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.

News:Rewired -- valuable digital lessons for the book trade

Since its launch in January this year, I have been a 'serial' delegate at the News Rewired events (hashtag #newsrw  on Twitter) aimed at online journalists and anyone working in the digital field. Last December I went to event no.3, which was about building a brand and digital products to support and share content.

A link-by-link coverage can be found here, including reactions from delegates, and video footage of all sessions taken by the BBC College of Journalism are now available on YouTube.

To avoid repeating what dozens of other delegates have already blogged about in the journalism context, I will focus this post on what I learned at News:Rewired form the point of view of a publishing professional.

Doherty and C Words
Anthony Thornton , group digital editor at IPC Meda, talked about building a community, although 'building' sounds like a misnomer, since he says communities do not need to be built – they are out there already on the Internet, or they are people who just need to be connected and gathered into a community.

And how?

According to Thornton, there are four Cs to be followed:

• Connection - go out and link out to people
• Conversation - engage in a conversation, don't just host a forum
• Consultation - ask what people are thinking about something
• Collaboration - get people to help you with what you have built

He illustrated with his own success story of how his 2006 book on Pete Doherty's band, The Libertines Bound Together (Little Brown), ended up in eigth place in the coveted Sunday Times' Top 10 bestsellers' list, despite his publisher's naught marketing spend.

Thornton set up a page to promote the book on MySpace [today it would probably have been on Facebook] (Connection), ran tailored competitions for the band's fans, formed and interacted with a community of 1700 followers (Conversation).

He then persuaded his editor to allow readers to decide the book's cover design (Consultation); even the book's appendix was fact-checked by a number of key fans and 'influencers', who having been involved themselves, recommended it to others (Collaboration).

Going native
Thornton's success could have been partly down to the fact that The Libertines' fans already had a strong active online presence; even so I was delighted to hear how a little creativity on a non-existent budget went such a a long way in boosting the sales of a book.

As a digital enthusiast, I am surprised we do not hear more stories like this on a daily basis. After all...

(Image borrowed from James Lowery's presentation at News:Rewired on search optimisation for B2B and specialist media.)

Whether they have even heard of e-books or not, there is no denying consumers are spending more and more time online and not only through computers. In the age of Internet and information overload, attention spans are known to be shorter, reading habits hugely fragmented. But even those who don't have time to read books or newspapers, do find time to surf the Net on the go on their smartphones and iPads.

In order to get the attention of those time-poor but digitally savvy readers, and retain their custom, publishers should be learning to speak a language they can relate to, foreign as it may seem.

Forget discussions on iPad apps versus e-readers, debates about Google, Amazon and the agency model. They make great topics for forums and conferences for publishing types, but the average reader is hardly likely to be interested in what pricing issues are making book people hot under the collar. What readers seek, what all consumers seek, is added value for money – not only BOGOFs.

Social media sells brands
A valuable message I keep hearing at News:Rewired was that whatever the product, online exposure do help sell, and with minimum to naught PR cost involved.

A recent article in The Economist about public relations explained that, as mainstream media start to play less of a central role as the traditional gatekeepers of news, the value of their advertising slots also decrease for the PR man.

It is interesting that Nike, which, like Apple, is known as a brand so strong that it came to represent a certain type of lifestyle, uses both paid ads in mainstream media as well as Facebook, where, when I last looked, 3.5 million people had "liked" its page.

Anne Gregory, professor of public relations at Leeds Metropolitan University, however, explains that few PR firms run social-media-only campaigns. She told the Economist:

"All that is happening is that social-media elements are being added to traditional marketing plans."

So, a bit of the old, a bit of the new.

Nothing prevents publishers from taking a leaf out of Nike's book and maximising returns through free PR on social media outlets, building and managing an online community of 'likers' and 'followers'. There is of course the good old blogosphere, micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, plus a myriad of other social networking sites, but every publisher also has a website that serves as a portal to its products.

The questions that remain are: is that portal open wide enough and how many visitors are actually coming back?

Retention vs. acquisition

There are far worse things than paywalls to stop people from wanting to access what you have to show them, and that is a site which is closed to the outside world, a site that does not engage, invite participation or acknowledge users as a member of the community.

Joanna Geary, keynote speaker at News:Rewired, was inspirational in confirming the old sales motto that "the customer is king". Geary is communities editor at The Times, which is currently under a paid-for subscription model. From her days as a business journalist at The Birmingham Post, she was uncomfortable with the fact that an article's only measure of success was whether your editor was pleased with it. There was something missing: the reader.

Her new business strategy at The Times was based on engaging and building 'relationships' with the reader, something journalists are not accustomed to. Amassing numbers of what she calls 'eyeballs', or unique visitors to the site, for the sake of the advertisers, is less important than identifying and retaining those repeat customers/readers with a tribal sense of loyalty, she says.

The Times Online may have gone behind a paywall but Geary says there is now stronger loyalty among their regular readers, who keep traffic to the site stable. They feel they own and belong to the site they have to paid to get into, so they keep coming back. The site has become a place where community members meet to have grown-up conversations with each other. That makes sense.

You can see the video footage of Jo Geary' talk below, courtesy of the BBC College of Journalism.

Enhanced interacti..on
If building and servicing your community can keep readers loyal to a newspaper, why should it not be equally effective in the publishing industry? Imagine a book club type of space, where fans of an author could feed back impressions, write their own reviews, exchange recommendations on what to read next.

What if every book you bought came with a unique code that allowed you entry into such literary chat rooms? Similar fan sites may already exist for certain authors or product lines, but what about transforming entire pages within publishers' websites into community pages, where a staff member(s) in a sales/marketing+creative/editorial combination role could regularly talk with, not 'at', its public? Would it not make commissioning jobs easier, sell more books, create more buzz, keep readers feeling they are part of the tribe, and ultimately, loyal to the publisher's brand?

The really good news for cash-strapped publishing houses is that none of these possibilities require more than a good web developer and a personable community manager.

Conclusions

• Passive content creation and static, one-way PR are a thing of the past. Publishers of content, be it facts or fiction, ought to take heed and start re-evaluating their roles. Why shouldn't curated information be part of the creative process? 
• While UK publishers are obsessing about the future of digital books en masse, not enough are actively seeking to understand the 'lingo' the future consumers of digital products speak. What better way of doing that than reaching out for your own niche community in the online world?
• It is not what you sell but 'how' you sell it that will give you an edge in the future.

The News Rewired event may have been about digital tools and processes, but, as Neil Perkin, founder of digital and media consultancy Only Dead Fish, wisely said, we should not forget that ultimately...

 "It's not about the technology; it's about the people." 

A good place to start.

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.