6 PR lessons from clinical depression (or "How mental illness made me a better communicator")

"The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality."

This very telling quote is by author, journalist and mental health advocate Andrew Solomon, from his deeply moving TED lecture entitled Depression: The Secret We Share. It was midsummer of this year when I first heard the lecture, and at the time I was in the midst of the deepest, most serious bout of depression I have ever experienced. For whatever reason, Solomon's lecture struck a chord in me like nothing I'd yet heard on the subject of depression, and for a few days I listened to it over and over, latching myself onto the man's pristine prose and light-hearted pathos as though it were a life raft. It felt like a roadmap out of my malaise.

Here is the video. I highly recommend it - whether you're depressed or not.

In May of this year I announced to the world, through this very blog no less, that I was "going it alone" as an independent PR contractor. It had been tumultuous and stressful spring, but one from out of which seem to spring unexpected opportunities, and feeling adventurous at the time I embraced them. And for the first month of my voyage into the seas of freelance work, all seemed to go well. It didn't last.

The other thing that happened to me at around the same time I left my old job at the airport is that my doctor recommended that I try going off my anti-anxiety medications. I had been prescribed Duloxetine about two years previous during a time of similarly high stress, and I had been taking it religiously ever since in what had ended up being two years of tremendous professional growth and productivity. Why I thought this was a good idea at this turning point in my professional life I still can figure out, but I took my doctor's advice. This, it turned out, was a colossal mistake.

By the end of May there were plenty of outward signs that my overall mental state had deteriorated. It began with seemingly constant memory lapses, lapses that I simply put down to the stress of client-hunting and financial uncertainty. But by the end of June things had deteriorated to such an extent that I could no longer be blind to what was going on. Work assignments that would have been a breeze months before became epic struggles. All I wanted to do was sleep and hide from the world. My emotional outbursts became more and more extreme. My only moments of reprieve were swimming, running and walks with the dogs in the river valley.

Amazingly enough in retrospect, it wasn't until the first few weeks of July that I came face to face with the true depth of my depression, and when, like Andrew Solomon in his personal account in his book The Noonday Demon, I found himself completely paralyzed - and reached out to my father for help. This was the start of a long climb out of the abyss I had found myself. I found myself a new doctor and I began once again with the medications and the therapy, realizing only then that I would probably have to be on some sort of mood stabilizer for the rest of my life.

I also returned to the job market, figuring that given everything I had been through I was better off in a permanent position with good medical benefits (namely a plan that offered psychological services) and a paycheque I could count on every other week. After several months of job-hunting I figured I would have to take the next semi-decent thing on offer and then hold tight until I found something better. Instead, I landed in a fantastic position that thus far (it's only been three weeks mind you) appeals to me more than any job I've had up to now.

I'm back. A little shaken up still, but I'm back. The vitality I so sorely lacked this summer is back in full force. I'm writing again, back in classes (finishing the PR department I had to put the kibosh on in my previous job due to the onerous commute), involved in the spoken word/poetry scene and in far more of a mood to socialize than I've been in a long time. But my climb out from the abyss this summer has also meant mending relationships strained by my moods. The only way truly to break free from my summer of hurt was to be open and frank about what I had gone through, and in doing so fire a broadside at the taboo that still prevent so many of us about talking frankly about depression.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality. And as a professional writer and communicator, a key component of that vitality is being open about my experience, with the hopes that it might help others who have dealt with - or may currently be dealing with - similar struggles. And in the last few months, in my numerous conversations with friends and colleagues, I've come to several conclusions, namely:

1. Most of the really smart people I know feel like they're barely holding it together much of the time.
2. The communications profession is particularly rife with mood disorders, probably through a combination of the stress that comes with the job and the emotionally sensitive nature of the type of people generally drawn to the profession.
3. People are generally forgiving when it comes to this sort of thing. And if they're not, chances are they're not people you want in your life anyway. In other words, there's nothing like a serious bout of depression to tell you who your real friends are.
4. We all medicate. Be it uppers, downers, booze, weed, obsessive exercise, RPG games, work, reality TV, porn, Pinterest - we're all on drugs of one form or another.

But enough about me. What can we, as public relations practitioners, take away from our struggles on the fringes of mental health so as to make the world a better place, and be better at our jobs. Because ever since returning to the work world with a refreshed mind, body and soul, I've honestly felt like I'm better at my job than I was before. Could it be that going through what I went through, as unpleasant as it was (and something I wouldn't wish on anybody), was one of those "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" things? I've never been a fan of this cliché, but my bad run of mental health made me, if not stronger, certainly more aware and mentally agile.

So what were my 'educational takeaways' from this experience? Here's my attempt at distilling them into words. I'll probably have more to add later, but here's what comes to mind now, for what it's worth.

1. The truth lies.

Any experienced public relations person will tell you that "telling the truth" is only the start of your ethical obligations in the profession. Being honest and transparent is, of course, of vital importance and a baseline requirement of any credible organization, but blurting out truths without framing them in a manner that protects you and your organization is potentially as injurious as lying. Some might interpret this as tacit dishonesty of a sort, but a comparable example would be to rephrase the sentence "We're all going to die" (an indisputable truth) with "We only live ones, so let's make the most of it." Is this a spin? Perhaps, but it's one that we're all better off with.

Anybody who has ever battled clinical depression will tell you that, when you're in the throes of it, you feel as though a veil has been lifted from you, thereby forcing you to stare unflinchingly at the dark and horrible truths of the world - and of you yourself specifically. And while some of the statements that a depressed person habitually makes are easily refutable (i.e. "Nobody loves me."), others are less easy to fend off, such as "What, concretely speaking, is the point of it all? I'm a mid-level word-monkey who's out of a job - what the hell am I contributing to the well-being of the world?"

This of course, on a basic level, is true, but at the time it's the equivalent of a company telling its shareholders that "Well, in the fullness of time the sun is going to swell to the size of a supergiant and swallow the four innermost planets of the solar system, incinerating the earth and everyone on it, before going supernova, so what, concretely speaking, is the point of expanding into the European market?" This of course is a caricature, but if nothing else it's made me all the more sensitive to the wording of both internal and external communiqués. The truth lies - this is one of the most impactful statements in Andrew Solomon's TED talk, and one that has stuck with me ever since.

2. SWOT analyses are awesome.

Source: bizbingo.blogspot.com

Anybody with any training in public relations, or has spent enough time in the profession, has at one point or another sat down to do one of these. For those of you unfamiliar with the practice, read my early post entitled 'If Fictional Characters Conducted SWOT Analyses'. And for those of you who are well versed in them, you may be interested to know that the process is not only a crucial step in writing a communications plan, but also a useful process for bushwhacking your way out of a deep depressive episode.

Why a SWOT analysis? Simply put, it helps you filter out all the noise that clouds your judgment and keeps you paralyzed while at the same time giving you the 'comforting' base of cold, hard facts devoid of the cloying platitudes of The Secret-style positive affirmations. In other words, it appeals to the emotionally calloused mind of the depressed individual while at the same time offering a way out, and by way of the 'Weaknesses' and 'Threats' boxes you're neither invalidating nor giving undue credence to what the toxic voices in your head are saying. Because if you simply try to wallpaper over those voices with sanctimonious clichés, in my experience you just end up strengthening their resolve.

3. Aw hell, why not write yourself a whole goddamn communications plan?

I didn't actually do this, but I nearly did. I certainly wrote myself elements of one - key messages about myself and all. And all in all, I think this was more helpful than most of the self-help books I picked up and subsequently tossed aside. After a few weeks back on my medications, I felt like I once again had the energy to get up and do something useful towards getting my life and career back on track, and feeling like I was completely out of touch with my profession, the process served as a useful refresher. It also felt more real, like my own personal change management process. In other words, I was determined to sound good until we feel good - or at least have the right messages.

4. Writing will never let you down.

Once it became apparent to me that I was in the midst of a severe depressive episode, one of the first things I did was disentangle myself from as many commitments as a reasonably could. I quit a summer class. I resigned from a board I was heavily involved in at the time. I simply felt I couldn't fulfill the responsibilities I had taken on, and admitting this fact to myself was one of the first steps in acknowledging that what I was dealing with was an illness - not simply a case of head-up-ass syndrome. Like a drug addict entering treatment, it was an acknowledgement of my own weakness and vulnerability - the first step on any road to recovery.

But at the same time as I was pulling back from my numerous extracurricular activities, I was thoroughly burying myself in my writing - the one place, it seemed, that my brain was still working. I wrote poetry. I revived a novel project I had long abandoned. And I took on new freelance writing projects, projects I knew I could still do a bang-up job on in spite of my fragile state of mind - the type of work I've been doing for ten years now and can virtually do in my sleep. And in my writing work I found a semblance of sanity, and rediscovered my love of words and communication. And from that I started to rebuild my professional life.

In actual fact, I managed to get quite a lot of work done during the summer, in spite of it all. Much of it I feel was on some sort of automatic pilot, and the fact that I was able to keep moving, albeit slowly, through this morass proved, in the end, to be a source of pride. After all, I could scarcely have been able to do that it was truly sucked at my job. Whether you're deeply depressed or at the peak of mental fitness, write your guts out! I have no doubt that Emily Dickinson would have made a fine PR professional had she had access to the types of treatment that exist today.

5. Never lose faith in your network.

Probably the hardest thing about coming out of my midsummer depression, apart from the job hunt, was the fear I had that my depression had made a mess of my own personal and professional social life. After all, PR people, even the most introverted among us, are at heart social animals whose profession is centred on interpersonal connections and imparting meaning between people. And with Edmonton's marketing and communications community being pretty small and close-knit, I found myself re-entering the workforce with a profound fear that my sudden disappearance from the scene and my failed attempt at going independent would leave me scarlet-lettered in the profession.

All this turned out to be classic paranoia. One of the worst aspects of depression is that it's an inherently selfish and self-centred condition that causes one to spend an inordinate amount of time fixated on oneself and one's flaws (real and imagined), which to all around you is practically as bad as being a narcissist who is constantly flaunting their positive attributes. In other words, unless your mental state has caused you to behave in a truly egregious matter, chances are you're still regarded in the same light as you were before things began falling apart. To put it bluntly, people don't really pay that much attention to you most of the time, unless you're really out there screwing things up.

Sure enough, once I had built up the courage to start reconnecting again, it was as though nothing had happened. Moreover, for those with whom I did divulge what I had been through during the summer, the reaction was universally sympathetic, usually followed either by a similar personal account or accounts of people they've known. This is, after all, a line of work full of people who 'feel all the feels', people generally endowed with high levels of emotional intelligence, and as safe a crowd as any for talking frankly about mental illness. That and my poetry circle, of course.

A good friend and mentor of mine told me early on that whatever happens in this line of work, "The network will provide." And in my own struggles this year I've really come to realize how prescient this remark was. The network did provide, and I am now back on my feet, feeling stronger than ever.

6. We need to be talking about this stuff.

As a privileged, educated and well-connected urban professional living in a progressive city and working in a profession dedicated to communicating truth in an emotionally nuanced way, I, if anyone, should feel comfortable talking frankly about ups and downs in my own mental health. And yet I don't. Not really. Even though I live in a country where I enjoy legal protections from discrimination due to mental health, the stigma persists. Even as I write this blog post, the hesitant Piglet archetype lurking in the back of my mind is urging me not to press the 'publish' button. "You don't know what this is going to do to your reputation!" it chirps. "Have you really thought this through?"

My answer to this is a definitive yes. I have thought this through. This is a post I've been wanting to write for months now, and it's only been my schedule and my cognizance of the persistent taboo around discussions of mental health that have kept me from doing so. But I truly believe that as professional communicators, we have a duty to talk frankly about depression and other mental health issues (bipolarity, BPD, OCD and so on). It is estimated that one out of five of Canadians will personally experience mental illness in their lifetime. That means that not only one out of five of our fellow PR professionals will go through it, but that a full 20% of our external and internal publics will. That's a hell of a lot of people!

I am fortunate that I now work for an organization that not only provides a stellar health plan for its employees that includes mental health care, but one that also 'walks the talk' through active promotion of health and wellness (including mental health) to its staff and is also on the frontline in training community support workers to help the most vulnerable people in this province - and help empower them economically. Awareness of mental illness continues to increase in our society, and it is heartening to see more and more employers taking the problem seriously. But at the same time, the taboo around disclosing such conditions to anyone other than a clinical psychologist behind a closed door persists, and it is up to people like us to 'push the needle' big-time on this issue.

And like any paradigm shift, it seems to me that it needs to start with us, among ourselves as a professional community. I know for a fact that I'm far from the only professional communicator who has struggled with clinical depression or worse. We are a sensitive, highly-strung bunch as a profession with a penchant towards workaholism, insufficient sleep and one or two extra glasses of wine at the end of a long event that we perhaps don't need. And a lot of us are prone to an acute sense of isolation (especially those of us who specialize in writing) that creates the perfect breeding ground for all manner of mental malaise. We talk a good talk, but lots of us are kind of a mess deep down.

My challenge to you all is this: let's keep it real when it comes to depression. Let's actively engage in conversation about it, whether that means being frank about our own struggles or acknowledging those of others - and prioritizing the promotion of mental health and wellbeing in our work. As a person who has been through a nasty spell of it and come out the other end, I'm extraordinarily thankful to my family, friends and colleagues who have stood by me and helped me put my life back together. And I'm also more determined than ever than ever to use my position to help make a difference - and that has to start telling my own story.

A number of years ago a campaign entitled 1,000 Conversations, spearheaded by Native Counselling Services of Alberta (through its National Day of Healing and Reconciliation event-planning department), set out to trigger a nationwide wave of conversations about truth and reconciliation in relation to past injustices committed on Canadian soil - primarily the Indian Residential School System but also the internment of Japanese Canadians and other skeletons in Canada's closet. Among the project's greatest champions were CBC radio host Shelagh Rogers (who this May was appointed chancellor of the University of Victoria), a woman who in recent years has gone public about her own struggles with depression - which she has likened to "sliding into caves of emptiness." 

To my mind we need something akin to the 1,000 Conversations campaign for sufferers of depression and the like - a consciousness-raising campaign aimed at ending the stigma once and for all. And if anybody's going to spearhead something like this, it's people like us PR folks. Not that I'm necessarily offering myself up for the job. After all I've got a new job to focus on and a school program to finish - not to mention a poor, neglected blog to revive. Down the road, who knows? But for the time being, I float the idea out there for all it's worth.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and we communicators are in the vitality business. The news we communicate isn't always good news and we're certainly not in the business of spinning bad news as good. But it is our job to empower our publics, internal and external alike, with calls to action and offer solutions. And the more we can collectively chip away at the taboo surrounding depression and other forms of mental illness, the more empowered we'll all be in our efforts to elucidate and punch through the noise.

(Special thanks to Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series for his timely visual appearances in this text. Even though I can't lay claim to a brain the size of a planet, I still feel your pain!)

(Poème) Celui qui me poursuit

Celui qui me poursuit

s'agit de ma maladie

et dès minuit

il me prend

avec toute sa force

et m'écorche de mon écorce

On connait bien ce noirceur

à travers la poésie

par les funèbres d'Emily

et les cadavres dans mon lit

ce même chien noir me poursuit

dans la brume implacable, tout étourdi

Elle m'entour

et puis je cours et je cours

je fuit le jour

arraché de mon amour

à qui je pense à chaque jour

et maintenant c'est à mon tour

de monter l'ascenseur à l'entrée du four

les flammes qui lèchent à ma peau

et murmurent

on t'attendait ici depuis des jours

Hier soir je me suis aperçu

parmi mes reveries

une somnolence replète de violence

étourdi et sans abri

dentelles et ficelles compriment mes ailes

débile et siphoné

ensorcelé et noyé

consciemment abruti

mais incapable de m'en sortir

Mais un matin

en attendant Godot

je me suis trouvé

une paire de ciseaux

et en me libérant de mes bandeaux

j'ai pu saluer aux oiseaux

et ensemble nous vaincrons

et survivrons a savourer la prochaine saison.

(Poem) King of the Capsules

I love my pills

They have cool names

Let me introduce you

This is Duloxetine; he’s a French nobleman

Who slays werewolves between romantic conquests

Here’s Cymbalta, a new dance craze

Born in the basement dives of Buenos Aires

From a generation cut down by financial ruin

And reborn in fiery, fitful embrace

And then there’s Zoloft – the planet beyond the wormhole

Where all my socks and flash drives go

They’ve built a civilization over there

And lead happy lives in loving pairs.

But on this side of the event horizon

My little multicoloured space capsules

Keep me warm and safe from the dark void outside

And allow me to breathe

They stand sentinel before me every morning

My valiant and trusted pawns

Sure, they only move one square at a time

But always forward, never retreating

All the while dispatching the diagonizing demons

That attack at will, bursting through fences

Where once I stood with no defences.

I love my pills

They’re my mini time capsules

Like the one we buried at my old high school

Treasure troves of happy memories

Of the sweetness of rain coast sunshine

Of youthful kisses in treetops

Of beach fires, bong hits and starry canopies

All that in powder perfection, sealed in coloured shells

That melt on my tongue and set me free

Not with happiness, but with real vitality.

I’m the king of the capsules

My wish is their command

They salute me at the front line

As we brave uncharted land.

How much social media is too much?

Source: reconnections.net

Last week I posted a Facebook status in which I confessed to having a "social media problem." Which is a bit of an exaggeration, but not wholly untrue. I do have interests other than social media, including some which I consciously engage in on my own without any digital engagement with the outside world. Nevertheless, both my professional and social lives float on a sea of digital communication, and as anyone who reads this blog is doubtless aware, I have a deep abiding interest in social media and its influence on culture, human communication and psychology, as well as a knee-jerk desire to be 'ahead of the curve' with the stuff. In other words, I'm capable of dispensing with it but it seems I have to work at it.

Those of you familiar with my blog and what I do for a living might be surprised to find out I was not an early adopter of social media. I didn't even join Facebook until 2010, having resisted the dreaded F-word for many years. For the longest time I dismissed social media as communication for people too lazy to write an email or pick up the phone, as well as a sordid incubator for bad writing. I finally broke down, and in a sort of online Damascene conversion I took up social media with a vengeance. Today I'm subscribed to no less than nine social media platforms, and (to varying degrees) manage four Twitter accounts and three Facebook pages. In all, 14 accounts.

When I say I'm subscribed to nine different platforms, that's not to say I use them all on a regular basis. In fact some I simply signed up with to test-drive them, including for my post last week on new social media trends to watch for. But even at that it's a hell of a lot of digital media. (Come to think of it I should probably unsubscribe to some of this stuff, as it's still my name floating out there in cyberspace.) And much of the time I find that when I open my laptop and click on the browser, I instinctively go straight for Twitter or Facebook rather than something interesting to read, and thanks to the smartphone, it's easy to get into the habit of obsessively tapping on those SM apps. They're just so....there!

So how much social media is too much? There's really no straightforward answer to this. Evidently if you're regularly up until 4:30 in the morning arguing on Facebook over an obscure grammar point or 1980s film quotes, or regularly spending six consecutive hours on Twitter in any context other than post-tsunami crisis communications, you might have a social media problem. Most of us don't take it to such extremes, but at the same time it's worth taking the following realities to heart:

1) Unless you're on the clock, you don't have to be on social media.

A love of social media coupled with a gung-ho disposition and a lack of time management is a surefire recipe for burnout. Social media monitoring, especially for a major company or organization, is really a 24-7 job, which means that no single human being could ever possibly be expected to do it single-handedly. If your organization doesn't have the money or the inclination to hire more than one person to do the job, that's not your problem. And if your day job is social media coordinator, it's all the more important that your day include down time from the stuff.

2) It's OK to quit a tool that isn't working for you.

All too many SM nuts seem to take the mountaineer's adage "Because it's there" to heart when it comes to social media. But unlike Everest and Annapurna, social media is a capricious, constantly shifting landscape with only a nebulous concept of 'there'. When it comes to Pheed, Path or whatever other Flayvr of the month, by all means visit Base Camp but if the climb is proving more arduous than beneficial, nobody cares if you head back to Kathmandu.

3) Being an 'early adopter' isn't itself an accomplishment.

Many of us (myself included) have succumbed to the (imagined) pressure to be an early adopter of social media. And while there's nothing wrong with the desire to be ahead of the curve with digital innovations, not all such innovations are worth taking on board with full aplomb. In fact some are downright bad. Again, see Point #2 about it being OK to just visit and then say, "Meh, not for me."

4) It's OK to be an expert.

In his book The Cult of the Amateur, author and tech entrepreneur Andrew Keen upbraids Web 2.0 for undermining the authority of learned experts and the work of professionals by creating a culture of dilettantism. While I have my disagreements with his assertions, it is true that our current obsession with being on trend with every single online innovation is anathema to developing expertise. In a recent social media conference I attended, one SM 'guru' urged his audience to experiment, asserting "There's no shame in being a rookie." I agree, but I also believe there's a tremendous amount to be gained from being an expert at something, and this requires some focus.

5) It's OK to take a break from social media and blogging.

In February of this year I reached the end of my tether. I quit blogging for a couple of months and reduced my non-work-related social media output. And I'm glad I did. I'm now back at it, but without putting pressure on myself to produce X number of blog posts every month and whatnot. If for no other reason, social media without content to communicate is a complete waste of time (yours and other people's), and we all have a finite amount of content to disseminate before we need to step back and go into recharge mode, be that reading, making music or walking through the woods deep in thought. In the end you're only competing with yourself, so the best result you can ever expect is a draw.

6) Let your elves do their share of the work.

About a year ago I wrote a post on 'digital media rules as told by children's fables'. In this I referenced the tale of the poor shoemaker and the elves as an example of taking successful advantage of your networks, thereby relieving your own social media monitoring burden. If you've invested enough time building up your SM presence, it's hardly going to collapse in ruin if you take a week-long (or even a month-long) sabbatical. And if a question in left unanswered on a thread on your timeline, if you've got enough people you routinely engage with, someone else will fill in the blanks if you decide to call it a night.

On that note, I'm taking the rest of today off.

On Bullying and Misogyny (In Memory of Amanda Todd)

The suicide of bullied Metro Vancouver teen Amanda Todd has generated yet another media frenzy over the epidemic of cyberbullying. In the case of Amanda, the 15-year-old from Port Coquitlam left behind a chilling YouTube PSA in which she recounts how her tormentors forced her to switch schools on multiple occasions (which did nothing to remedy the situation) and ultimately drove her to drugs, alcohol, seclusion and self-harming before ending it all. For those of you who haven't seen the video, you owe it to yourselves to see it.

The media's reaction to Amanda Todd's death has been depressingly predictable: outrage of the "How could this possibly happen?" followed by the predictable cacophony of proposed solutions to the epidemic of cyberbullying. As always, some called for increased policing of the web, others for greater bullying awareness campaigns in the school system. Some blamed parents and teachers for not doing more to stop it. Others callously opined that bullying is simply part of the natural order of things and that she got what she deserved. And as always, much of the focus remained on the need for teens to be careful while online lest they make themselves vulnerable to online tormentors.

The really depressing part, of course, is that Amanda Todd will soon be largely forgotten - apart of course from her grieving family and friends, who will never forget. And the frenzy of cyberbullying will quickly subside...until the next Amanda Todd pulls the plug on his or her life and the process begins again. And then of course there are the victims whose names and faces never make the pages of the National Post. Canada's youth suicide rate remains troublingly high. And while the rate is still higher for boys than for girls, the suicide rate for girls has jumped over the past few decades, while the rate for boys has decreased. There are thousands of Amandas out there. And far too many will leave this world unknown, with no YouTube account of their torment.

There can be no denying that the Internet, and social media in particular, has made the problem of adolescent bullying more insidious and difficult to combat. Not only does it allow perpetrators to remain anonymous, it also provides them with a far wider dominion over their victims. When I was a junior high schooler in the early 1990s, a change of school was generally a surefire tactic for curtailing bullying; while one still had to content with being friendless at a new school, at the very least it meant an escape from the devils of the old school. For modern-day teens like Amanda, changing schools offers no such escape. The web has even allowed her tormentors to target the girl's online memorials. Some sort of 21st century equivalent to the Greek Defixiones might be in order.

But while the 'cyber' element has made the problem of bullying scarier and more complicated, the root of the problem remains the same. Bullying is - and always has been - a societal means for maintaining a hierarchical status quo by punishing those who dare to overstep their bounds. It's also a means for placating the 'masses' with the occasional human sacrifice, playing into the dark side to our human nature. (Think Apocalypto in the schoolyard.) It's the 'mild' first-world tip of a very large and sinister iceberg that in other parts of the world manifests itself in the public lynching of gays and the spraying of schoolgirls with battery acid for having the audacity to seek out an education. And as always, those who fall outside of the default group (women, members of cultural, racial or sexual minorities, social misfits etc.) who bear the brunt of it.

"She flashed, felt repercussions, her own fault."

- Anonymous online commenter

The bullying of young girls like Amanda Todd is especially troubling inasmuch as it highlights the yawning gap between our society's post-feminist discourse and notions of equality and the harsh underbelly of misogyny that continues to contaminate our social relations. Granted, the Amanda Todds of the western world are no longer liable to be burned at the stake (as they might have been in Europe 500 years ago) or stoned to death (as she might well have been in modern-day Afghanistan or Somalia), but the horrible bullying to which she was subjected bears the same malevolent misogynist streak that motivated - and continues to motivate - such atrocities. The Amanda Todd story exemplifies the degree to which a great many men (and sadly many women) still view women within the passive virgin-whore dichotomy and consider those who lose their footing on that tightrope to be deserving of cruel censure.

So what are we to do about it? Sadly, there are no obvious cures. My own proposed radical solution for gender equality is not one that I'm expecting anybody to embrace anytime soon, namely a 50-year moratorium on male voting. Under such an edict, men would still be eligible to run for office but would have to be answerable to a female-only electorate (in a similar fashion to how chiefs and warlords within the Iroquois Confederacy were answerable to a council of women). A 50-year period would be long enough to produce profound change but short enough to remain within people's historical memory, a time period similar in length to the beginning and end of the Cold War, the rise of the Asian Tigers and the unfolding of the New Europe. And suffice it to say, 50 years of female rule would pale in comparison to 4,000 nearly uninterrupted years of patriarchy, but then again the goal is equality, not supremacy.

Getting back to the problem of cyberbullying, it bothers me that the onus is always placed on the victims to protect themselves against abusers while the abusers, and the complicit onlookers, invariably escape unpunished. While it is of course important for children and adolescents to be taught how to protect themselves online, it's about time more altruistic IT-savvy people stepped up to the plate and confronted this online terrorists head on. I was recently inspired by a story in the Guardian by Irish journalist Leo Traynor, in which he recounted his own tale of online abuse and how he enlisted a hacker colleague of his to track down his abuser - who turned out to be the son of a colleague with a head full of bad wiring. We need a Hackers Without Borders-type organization, a crack squad of angry nerds (who you would think would be natural allies in in this cause) to scare the crap out of would-be online tormentors.

At the same time, we need a 'coming out' campaign for former bullies seeking to make amends. In the aftermath of Amanda Todd's suicide, many commentors have come forward with their own stories of bullying and harrassment. For any sort of restorative justice to occur, those who are saddled with the burden of having been bullies or passive bystanders need to make themselves known, ask for forgiveness and then take part in combatting the problem. Just as the onus of gender equality cannot exclusively be placed on the backs of women, I don't see how anti-bullying campaign are to make any headway without the involvement of former perpetrators. At least one bully did just this in the aftermath of Amanda Todd's suicide. A good start, but far more of this is needed.

We should all be mad as hell about this - and about our society's ongoing contempt for women and girls who fail to meet mainstream culture's unspoken but understood expectations to be sexy-but-not-sexual, compliant to patriarchal strictures and vigilant in defence of their own purity. And for the sake of online freedom (and not ruining it for everybody else), we need to get tough on cyberbullies. Censoring the Internet will not curb bullying anymore than veiling and secluding women reducing instances of sexual assault, as conservatives in the Islamic world are fond of arguing. As a society we are capable of being better than this, but we won't get there without taking a long, hard look at the poisonous attitudes that persist within our supposedly progressive culture.

And for the love of god, please stop blaming social media for this! Yes, SM is a double-edged sword that makes the issue of bullying more complex, but it's not the crux of the problem. And besides, were it not for social media, none of us would be talking about Amanda Todd right now, as her excruciatingly eloquent YouTube statement could never have been made and disseminated around the world in the first place. Social media is not to blame for this. Misogyny and its never ending capacity to inflict unnecessary human misery is to blame.

In the meantime, my heart goes out to the girls family and friends, for what it's worth. Needless to say no words could ever even begin to take away the hurt.

Facebook: Helping People Feel Inadequate Since 2004

I like having Facebook in my life - for the most part. It's a useful tool for a lot of things and I would say that, on the whole, my life is better with it than without it. Nevertheless, there are days where I'm forced to wonder if Zuckerberg and Co. are deliberately trying to undermine humanity's sense of self-worth.
In particular, I wonder sometimes if Facebook app designers specifically set out to find new and ingenious ways to make us feel inadequate.

Consider, if you will, the 'My Friends Map' app. For those of you who don't know it, this is an app that allows you to produce a map of where all your Facebook friends live, which you're expected to then post to your wall. For the sake of reference, here's what mine came out looking like:



This is meant as an example, not to make me look cool. Trust me, the 'international-ness' of my friends is the least interesting thing about me.

As a geography geek, I can appreciate this sort of thing, and it's certainly an interesting visualization. Nevertheless, it bothers me that the intended purpose of this app is to publish such maps on your wall to show off to your friends not only how many friends you have but also how international your group of friends. It's easy to say "Who frickin' cares if Jessica has three friends in Istanbul and five dots in what looks like Belarus?", but in the end we all care how we look to our friends - and apps like this are pretty much guaranteed to make us feel less cool, less sophisticated, less worldly and, well, simply less than.

(Note: this tool could have potential unintended consequences. For example, if the lion's share of your overseas friends are located in Yemen, Sudan and northern Pakistan, you probably want to avoid advertising that fact on your wall - unless you want to have CIA operatives with binoculars crouching behind your rose bushes.)

But My Friends Map isn't the worst of the self-esteem-undermining tools that the Book of Face has to offer. Consider this lovely app. This takes international one-upmanship a step further, whereby you get to advertise to everyone in your Facebook network how awesome you are based on the number of countries you've visited.

Oh yeah? Betcha you haven't been to Antarctica and Andorra!

There you have it. Now not only can you take that whirlwind European tour you went on when you were 21 and make yourself out to be a globetrotter comparable to Kofi Annan or Hillary Clinton, but you can also turn that four-hour layover you once had in Addis Ababa into a bona-fide travel experience that you can brag about to your friends. Does anyone really care? Of course they do - it's on Facebook!

What is this app trying to say? From the standpoint of this app, the six years I spent living and working in Japan, learning the language and absorbing the culture is no different from the seven hours I once spent in the terminal building in Kuwait City. It's a country. It goes on the list. This is to say nothing of the fact that some of the most worldly and globally aware people I've met are not particularly well travelled and that a great many self-proclaimed globetrotters that I've met are, frankly, closed-minded and blinkered by their own cultural conditioning. It's all about the points you rack up in life. That is all.

Numerous studies have pointed to Facebook and other social networks having a negative effect on people's self-esteem. Furthermore, the great paradox of Facebook is that the more friends you have, the greater the negative impact on your sense of self worth you're likely to suffer. A recent article in Men's Health on the subject notes that the more 'friends' a person has, the more likely they are to be spending their day enviously reading about someone else’s paradise vacation, new girlfriend or job promotion.

Given the fact that FB already puts us in a precarious position vis-à-vis our own self-esteem, is it really necessary for app designers to keep coming up with new ways for us to feel inferior? I would like to issue a challenge to whoever the people are who design these things to actually create something that will foster people's sense of self-worth rather than perpetuating this endless cycle of social media one-upmanship.

In the meantime, I'm keeping my Friends Map hidden. Whoops, I just posted it. Guess I'm just as guilty as the rest of y'all.