help fight breast cancer you can:

a) start a campaign yourself

b) help promote self-examination in women

c) make a donation to a breast cancer charity

d) participate in a fundraising event

e) volunteer your time to a charity

Below are some breast cancer charities in the UK worth supporting (click on links to find out more). I am personally hugely indebted to Breast Cancer Haven, so I have listed them first. Please feel free to leave me comments with further suggestions, and I will add them to the list

• Breast Cancer Haven
• Breakthrough Breast Cancer
• Breast Cancer Care
• Breast Cancer Campaign
• Walk the Walk
• Pink Ribbon Foundation
• Cancer Research UK
• Macmillan Cancer Support

Privacy: from Jade’s BB house to your house on Google

Falling stars
It has been a bizarre few last days with two celebrity deaths in only one week, sending the media into a frenzy. First the Richardson-Redgrave actress daughter, Natasha Richardson, dies tragically after a skiing accident which didn’t even produce a drop of blood or broken bones. At least not on the surface.

Natasha was only two years older than me – which makes her death even more shocking. You could be at the pinnacle of your happiness – or the pinnacle of a ski slope – but when the fall comes, it comes. Life is funny. I mean life is serious, but destiny plays tricks on us no one can possibly predict. The message is clear: live each day as if it were your last.

Reality TV queen
Then Jade.

The public demise of the very public life of the former reality TV star Jade Goodie, whose existence has come to our permanent attention since her appearance in the Celebrity Big Brother show in 2002.

I absolutely loathe Big Brother and have only ever watched snippets of it when I was flicking through channels. To incarcerate, albeit willingly, a group of random people in a house for a few weeks and follow them round the clock with a camera for the public’s viewing eyes is just too sickening for my taste. I don’t understand the fascination with it, but more people around me than they care to admit, not only watch the programme regularly but are also addicted to it.

I only know OF Jade because any glossy magazine I picked up at the waiting room of doctors’, dentists’ or hairdressers’ would have her on the cover or the latest gossip article about her life, not to mention the tabloids, who ought to thank her for helping them sell papers at a time when sales figures are plummeting in the print media.

I first started paying attention to the name Jade Goody when there was a big hoo-ha about her having made an allegedly racist comment to her BB housemate and Bollywood queen Shilpa Shetty. I remember reading about Jade having a nervous breakdown because the media was ruthless about persecuting her and shredding her to pieces. In the words of the wise Stephen Fry in a recent tweet: “Jade lived life under a magnifying glass. Magnifying glasses magnify (obviously) but they distort and they burn.”

Humble origins
It wasn’t until yesterday, reading The Metro on a bus, that I discovered what a rough childhood Jade had had. Father a heroin addict who died of an overdose and used to keep weapons stashed under his daughter’s cot. Daughter looking after mother and mother’s drug needs after separation from father until mother’s accident in which she loses the use of an arm, forcing Jade to become her round-the-clock carer. It is a lot for any child to handle. Knowing all that, can you blame her for seeking fame, or money, or both, the way she did, allowing the media to keep her private life in the spotlight even after she left the BB house and, who knows, also giving it licence to shorten it in some ways. Even her funeral is now public domain.

I am not blaming the press for Jade’s death or disease. The cancer was probably there from the beginning and she should have had her smear tests regularly before it got out of control. But I can’t help but view the pursuit of celebrity status through Big Brother as another way of selling your soul to the devil. It is so tempting, such a gold mine trap, leading to ever more lucrative marketing deals. Look at Jade: “exclusive” interviews, countless fitness videos, two books and two perfumes in the space of a few years. Then OK! magazine follows an exclusive coverage of her wedding with an exclusive obituary issue – or a “loving tribute” as they called it – while she is still alive. Where will it go next? Exclusive photos of Jade lying in her coffin?!

The anti-hero
Apparently hundreds of thousands of supporters are flocking to her Facebook online tribute pages, but some are also leaving abusive messages, which the administrators are busy deleting. It is understandable that a public figure like Jade should be equally loved and admired as she was hated and despised. She was not exactly the archetypal celebrity beauty, nor particularly good at geography (she famously thought Cambridge was in “East Angular” and asked if that was abroad), and the comments she allegedly made or didn’t make about India on Big Brother, indicate she may not have been that cultivated in her manners. And yet, finding out about her traumatic origins, watching a video of her wedding speech in which she thanks the male nurse who looked after her in her moments of intense pain, I was touched by the beauty of her soul showing through her pale skin.

She may have been gullible and naïve; you may not even have liked her or wanted her as your friend. But Jade Goody was no different from any of us – she was just an ordinary human following a most basic instinct: to survive as best she could.

A kind of Di
We crucified the woman for her greed, but we chose to ignore she had a deprived childhood and she was a mother to two young sons, to whom she wished to give the type of education her family could never have afforded for her. How can any of us judge her for the dignity-for-cash deal she struck when she agreed to being photographed in hospital looking her worst, getting married bald and with false eyelashes because she had lost her own, then snapped dying, and now dead and being buried, all for the sake of granting a future denied to her for her own children. Are privacy and dignity such a high price for a mother to pay, when one is about to die leaving small children to be cared for?

Any schadenfreude people felt about her plight is inhuman and unjustified. Just because she was Britain’s first reality TV star, it does not mean her suffering was not real but a soap opera put on camera for our entertainment. By any standards, 27 years is too short a life.

If fame was what Jade craved for, she got more than she deserved. God knows how long the media will go on to portray her as cover story. We must remember how reports on the supposedly mysterious circumstances of Lady Di’s death boosts circulation figures every time Al Fayed mentions a conspiracy theory. I must agree with Stephen Fry when he calls Jade “a kind of Princess Di from the wrong side of the tracks.”

Google, the new BB?
This week the media is also awash with news on the public’s accusations of Google for invasion of privacy through their Street View . It is the people who were photographed coming out of sex shops, being sick outside pubs or caught in a compromising position with a work colleague who are shouting the loudest. The majority is simply indignant that the photographs reveal the inside of their houses or their cars parked outside. Yet, we think nothing of logging onto Twitter to find out that Ashton Kutcher is lustfully watching wife Demi Moore iron his suit while wearing a bikini, and we log on to Facebook where it is revealed our colleague has a raging hangover because he/she had a rough night out. Next BBC Breaking News flashes on our screen to tell us a Labour MP was caught having a romp in the House of Commons.

We seem to alternate between enjoying being voyeurs and self-righteous critics of voyeurism. We are fascinated by details of other people’s diseases, sex lives and affairs and yet we do not want our house to appear in a photograph of our street. How contradictory is that?

Peeping tom
Social media, and I daresay the advent of Twitter in particular, has made it possible to “follow” what is going on every minute of every day of celebrities such as the popular twitterers Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross all the way to President Obama. Talk about six degrees of separation. Separation has long ceased to exist. And it certainly does not take six people any more in order to reach that elusive “stranger”. One search and one click later you are there – knowing what Barack had for breakfast, if only he decides to “tweet” about it.

It is freaky to think I can “follow” the American President or the Prime Minister of Britain or a TV celebrity anywhere in the world as if I were a cyber-stalker, and all of that lawfully and without shame. Following what other people are doing and thinking, sharing their holiday pictures in Twitterpic or in Flickr are now routine and perfectly normal. What do you mean privacy? And you don’t want your new couch to appear on Google just because you hadn’t twitted about it yet?

Moi moi moi...
The truth is we currently live in a “me-centred” society, and we are obsessed about publicising our private thoughts and lives as well as scrutinising those of others. Not everyone uses social networking sites for voyeuristic purposes of course, but when I was being trained as a journalist we were encouraged to make active use of Facebook and Twitter as a quick source of information and news. In other words: if the door is half open anyway, eavesdrop at will.

Many of those who are suing Google because they appear in Street View putting the rubbish out in a nightgown and their hair in curlers will not think twice about looking up on the Internet for more details about a celebrity’s life, or death. They may even have bought the Jade tribute issue of Ok!

We have become so auto-centric and callous that as long as what WE want to protect remains protected the rest does not seem to matter.

Every time I read about “publicist Max Clifford” having called Jade’s funeral a “Jade Goodie production” I cringe, and feel like wishing he were a woman with a cancer-ridden cervix. While poor Jade lies dead in a morgue, his coffers fatten up with each paper sold. Were Max to be caught by the tabloids on his way to a Nazi orgy party like his namesake in Formula One, he may not find the front cover story so entertaining.

The world goes on – without Natasha, without Jade. We will carry on scrutinising, googling, eavesdropping. Nothing changes overnight. In my heart I wish the two celebrities a long, deep sleep, away from the flash of the cameras and basking in the Light that embraces those lain to rest in peace.

R.I.P.