Documentary Media Ripples :: Response

New Seesmic pal Karen responded to THIS video posted to Seesmic via YouTube.



I respond to Karen as above.

I continue to learn how to listen.

In researching "The World's Longest Open Love Letter" documentary I've occasion to search YouTube for folks who speak to mental health issues. Watching these profound stories brought me way down. In the parlance of survivor circles, it's known as 'triggering'.

Rather than fight it, I allowed the spiral to unfold in its way, but with an attempt at keeping my extreme artists eyes, ears and heart open so as to be able to later relate the experience. It inevitably takes longer to process this information than I expect.

Input & consequence.

I've also had occasion to gather a month or two of feedback from colleagues to whom I 'came out' of the depression closet very early on in our social network relationships. Specifically, a 'control group' at Seesmic.

In the midst of the bottom of the spiral down, I posted this entry, a longer-term project illustrating my fascination and irritation with television and film writers for having their characters say, "Are you okay?" sometimes many times per episode.

When I posted it, one of my dear new Seesmic friends - Otir - wrote me comment expressing the hope that i was indeed "Okay."

Otir said...

I hope you're Okay. I know that you are going to be fine. But if you don't feel it, I want you to know that others feel it for you and trust you will. Love.

I loved the mashup. I am so impressed at all the creativity that is there. I am jealous. Yes I am. But I am going to be okay with it :-)

My feeling - having come out - is that anything I do in their eyes is first colored by the knowledge that one of my dearest, oldest - if least respected - friends is chronic depression. Is that a good thing? Maybe. Maybe the support helps rather than hurts. In the middle of the beast, it hurts.

Pain is a red flag indicative of something that requires conscious attention, and is in its own way, another old friend whom I know too well.

Yes. Otir's words of encouragement helped, thought it took some time to get to that place where I could let her loving spirit into my heart. At first, her kind words filled me with dread.

I'm unaccustomed to allowing a support system into the process. Unaccustomed to being 'seen' in this way.

In being seen, I feel vulnerable.

Invisibility was the OLD strategy; being SEEN, the new.

My biggest fear is that friendships and career will be ruined as a result of going public. My online research indicates others go public about craploads of mental health issues in droves. What I see is gutsy stuff. Full of courage, hope and technique.

It's my theory that healing and forgiveness require 'witness', one thing the Catholic Church got right. Posting videos about one's healing experiences admirably - if somewhat dangerously - fills that need.

The NY Times recently published an interesting tech article about a new social networking site - PatientsLikeMe - that crowdsources data, statistics, charts, medical metrics. For sure, the site bucks the MSM-promoted privacy-before-all-else-for-fear-of-identity-theft or death-by-pervert-stalker trend.

Here's what deputy editor of Wired magazine Thomas Goetz had to say on the subject of the social networking of mental health research:

As diseases go, A.L.S. or M.S. or Parkinson’s or even H.I.V. are relatively rare afflictions, at least in the United States. Mental illness, on the other hand, afflicts a vast swath of the country. Nearly 60 million Americans have a diagnosable mental disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, a population that includes everything from depression to bipolar syndrome to anxiety. For PatientsLikeMe, that population represents a huge market, not to mention the potentially lucrative bounty of data related to antidepressants and other mood-disorder drugs. But it also presents a challenge.

Creating a PatientsLikeMe mental-health community — or as they call it, a “mood community” — requires a new strategy for measuring mental health. The challenge is in part semantic. Where the argot around A.L.S. or M.S. is largely clinical, the vernacular around mental health is more subjective. The official diagnostic criteria for major depression, for example, include “feelings of worthlessness” and “indecisiveness.” So PatientsLikeMe faces an input problem: how to convert the ambiguities of mental illness into metrics?

Whatever its ultimate worth, the site’s answer is elegantly straightforward. Members can update their mood status every hour on a scale of 1 to 4, from very bad to very good. How they feel may be subjective, but the resulting data can be mapped across time. The site treats sessions of therapy as if they were a dose of Prozac; the type of therapy (say, group or individual) stands as the treatment, and the length of a session (say, 50 minutes a week) as the dosage.

We live in interesting times.

Music is "Mother's Blues" from Jeff Kelley's Classic Acoustic Blues album - about whom I've written in this space before.

[NY Times article]

Tags: Self-Help Art Depression