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This new blog is about building a community. After you read, please take a moment to leave me a quick comment or visit the "How You Can Help" page. Thanks.A 72-year Harvard Medical School study on mental health found that “by age 50, almost a third of the men had at one time or another met [the researcher's] criteria for mental illness.”
Almost a third. That’s about one person in even the smallest family.
In a classroom of twenty, it’s about six students.
In an office workgroup of ten people, two or three will probably have experienced mental illness by the time they are 50 years old.
We need to re-examine our assumptions aobut mental health and stop treating mental illness like a bizarre aberration. It’s way, way, WAY more common than we’ve been led to believe.
I’ve been so inspired by the various “camps” lately – Mental Health Camp in Vancouver, obviously, but also Laid Off camp here in L.A., “I’m staying up too late online and need to go to bed” camp (happening right now as I write this)…
I recently asked a buddy if he wanted me to come stay with him and his family for a week while we both did awesome creative projects and stuff…he was underwhelmed. (I still love you though, bro.) But I DID have great results spending one or two nights a week with friends over the last month, avoiding or shortening little dips that could have gotten worse. OK, dips that did get worse on the week when I was alone too many days in a row.
So now I’m thinking how cool would it be if we just had BummerCamp! Get a bunch of people with depression to all hang out together in L.A., for a day, a weekend, a long weekend, a week, wudevs. We could have talks, do fun stuff, inspire each other, open our bags of unopened mail together. (What do you mean you don’t have bags of unopened mail?!!)
If you read this blog what do you think?
The goals would be:
* having fun!
* getting some individual creative, productive work done. E.g. on key projects in work or life, or things we’ve been procrastinating on.
* experiencing our power as a community so that we can attract more people into our self-help love mafia.
How long should it be? I kind of like the longer-than-a-day variants my self. Like a whole weekend maybe, or a long weekend.
If you have more peeps in your town that are up for it, let’s all go there.
Hey kids, let’s put on a show! About how beautiful and terrible life is, and all the great things that can happen when we come together with the intent to heal.
Well once again, God bless Twitter!
Do you think the author or any readers of this blog might be interested in something called:
Mental Health Camp – a Conference about Mental Health and Social Media ?
If you answered “yes,” you are cor-rect!
This absolutely fantastic-sounding event is bringing together a community to ask questions like [taken from their website]:
- How can blogging help decrease the stigma of mental health?
- How does someone with a mental illness navigate the waters of anonymity in the transparent world of social media?
- How is the journaling that happens in blogging similar to or different from journaling for healing?
- How can social media participants with mental health issues help each other?
I’m interested in all of these but particularly the last one. I know that online community tools are perfect for helping to provide social structure to change behavior that will make a big dent in depression for certain kinds of people. So now I’m going to go to Vancouver to hang out with my tribe!! Yay!! (And yes, the focus of the conference is more broad than just depression, but I’m gonna go ahead and allow my narcissism to feed my enthusiasm a little bit on this one. And besides, I’ve got enough diagnoses to come home with a whole set of stickers that say “I’m the same kind of wacky as you are!”)
I’m so grateful to everyone who has come together to make this event happen and to @unsuicide for putting the word out!
If you’re on twitter follow these great peeps (probably an incomplete list but a place to start)
P.S. I’m already imagining t-shirts that say “I went to Mental Health Camp and it saved my freakin life!” 
If you read online news about Twitter, depression, or celebrities you’ve probably already heard the “Did Demi Moore’s Twitter Feed Stop a Suicide?” story today. In short, a woman named Sandie had been talking on Twitter about killing herself. She sent a message to Demi, who alerted a larger audience, which then got in touch with local police who found her. As of this writing, Sandie is apparently in custody and okay.
As someone with depression myself, I have a lot of reactions to this story, but the main one is that what we are currently doing about depression is not enough. I have done a jillion hours of therapy and taken a few thousand anti-depressant pills, and I will tell you it was after all that that I bought a gun so I could permanently escape how I felt. (And no, I no longer have a gun or any plans to kill myself.) We need to go beyond just drugs and counseling and re-examine how we understand and treat depression.
I would bet you that Sandie lives alone. I don’t know if she does or not. But I know that the first time I bought a gun was when the people I was living with moved out. In fact the morning they left, the first thing I did was go to a gun store. I’m not saying that living alone causes depression or suicide, but at least for people like me the chances increase significantly. (Question: does anyone have or know where to find statistics on what percentage of suicide victims live alone?)
My second reaction is that I bet you Demi Moore feels like people are giving her too much credit. Partly this is because – without knowing her – she seems like a humble person to me. It’s fantastic that she chose to act by retweeting (re-broadcasting on Twitter) the woman’s cry for help. Maybe if she hadn’t done that this woman would now be dead – needlessly & tragically. So I give mad props to Demi. She did the right thing even though she felt “torn about responding.” (How could she not – what if every suicidal person starts tweeting to her now, right?) But there was a long chain of people taking action to reach this woman. I don’t even know how the police managed to locate Sandie. But my point is, the media are likely to collapse this story into “what’s hot” (Twitter, a celebrity) and leave it at that. This story is not about Demi and Twitter.
This is call for us to re-examine how we treat suicide and depression. You want to hear something intense? This may not be over for Sandie. I know that because even after I went to treatment for my depression I continued to battle it and came frighteningly close to suicide a second time. So now what?
I think we need new ideas, like this one or this one. There is a nutritionist on Twitter called Rose Cole who writes about how changing her diet reduced or eliminated her depression (scroll down to her bio). But behind all this lies a different way of thinking about depression.
I started this blog because I continue to battle my depression and I want to try another approach. I’m not selling anything or trying to make money. If you know someone with depression please reach out to them today. Make sure they don’t have access to a gun, or have any other plan for killing themselves. If you want to, read the links above about what I think might help some people with depression to live normal, happy, healthy lives. If it feels right, tell them there is a community online they might want to check out.
When I started this blog on March 22ns, 2009, there were three Twitter accounts that had self-identified with the #depression tag. Now there are 19 25. The Twitter account I maintain for this blog has 160 350 people following it in less than two four weeks. Many have reached out to me to say that they want to connect with others and we can use some of these new ideas to help ourselves. By talking together, tweeting together, and coming together in real life, we can make more progress than just by working on it alone.
My heart goes out to Sandie. And my hat goes off to Demi and many others from Twitter who took action to help. But let’s not just leave this there. Let’s see how many more people we can help. If we prevent even one suicide, it’s worth it.
On most days, people describe me as enthusiastic, warm, funny, and great at what I do.
On other days I won’t answer my phone, don’t eat, can’t work, and wish that everything in my life would just go away. Small things that might upset someone else for a few minutes can snowball into an all-consuming rage or gloom, leading me to cancel appointments, skip meals, unplug my phone and begin a spiral that can last hours, days, or sometimes weeks. Often the greatest source of pain for me is the contrast between the “me” I know when I’m having an average or normal day, and the reclusive, bitter cynic I become when I’m down. I feel like I’m betraying everything I stand for and everyone who sees me as this talented, warm, wonderful person. And when I’m in that place, I don’t care. In fact in a certain way, I congratulate myself for seeing the pointlessness of ever imagining that my life could be any different. In the worst of times I imagine a permanent retreat from everything, a conclusive end to my pain forever.
I have been in and out of therapy and self-help groups, and on and off medication, for over twenty years. Nothing I’ve found seems to work for very long. And over the last few years I’ve felt like it’s getting worse. In that time I have quit jobs in the middle of critical work projects which I was leading, burned through tens of thousands of dollars of savings, and subjected my daughter to thinly disguised rages for forgetting her jacket at school. I have failed to show up at conferences where I was scheduled to speak, and abandoned close friends without a word for months. My depression feels out of control to me.
But I have a hunch. And I have learned, in my years of wrestling with this motherfucker called depression, that hunches can be life-saving. My hunch is that Twitter can save my life. Well, not exactly Twitter itself, but forming or joining a tribe around, and being public about, my recovery from depression. I think more people like me are out there. And I believe we can help each other. This blog is my call to that tribe.
Update: Two months after starting this blog, I feel like I have more traction on my moods than in a long time. I still have bad spells, but they are slowly becoming less frequent, less intense, and more preventable. I’ll keep you posted.
I think I need to live in a shared house with people like me who function well when they are doing ok, but who need a daily dose of good conversation to nip any potential self-immolation in the bud. I need structure, or what I’ve decided to call social structure. Not a halfway house, not someone who is a paid professional, but a self-aware peer group to sit with and answer the question “How are we all doing today, really?” Maybe 10 minutes of sitting meditation together in the morning, a quick check-in on how we’re feeling, and the same at night. Other than that, we’d live the same kind of lives that I see most of my friends leading. Work regular jobs, socialize at night, and do everything except go home alone carrying some small kernel of discontent that could metastasize and plunge us back into self-destructive isolation.
I’ve had the intuition that this would be the best situation for me for a while, maybe 3-4 years. But the bedeviling thing about depression is that it makes it extreeeemely difficult to take any action to deal with the depression. On the other hand, this is why I think social structure, specifically a small community of mutually supportive housemates, might work really well.
Think about it. Thorough recovery from depression probably requires a number of simultaneous practices like eating a healthy diet, regular exercise, satisfying employment, helping others, and staying on top of the unglamorous administrative things that (at least in my case) often feel impossible to do but which add untold suffering to my life when I avoid them (e.g. filing taxes, billing clients, health insurance, etc). Regular counseling with a good therapist and in some cases medication may also be central to that mix.
But here’s the rub: all of those practices fall apart when I start to willfully kick out the supports that hold my life up. It’s not that I (and others) don’t know how to live happily, it’s that in the crucial moment, we don’t want to! I had a fantastic therapist a few years ago. But I got too depressed to show up for our appointments. I was exercising about five days a week two winters ago, but after a couple of upsetting life setbacks I said “screw it” and quit.
On the other hand, certain things so seem to lift me out of depression almost effortlessly when I want to come out. One is helping a friend. During a really bad patch a few years ago, an especially clever buddy of mine who has dealt with me through years of ups and downs left me a voicemail. At the time I was responding to no one. He said this: “I’m a bit worried about you, but that’s probably not the best message to leave. What I should really say is that I’m wrestling with a really complex spiritual dilemma that I feel only you can help me with.” I could hear the smile in his voice and something in me softened. I eventually called him back, which I hadn’t done with anyone in a couple of months by that point.
It almost never fails that if I feel someone is approaching me with their need, as opposed to with a need to fix me, I will respond. The act of listening to and supporting them often breaks my self-imposed deadlock. I am someone friends frequently turn to for work advice, career advice, or just a non-judgemental listening ear. No matter how low I may feel about myself, this almost always seems like something fun to do and I say yes when asked. If I were part of a community living under the same roof who provided that kind of listening and support for each other, it might help me stay out of the ditch, or pull out if I was headed that way.
The other thing that works frequently is seeking out a friend who accepts me exactly as I am in the moment of depression, and who is not trying to help, fix, motivate, or cure me. In fact, I have found that when I’m talking to someone who is able to just listen without any agenda for changing me, I very frequently move into action spontaneously. Indeed, this blog was born out of a conversation with my friend Andrea. She wasn’t egging me on, she was just listening as I talked about feeling sad that a budding romance was not going to work out. I admitted that part of my heartbreak was the secret hope that this relationship would somehow lift me out of my depression. She asked me if I had any other secret plans in that direction. And I told her this idea, which I had shared with many other people before. Without her having to say anything I made my Twitter account and started looking for where to put this blog.
Like many people I know, I didn’t need someone to tell me how to feel or what to do. I just needed someone who was there in a moment when I was willing to open up. The rest happened as naturally as a leaf falling from a tree.
