All posts by Hollis Easter

Spirit Airlines Wants to Cash In On Jennifer Lawrence

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Spirit Airlines, I’d like to talk. I’m feeling really angry about something. You crossed an important line today by trying to cash in on the Jennifer Lawrence hacked-nude-selfie fiasco, and I’d like you to apologize and resolve not to do it again.

I’ve only flown with you once, but I had a great time. You got me home from Myrtle Beach with a flight that was faster than advertised, hilarious in-flight briefings, clean planes, and helpful staff. I’m a fan. I’ve considered getting your credit card so I can earn miles and fly with you more often.

I even like your irreverent tone. I dig the way you point out the hidden costs in aviation by posting the “Government’s Cut” and translating it into a percentage cost. There’s a lot to like about you, Spirit Airlines.

“Bare Fare” — well played

Spirit Airlines Bare Fare
Spirit Airlines Bare Fare icon

“Bare Fare” is a clever piece of marketing, given your ideal of offering minimalist service to which people can pay more to add the services they actually want. I admit it, I laughed aloud when I first saw “bare fare”: it’s the kind of clever wordplay I love.

“Our Selfie Leaked Too…”

Here’s the problem. This showed up in my inbox today, two days after Jennifer Lawrence was targeted by criminals and had her property stolen.

Spirit Airlines Our Bare Fare Was Hacked Spirit Airlines Our Bare Fare Was LeakedI’m gonna just go ahead and quote that (emphasis mine):

Our selfie leaked too… Our Bare Fare was hacked! Our Bare Fare was leaked!

We feel naked; you were never supposed to see this Bare Fare! It was meant for a special someone (who isn’t you). Now it’s all over the internet for you to take advantage of as you see fit. Scandalous! We thought the cloud was our friend, y’know, because we spend so much time flying with ’em. But now our private prices are on display! Bad for us; GREAT for you. 

What.

I hope tomorrow will be celebrated in the annals of Spirit Airlines history as the last workday of whichever of your copywriters thought that was a good idea and whichever team lead signed off on it.

What on earth (or in the clouds, I guess?) were you thinking?

Aside from the fact that your email is pretty tasteless and crass in general, you’re also tacitly encouraging people to think of the leaked photos as, perhaps, unfortunate for the ladies in question but “GREAT for” all the rest of us, and you’re trivializing the violation of trust and laws that occurred in stealing those images.

I felt really good about flying with Spirit when I took that flight in July. Now I feel dirty for having given you money, especially since this is how you’ve chosen to ask for more of it.

So here’s what you can do.

I’d like to fly with you again, but right now I don’t want to give any cash to a company that thinks this sort of thing is funny. (Apparently they think it’s fine; see their response.)

Everyone makes mistakes, and I’d like to know that you see this as one. I’d like you to publicly apologize, and then put some effort into making sure this never happens again. (Spirit responded and did not apologize.)

You’ve got a press page for releasing news about Spirit Airlines. You could write a statement about how you regret the tasteless and crude email you sent, including a screen capture of the email. Talk about why it was wrong, so we can be sure you get it.

Then you post that statement on your press page, and you email me the link. I’ll post it here so your customers can see that you’re a good company that tries to do the right thing when it makes mistakes. (They didn’t do this either.)

Then, you could post a link to your press statement on your Twitter feed, acknowledging the mistake and asking people to forgive you. I’ll retweet it to help you get the signal boost. (Nope.)

Finally, you should ask yourselves whether you want to continue being represented by whoever wrote this email. You’ve got a careers page for people who want to work for Spirit.  It would be a great place to post the job opening (“sudden vacancy”) to replace whoever wrote this. (Nope nope nope.)

I really want to like you, Spirit. I—and others—are watching to see how you respond to this. Your team goofed today, and it’s up to you to fix it.

If you’re reading this and want to send Spirit a message, do so on their comments page or via Twitter.

Talking about Lived Experience

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“Lived experience” basically just means “one actual person’s experiences”, and it stands apart from hypothetical experiences (existing only as conjecture), theories, and aggregate experiences (compiled from many people’s life experience). More and more fields are working to consciously acknowledge lived experience as valid and important, and I am thrilled about that because lived experience has been cast down in the weeds for a long time.

I’ve had a lot of people minimize or dismiss things that happened to me, and I’ve seen it happen to people I care about. I’ve had medical issues that got worse because a doctor didn’t believe me when I reported a problem. I’ve had friends whose stories of rape were dismissed because the accused was “a good guy” who “would never do something like that”.

I am sure that I’ve also dismissed people’s lived experience. I would like to do better in future. I’ve been thinking about how to deal with lived experience in a way that’s open, respectful, honest, and real, and this article is what came out.

It’s very easy to trample on people’s feelings when you’re talking about lived experience. A lot of discussions fall apart when people feel that their life stories have been dismissed.

The shortest guidelines

Don’t argue with people about what they experienced.

Listen respectfully, acknowledge it when their data points don’t fit your understanding, and don’t suppress their experiences just because they clash with your story. Don’t tell them what (you think) their experiences mean unless they ask you for that.

Be careful to distinguish in your head between facts and interpretations. Facts are objective truths about things that happen. Interpretations are the conclusions we draw about what those facts mean.

And really, don’t argue with people about what they experienced.

Simple facts

Start by assuming that people are telling the truth about the facts underlying their experiences.

Unless you have very strong affirmative evidence that their lived experience did not happen, you should give people the benefit of the doubt here. If you believe that their experience could not have happened, there’s a strong possibility that your beliefs are wrong.

Even if you disagree about the underlying facts, assume that they’re telling you the truth of what they felt and experienced.

I went to my doctor several years ago and said “I think I might have Lyme disease: I have all the symptoms on the diagnostic chart and I found an engorged tick biting my neck.” She told me “you can’t have Lyme disease—we don’t have it in NY”. In one sentence, she argued that my lived experience couldn’t be real because it conflicted with her beliefs. She argued with my facts and used her belief that a Lyme diagnosis was impossible (because we allegedly don’t have it in NY) to argue that my symptoms weren’t real and didn’t need treatment. (She didn’t ask whether I had recently traveled out of state, which I had, or where I thought I got the tick bite.)

My friend Eden says that we often reject others’ lived experiences because we simply don’t want them to be true. It’s painful to believe some of the things that happen to folks we care about, and it’s easy to slip into believing that their experiences couldn’t have happened simply because we wish they hadn’t. She also writes:

“In other cases, we dismiss because we do not want to recognize the reality of violence, oppression, evil, trauma in the world. We do not want bad things to happen in general–and certainly not to those we know and love. We need to believe that the world is a good and safe place not a broken and dangerous place, and coming in contact with others’ lived experiences often calls that belief/need into question.” —  Eden Wales Freedman

When people insist that your lived experience didn’t happen or isn’t real, that’s often called silencing. My doctor silenced my experience by, essentially, arguing that it was impossible for my experience to be real.

Silencing can happen on lots of levels. If I tell you the story about my interaction with the doctor, I am reporting a fact to you. It actually happened—I was there! If you tell me that I’m wrong about that, whether because no doctor could be as [insert adjective] as that or because it shouldn’t have happened or whatever, you are also silencing my lived experience. Nobody likes that.

If you want a great cartoon explaining this, check out the always-fabulous Robot Hugs. And also this fabulous parallel-lives cartoon by Nate Swineheart.

Start by assuming that people are reporting their experiences truthfully, even if it seems far-fetched or unlikely to you.

Things to say:

  • Would you tell me more about that?
  • What was that like?
  • How did that feel?
  • I don’t think I understand yet—could you help me?
  • I’m surprised to hear that, and it’s hard for me to believe. Could you tell me more so I can understand? (this one is less desirable because it starts with confrontation, but it’s better than nothing)

What do those facts mean?

We often run into trouble when we agree about what happened but disagree about what it means.

Suppose that you’ve been feeling really down for a long time and life doesn’t feel like it’s worth that much anymore. You see a billboard saying “Depressed? There’s help! See your doctor!” and decide to give it a shot, thinking maybe they can give you some antidepressants. The doctor sees you, tells you to exercise for 30 minutes every day and avoid eating anything with added sugar, and asks you to come in for a follow-up appointment in two weeks to see how things are going. You leave without the prescription you wanted.

You tell me your story while we’re hanging out later. I hear it and think “okay, that doctor has read some of the treatment guides that suggest exercise and food choices can be similarly effective compared to antidepressants, and carry fewer side effects, so she’s starting with the least-invasive treatment and then wants to check up on you in two weeks.”

You say “The doctor didn’t care at all—didn’t even seem to take it seriously. Just said ‘go work out and eat better’, as if that’s going to help anything. Bullshit.”

We agree about the facts—what was said—but not about what they mean.

If I jump right in and say “no, the doctor really does care, she’s just starting with a lower-intensity intervention to see if it will help”, I’m doing two things: I’m silencing your experience of being dismissed, and I’m assuming that I know what the fact pattern means. I’m also probably making you really angry. On some level, I’m silencing your lived experience and telling you that I know, better than you, what it all means.

Suppose a friend gets dumped and feels horrible about losing his soul mate. If my friend says “I’m never going to find anyone else”, is he correct? We agree on the facts of what already happened—the breakup—but perhaps we don’t agree on the conclusion that perpetual solitude is the only outcome.

There’s a place for disagreeing, but remember that my friend is still speaking of his lived experiences. Whether or not it’s true that he will never find anyone again, it’s true that that’s how he feels right now. If I attack his conclusions without establishing rapport and connecting first, he’s going to feel as though I’m out of touch or rude or uncaring.

Do your best to accept that people are reporting the facts, and their interpretation of those facts, accurately. If you disagree about the interpretation, do so respectfully, acknowledging that you are speaking about opinions rather than absolute truths.

Things to say:

  • I hear you.
  • Thank you for telling me about what this was like for you.
  • Could you tell me more about how that felt?
  • How does it feel to talk about this?
  • It sounds like you think [interpretation] is the only answer to what happened. Did I get that right?
  • I think I interpret that a little differently. May I share my thoughts?
  • I agree about what happened, but I think I disagree about what it means. Could we talk about that?

What if the facts conflict?

It gets into grey area when you have strong evidence that the person’s lived experience is not factually correct. Start with making sure, for yourself, that you’re really talking about conflicting facts and not differing interpretations.

If you have a situation where a person is reporting something that objectively didn’t happen—say, a person reports that a therapist sexually assaulted them in the lobby, and the lobby was full of witnesses and a video camera that all agree no such thing occurred–it’s challenging to respect the person’s experience while rejecting the purported facts. It’s really tempting to just say “you’re wrong” and keep moving.

In some cases, that may still be the right choice. But if you want to continue having any kind of good relationship with the person, it may be better to say “I understand that that’s what you experienced, but that’s not what the rest of us saw.” Validating people’s experiences like this often de-escalates the conflict.

In my experience, it’s pretty rare for people to claim lived experience that is objectively untrue. Partly this is because speaking up for lived experience is intensely vulnerable and scary, and people tend not to fake it. So I’d like to encourage you to give people the benefit of the doubt as much as you can.

Things to say:

  • I understand what you’ve said, but I saw it differently. Can I tell you what I saw?
  • I hear what you’re saying, and I need to share some things I saw.
  • It seems like we experienced different things. Could we talk about that?
  • I’m struggling to understand what you said, because I experienced something totally different. Could we talk about the differences and figure it out together?

Lived experience versus hypotheses

In my scientific training, I was taught that it only takes a single piece of data to disprove a hypothesis, and that conjectures and belief structures only become strong when, over and over again, they survive all attempts to disprove them. If anyone presents valid evidence that conflicts, the hypothesis is wrong.

I’d like us to adopt this way of thinking about lived experience when we’re talking about medicine, about violence, about mental health, about oppression, about suicide, and about the other kinds of lived experience people bring up.

If we believe that our college campus is free of sexual assault and a woman shows up saying she was raped, we’re presenting a belief and she’s presenting a fact. Unless we can prove that her fact is invalid or untrue, our belief is wrong. End of story.

If my doctor tells me that we don’t have Lyme disease in NY and I present a tick, in NY, that’s carrying Lyme disease, she’s presenting a belief and I am presenting a fact. Unless she can prove that my fact is invalid or untrue, her belief is wrong. End of story.

If a suicidal person tells you life isn’t worth living anymore, and you believe that suicide is a sin and that life is infinitely precious, you’re both presenting beliefs. Your belief is valid for you; her belief is valid for her. You don’t get to argue that she’s wrong. You can respectfully offer a different interpretation, but that’s different from saying she’s wrong.

Partnership

I’ve framed much of this discussion in an adversarial way, because that’s how a lot of people approach the lived experience topic: there are people with high-level understanding of how things work, and there are people with lived experience, and never the twain shall meet.

Sometimes, disagreements arise simply because the square pegs of lived experience don’t fit into the round holes of expectations. Sometimes this is a big deal, like my experience with a doctor who didn’t believe me about being bitten by a tick. That disagreement has cost me thousands of dollars in medical bills, a lot of pain, and a ton of Lyme-related disabilities that are arguably caused by my doctor withholding the early treatment I asked for.

But other times, people dismiss lived experience casually, without even thinking about it. I have a ton of allergies, and some of the worst ones are to dogs and perfumes. People often hear about the dog one and say “Really? But you have a cat!”. I say “yep. Not allergic to cats”. Often, they respond “most people are allergic to cats and not allergic to dogs. Are you sure you don’t have it backwards?”. This is small, but it’s still dismissing lived experience.

Or I’ll talk about the perfume allergy, which is severe enough that I often get migraines for days and asthma attacks that leave me gasping for air as I scramble to find my inhaler. And that’s just what happens from being around people wearing perfume—let’s not talk about what happens when people hug me or spray me with it. When I talk about this, people often say “oh, but it’s hypoallergenic!” or “well, I only used a little” or “it’s very mild”. Do you see how these comments dismiss my lived experience in favor of a theory about what should have happened? The theory is that this perfume is hypoallergenic, and my experience is that now I can’t breathe and am losing the vision in my left eye because of a migraine.

I’m using the term “theorists” as a catch-all phrase for people who argue against lived experience on the basis of assumptions, beliefs, or anything else that isn’t purely a fact. I’m obviously talking about research communities, but I’m also talking about how we live our daily lives.

When we tell our daughters “oh, he just has a crush on you” when they report that a boy is touching them or making them uncomfortable, we are silencing lived experience. When the boss screams at a coworker and we try to comfort him by saying “oh, I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it”, we are dismissing lived experience. In each of these situations, we’re acting as theorists, pitting our beliefs against the facts of other people’s lives. I’d like us to stop doing it.

Often these fights are really bitter, because the theorists feel like the lived experience people are just insisting on having their own anecdotes—most of which are outliers—heard, and it’s messing up the data or just being a pain to live with. And the lived experience people feel that the theorists are ignoring real experiences in order to have simpler models, cleaner datasets, and a life free of needing to care about others. There’s a lot of disrespect on both sides.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The suicide prevention movement offers a good example of how established groups are working to incorporate the voices of people with lived experience—in this case, suicide attempt survivors and suicide loss survivors—so we can do a better job of protecting people against suicide.

We are stronger when we respect and learn from lived experience, and when we use it to nourish deeper understanding and to build better systems. It starts with listening to people with lived experience, asking good questions, and respecting the answers.

(I am grateful to Dr. Eden Wales Freedman, Dese’Rae Stage, Dr. April Foreman, Dr. Laurel K, and Karen Easter for reading and commenting on the earlier drafts of this post. Thanks, team!) 

Jennifer Lawrence Is A Crime Victim, Not A Sex Symbol

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Today, the news broke that hackers had gotten ahold of nude pictures portraying actors Jennifer Lawrence, Mary Winstead, and others. There’s an active investigation going on, but it seems as though the photos may have come from cloud storage sites with poor security. The internet is all a-flutter because, I guess, naked ladies! Jennifer Lawrence confirmed many of the things I say here in a Vanity Fair interview on 10/8/14.

Let’s remember that the big news today ought to be that Jennifer Lawrence and several other high-profile women became victims of crime. And that they, like so many other women across the world, were targeted for crime because their bodies were appealing to men.

It’s kind of irrelevant whether the photographs are real or doctored. If they’re real, so what? People take nude pictures of themselves. People take nude pictures of their loved ones. People like to have sex, and some of them like to take pictures of themselves having it. If you asked a roomful of 1000 people to close their eyes and then raise their hands if they’d ever taken nude photos of themselves or someone else, I would bet you’d have at least 800 hands in the air.

Nothin’ wrong with that. I might even say there’s a lot that’s right about that, because I think seeing real people in their real bodies is a healthy antidote to the Photoshopped fakery advertising and media shove down our throats.

But again, this news story is not about nude photos of bodies. It’s about two things: our feeling of ownership over women’s bodies, and our feeling of entitlement about controlling them.

Why aren’t there any men in the list of leaked photos? Because we don’t think it’s problematic for men to be nude, and because we don’t think it’s exciting for men to be nude, and because we don’t feel entitled to tell men what to do with their bodies.

Why is the news media responding to the leaks not by castigating the thieves who broke in and stole data but, forgive me for swearing, BY FUCKING POSTING THE PICTURES? I’m looking at you, Perez Hilton, jackass. Do the media have their heads shoved so far up their asses that they can’t tell right from wrong, and that they can’t tell that throwing gasoline onto a conflagration isn’t a morally defensible choice?

No. They know that it’ll sell papers and get eyeballs onto ad impressions. And that enough of us will furtively enjoy consuming the images of naked women, without their consent, that we’ll turn our heads away rather than calling them out.

But let’s keep our eyes on the ball. Jennifer Lawrence is the targeted victim of a crime. Instead of receiving those stolen goods (which is really what we’re doing when we look at the pictures), we should be focusing on how to protect privacy and take care of victims.

We have this salacious delectation and delight in finding that celebrities are real people too—that they take nudie pics like everyone else, that they argue with their spouses like everyone else, and that they sometimes kill themselves, just like everyone else.

It feels as though we want them to deny and forgo all the aspects of their humanity as soon as they get cast for a film. And, twisted further, we want the right to consume the images of their bodies not just when they’re at work—on the screen—but when they’re in the privacy of their own lives. 

We talk about how problematic ISIS’s treatment of women is, and how crude and horrible other cultures are in their treatment of women. We should spend some time looking in mirrors instead of drooling over these pictures.

This story isn’t really about nude pictures. It’s about a crime, and on a deeper level it’s about objectification of celebrities in general and female celebrities in specific. We’re accustomed to acting as though we own the right to view and enjoy their bodies, with or without their consent. This crime is just an indication of that viewpoint taken a little farther than usual.

We need to do better. Stop forwarding the pictures, and let people have a private life. Want to ogle gorgeous women’s bodies? Go watch some porn—those are women who signed up for being viewed, and they get paid for it. But getting all excited about stolen nudie pics from some celebrity’s phone?

Now that’s dirty.

(ETA 9/1/14 11:38 pm: Scott Mendelson says good things about this in Forbes. Clementine Ford also says good things in Daily Life. And then James Fell wrote this awesome thing. Genevieve Valentine wrote this completely wonderful analysis of what this is really about. Sara Benincasa articulated it well.)

(Laurie Penny wrote this awesome structural discussion of why we’re winning this fight.)

Shaming Our Allies in Suicide Prevention

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It’s been a couple of weeks since Robin Williams died. I’ve written a lot about suicide and suicide prevention during that time, and there’s been a lot of discussion in the public forum about suicide and what we can do about it. This is really good. We’re making progress on turning suicide into something people can talk about.

Those of us who work in suicide prevention, intervention, postvention, and research have an obvious leadership role for starting and guiding those conversations. We’ve learned a lot about what works, and we’re also learning how to talk about suicide openly. People (rightly) look to us for help in knowing what to think.

I’m concerned about some of what we’ve chosen, as a field, to say. I’m worried that, in preaching the gospel of what we’ve learned about suicide, we’re alienating more potential allies than we recruit. I’m worried that we may be choosing battles that end up losing ground in the larger fight.

As an example, please check out this opinion piece in CNN, written by Bill Schmitz, Jr., current President of the American Association of Suicidology. It came out on August 14th, three days after Williams’s death.

These are my main concerns:

  • It sharply rebukes The Academy and the grieving people who forwarded the tweet of the genie from Aladdin
  • It blames Williams and, effectively, perpetuates the stereotype of calling suicide a selfish act
  • It criticizes media for failing to follow our (somewhat obscure) guidelines rather than encouraging them to partner with us in future
  • It denies the lived experience of people with mental illness who find treatments ineffective

Much of what appears in Schmitz’s piece is good, and I want to be clear that I’m not saying he shouldn’t have written it. (Bill, if you’re reading this, I particularly appreciate that you chose to share some of your personal story and reactions even though you were speaking from your official position as AAS President. I think human stories are really valuable in helping people to process and hear our official recommendations.) I believe that all of the people who’ve written suicidology perspectives have done so out of good intent, and I want to make sure I start by saying that.

My point is that I think that piece, and others like it, didn’t play very well outside the suicide prevention community. The way we chose to frame our recommendations and comments had some problems, and that’s what I want to talk about. I think we can do an even better job next time. I think we can still say the important things about safety and prevention without pushing people away and shaming our potential allies.

The “Genie, be free” tweet

First, the line in The Academy’s tweet, “Genie, be free”, is a direct quotation from Aladdin. The genie was one of Robin Williams’s most-loved roles, and I know—because people told me—that the tweet helped a lot of them feel a sense of closure about Williams’s death. It was comforting to them.

In the film, it’s a scene when Aladdin frees the genie from the lamp in which he’s been imprisoned for years. It is a literal and metaphorical unshackling of the spirit, a hand extended to release a tormented spirit from bondage.

Should we be surprised that people found it a compelling message for talking about Williams’s death by suicide? I know the media guidelines suggest that we not talk about suicide as an escape or a way to get out of pain (Schmitz writes “Suicide should NEVER be presented by media as a means to resolve or escape one’s problems“), but I also know that many of the suicidal people I’ve talked to in 15 years on the suicide hotline do think of suicide that way. We can talk about ways that viewpoint can hinder suicide prevention efforts, and we can talk about ways to shift the dialogue, but I think that we’re denying people’s lived experience if we expect them to completely extinguish the “freedom” concept.

I’ve been to a lot of funerals lately. People say, overwhelmingly, that the person who died is “in a better place now”. Isn’t that basically the same message as The Academy’s tweet? People try to make the best of it when someone they loved has died, and I think we’re treading on thin ice if we expect people to behave in a radically different way when someone dies by suicide.

If there’s research supporting the idea that portraying suicide as freedom or escape in the media tends to increase suicide deaths, let’s talk about that. Let’s give people suggestions for what to do instead.

But calling people out for getting it wrong makes enemies for us, and given that most people seem to have found the tweet comforting, I think it runs the risk of painting us as out-of-touch academics muttering about a tempest in the proverbial teacup.

Put differently, calling out the Academy is a war of choice. We’re on totally solid ground to pick that fight, but I don’t know that it was good strategy. It irritated people (many of them just regular folks who read CNN) without gaining much ground.

Effectively calling Williams selfish

I’m really bothered by the line in Schmitz’s article that includes this parenthetical:

“(contrary to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ twitter post, the genie is not free, the genie’s pain has now been dispersed to a very large audience).“

The genie’s pain has now been dispersed to a very large audience. Yep, that’s true. So what?

The argument seems to be that, by killing himself, Robin Williams shared his suffering with a huge number of people across the world, effectively traumatizing them and exposing them to risk. Because Williams was so well known, his death—by any means, not just suicide—was bound to be big news. Celebrity deaths always touch a lot of people. And therefore, Robin Williams should not have killed himself.

But the thing is, Robin Williams didn’t really have any choice about whether his death would be big news. It wasn’t under his control. If you’re a celebrity, people write stories about you.

I feel like this kind of statement is, somehow, sending the message that Williams owed it to all of us to stay alive because, otherwise, his death would traumatize a lot of people. It’s the “suicide is selfish” argument in other clothes. Keep yourself alive because other people will be hurt if you don’t.

My problem is that people struggling with suicide are already carrying a huge burden, and explicitly loading them down with the weight of duty and obligation to other people is unlikely to help. It’s likely to make things worse.

I don’t want to live in a world where Robin Williams owed it to us to stay alive. I think this kind of statement makes it harder for people with thoughts of suicide to ask for help because it sets up a duty/blame dynamic that gets in the way of supporting them. And, again, what does it gain us in our larger campaign to prevent suicide?

Media guidelines

We need to partner with media if we want to affect the course of reporting on suicide. Now that there are millions of blogs in addition to traditional media, this is a big job. We should expect that most journalists have never seen or heard of the media guidelines for reporting on suicide.

It’s ironic, perhaps, that Schmitz’s op-ed piece links to an American Association of Suicidology media guidelines page that doesn’t exist. In fact, I can’t find a single link to “media guidelines” anywhere on AAS’s main webpage. It’s there, if you mouse over “Resources” and then scroll down to “Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide”, but I missed it the first four times I went looking for it, and it’s not labelled “media guidelines”. If I were a reporter writing on a deadline, I’m pretty confident that I would have missed it and given up.

The tone of the statement, “clearly, not all professional journalists have read or follow the media guidelines regarding the reporting related to suicide and suicidality” feels reproachful. Yes, it’s true—most of them have neither seen nor followed the guidelines. But framing this in negative terms, by critiquing their past failures rather than asking them to partner with us in the future, buys us little but enmity.

Probably most journalists have never heard of our guidelines. They’re decent people, and I’d bet that most of them want to keep their readers alive (even if it’s just to keep buying papers). Let’s give them credit for good intentions and work with them to reframe the message, instead of criticizing their failure to follow the rules they didn’t know about.

In the end, I found the guidelines, at http://www.suicidology.org/Portals/14/docs/Resources/RecommendationsForReportingOnSuicide.pdf . That’s long and challenging to type, and it’s the sort of link that seems likely to break when the recommendations get updated. I’d like to propose two things: one, put a symlinked page at http://www.suicidology.org/media/ and another at http://www.suicidology.org/reporting/ that point to the current guidelines, and just redirect the link when the guidelines change.

Two,  put a link to “Media Guidelines” in the topmost menu bar on every page of the AAS website, in the line that has Login and My AAS and Shopping Cart. Journalists are always going to be pressed for time, and we are more likely to get them to help us if we make it really easy to do. Don’t make them hunt for the guidelines. Make it easy.

Denying lived experience by calling treatments effective

I’ve heard so, so, so many people saying variants of this: “mental health treatments are effective“.

It’s true. Mostly.

A lot of the causes of suicidality are eminently treatable, whether by medication, therapy, or a combination. I know hundreds of people who’ve had episodes of thinking about suicide, have gotten treatment, and have found that the thoughts left and never returned. That’s FANTASTIC, and that’s what we want to hear. If people are struggling with thoughts of suicide, we want to drive them toward treatment, because it works really well for a lot of people. It’s a good bet.

But there are a lot of people for whom the treatments are not effective. I talk to callers who’ve been in intensive treatment for multiple decades and still aren’t better. They’re still here, still fighting to stay alive, but they’re not better. We deny their lived experience when we imply that treatment always works. For goodness sake, Robin Williams was receiving mental health treatment when he died.

I know people who’ve started treatment and found that it made them worse. Different medications affect people in different ways, and some antidepressants make depression worse, which is why medication management and active physician supervision is so important. Prescribing psychiatrists tell me that treating this stuff medically is challenging and complex. The outcomes are usually good, they say, but it takes work.

Many others have told me they went to a caregiver who had little experience with suicide and said hurtful or unhelpful things. Our own field frequently touts the assertion that most social workers and counselors in the US have had less than eight hours of training on suicide! We’re taught to use that statistic as part of how we encourage people to come to trainings on suicide intervention.

And, in any case, suicidal thoughts sometimes come back. Schmitz says “suicidal thoughts, by their very nature, tend to be time-limited — though they may regularly recur.” There’s hope in that, because we really can help people through the tough times, but also despair: treatment doesn’t always make thoughts of suicide go away forever. In this context, it’s reasonable to ask what “effective” means.

All of this leads back to my conclusion that making absolute blanket statements like “mental health treatments are effective” is unhelpful. It denies the lived experience of a significant group of vulnerable people for whom treatment has not helped that much, as well as silencing the experiences of their friends and families who’ve worked to support treatment that didn’t always do much.

Let’s encourage people to seek treatment. Let’s talk about how it can often help, and how medications or therapy help many—even most—people to survive their thoughts of suicide and never look back. But until we have treatments that always work, could we let go of the black-and-white encomia of treatment?

Conclusions

When highly-visible suicide deaths occur, we have a hard choice. We need to do our best to minimize the risk to vulnerable people, and that means encouraging them not to kill themselves. We also need to care for the people who are grieving for the suicide loss.

But much of our work on a national level falls more into the public health sphere than the individual intervention one. Given that, I think it’s important to talk about how our responses to suicide deaths gain or lose ground in the larger campaign against suicide.

Respectfully, I feel that a lot of what I saw coming out of the suicidology world after Robin Williams’s death backfired. I’ve talked about Schmitz’s article because it offered concise examples of things that worried me, but there have been many more articles and interviews. I don’t really want to talk about the specifics of any one article; I want to talk about how we can address these concerns next time.

Most of the points I’m making here came from people who’ve talked to me in the past two weeks, since I’m known in my community as “someone who knows about suicide”. I found myself left without answers for why our field responded in these ways, and I found myself working—particularly in regard to the Genie tweet—to comfort people who felt that they’d been shot down for sharing an image they thought would help.

So let’s talk about this stuff. We need lots of allies in this fight. Let’s show them what we hope they will do, praise them for doing it, and avoid shaming them.

(If you’re here because you’re struggling with thoughts of suicide, I hope you’ll consider reaching out for help. 1-800-273-TALK is free and confidential anywhere in the USA.)

Lean Optimization and Automation

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I don’t know about you, but my life is really busy. Seems like I’m always trying to juggle a million competing tasks and commitments, and keeping track of them is challenging. I use Remember The Milk Pro for to-do lists, but I have lots of them and they’re overflowing. I know a lot of folks in similar situations.

I’ve started trying to pay attention to what I’m calling lean optimization, by which I mean two things:

  • Small changes that don’t take a lot of time to implement
  • Changes that reduce waste: of time, of resources, of money

I studied performance improvement in grad school, and I found compelling evidence for the idea that a lot of our ability to perform well in life and work comes from environmental factors rather than personal ones. Basically, you can often make small changes to your workplace or workflows that give you free performance boosts forever with almost no effort.

As I’ve worked with this concept with people over the last few years, I’ve noticed something else, and I’d like to introduce a term: microaggressions. I learned it in discussions about oppression and privilege, and it originally described the way that little things like women feeling slightly unsafe when walking alone at night can add up to make people feel really bad—even though each individual episode is small. That’s the sense in which I’m using it here: the sort of occurrence that seems benign when it happens once but becomes overwhelming when it happens often.

I think most of us have microaggression triggers in our personal and work lives. It might be the sense of dread you feel when you open your inbox and find 700 unread emails, or it could be the feeling of shame from paying a bill late. Maybe you beat yourself up for missing an appointment or forgetting a visit with a friend. Maybe you drop your groceries while you hunt for the light switch after work.

None of these things is huge. But add them all up, and they make a big difference. Most of them are so small that traditional time management techniques don’t bother with them. I’m arguing that these areas are low-hanging fruit and deserve our attention first, to clear them out of the way and leave capacity for dealing with bigger stuff.

Lean optimization

Thus lean optimization. Find the psychic leeches that bleed your attention every day and pour salt on them. Look for small actions that give measurable improvement and try them for a while. My point is that these are small things that carry wildly disproportionate negative effects on happiness, creativity, and productivity. Every item you can optimize or automate leaves your brain more free for dealing with the big stuff.

Hunting microaggressions

Here are some ways to find the things that might be ripe for lean optimization or automation.

Look for things you do frequently

Start by looking at things you do most days. If you add up their time costs, it can get big pretty fast.

I bought a new computer this year. I use a computer 10+ hours a day, and my old laptop was five years old and slow. It had some hardware malfunctions and a bunch of software issues that multiple OS fixes hadn’t improved. It would take 10 minutes to wake from sleep, and its battery life on a full charge was 19 minutes. I finally bought a new one, and it’s been astounding to see the huge effect on my life of not having those microaggressions—maybe even macroaggressions!—from a slow computer. I hadn’t noticed how furious it made me to wait five minutes for a web page to load.

Perhaps more important, I hadn’t noticed the ways my bad computer was destroying my creativity and productivity. I stopped writing music because my notation software took 15 minutes to load. I stopped recording music because the computer was so slow that my recordings would glitch and fail. I stopped working with photos because the software was too slow. A bad computer was the bottleneck that trashed a lot of what I valued in myself. Look how many articles I’ve written since getting the new one compared to the months before.

First Alert Motion sensor light socket
First Alert Motion sensor

I started installing motion-sensing light sockets in places like my basement and the hallways at work. Initially this was to stop wasting money, because people were leaving the lights on all night by accident. But it turns out that having the lights come on automatically is a huge boon when I’m carrying stuff in both hands, which happens all the time. These are First Alert Motion Sensing Light Sockets, and they’re $20. They can install into almost any light socket, and they work with regular light bulbs. Huge improvement.

I had never noticed the small amounts of effort I spent on finding light switches in the dark. Now, I don’t even think about it.

It doesn’t have to be about stuff—this can be process optimization too. I used to let my desk get totally clogged with receipts waiting to be entered into my finance software. A few months ago, I bought a file folder for organizing all receipts by month once they’ve been entered, but the important point was the rule I set: receipts are only allowed on the desk when I’m actively entering them. Otherwise they have to stay in my wallet or in the file folder.

This means that I no longer think about where to put receipts. They go in my wallet (or in my in-basket if they’re too big for the wallet). Once I’m ready to enter them, they’re allowed on the desk. As soon as they’ve been entered, they go immediately into this month’s space in the file folder. No thought, no microaggression. I was surprised by how much energy a glut of receipts could steal from me.

Look for things you worry about

Worries are really high-strength psychic leeches. People in the mental health world are saying that anxiety disorders are the fastest-growing category of complaints among new patients, and I believe it. Anything you can do to cut chronic worries out of your life is going to have great effects.

Floor sucker pump
Floor sucker pump

Our basement leaks a lot when it rains, and I used to come home and find water pooled on the floor, several inches deep. We don’t have a sump, so we can’t have a standard sump pump. So it used to be manual pumping, every time. I noticed that I was worrying about it every time it rained.

So I put some effort into finding a creative solution. I learned about floor sucker pumps and automatic pump controllers that would work without a sump. I built a system, tweaked it a little, and now it works perfectly. It has a hose that runs into our set-tub, and it automatically pumps out all the water as soon as there’s more than 1/2″ of water on the floor of the basement. It works really well. (If you’re interested, Superior Pump 91250 and Basement Watchdog BWC1.)

An $85 one-time expense and that worry about the flooded basement is gone.

My band, Frost and Fire, put out a new CD this year. (It is super-awesome and I would love to sell you one. They’re $15 and you can get them at our website.) I’ve been the person in charge of packaging and shipping all those CDs, and thanks to Lyme disease I get scared about forgetting stuff. So I was worried about taking people’s money and forgetting to mail their CDs. Low-grade anxiety, but it was there.

So I built a system where most people buy their CDs via PayPal, and I included a unique product code in the receipt. All the receipts get emailed to me, and I have my email set up to automatically flag anything with that code as important and bring it to my attention. It took seconds to set up, but it’s really helped me to let go of worrying about the CDs.

Worried about forgetting to pay your credit card bill on time, getting hit with late fees? Set up an automatic transfer from your bank that makes a minimum payment for you each month a week or two before the due date. Then you pay your bill as normal, subtracting that amount. The point is that if you miss it, you’re still covered, and you never have to worry about it again.

Look for things you need to do fast

If you rely on speed for certain tasks, it’s worth optimizing them.

In a hurry in the morning? Pick a place where you always put your keys, so you can stop having the microaggression of hunting for them.

Look for things that waste resources

This is where I started with the lights thing, although that ended up improving other areas too. It’s why I changed banks, because the old bank’s fees were wasting money and my irritation about it was staining the rest of my life.

As a starting point, you might look for ways your life is squandering:

  • Money
  • Time
  • Food
  • Gas
  • Personal connections
  • Opportunities for future growth
  • Intelligence
  • Drive and motivation
  • Goodwill
  • Happiness

The last one is important. I’ve found it really valuable to prune things that used to thrill me but are now sapping my happiness. This is obvious but worth repeating.

The takeaway

We often think that big changes are necessary if you want to see big results. I’m arguing that small changes, if you make the right ones, often have huge effects in how your life works.

Think of a lean optimization approach whenever you repeat a task or feel irritated by it. Is there a way you can try a small change and see how it affects things? Can you automate the task, make it atomic and uninterruptible, or change it somehow to get it out of your headspace? Can you neutralize its microaggressions?

Fixing this stuff really pays.

Got examples of how you’ve used this approach? Leave a comment or ask a question!

Censorship of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy’s Body

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If you aren’t familiar with ISIS*, check out their Wikipedia page or your favorite news organization.

Several days ago, an Egyptian activist named Aliaa Magda Elmahdy (@aliaaelmahdy) posted a very provocative photograph in protest of ISIS’s actions in Iraq. To protest their legacy of “violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment, and hypocrisy”, she and Inna Shevchenko crafted an picture of desecrating ISIS’s flag by smearing it with menstrual blood and feces. It’s a powerful image.

The original image, posted on Twitter by Shevchenko, came with a quotation attached: “ Animals, our execution of your ideas looks like that! Watch it well! & “. From that, it seems clear that Elmahdy’s piece is intended as ideological and cultural warfare against ISIS’s control and policing of women’s bodies.

Like I said, it’s provocative. It’s an effective piece of political art because it makes you stop and think.

A host of liberal, conservative, and feminist bloggers and news sites (of which these are only a smattering) picked up the story and have been running with it. The general tone seems to be a kind of in-your-face laughing rebuke of ISIS in particular and radical Islam in general. “How hilarious is it,” the sites all seem to say, “that ISIS is really big on controlling women and then there are women desecrating their flag by bleeding on it”. ISIS is probably not thrilled.

Kate of Victory Girls Blog writes, acknowledging the danger Elmahdy may face, “And whilst I am of the mindset that many fundamentalist Islamic men like to cover their women with as many layers as possible to minimize their very existence, this kind of protest on that issue may not be the best tactic right now with ISIS rising.” Indeed, Elmahdy has received death threats from all over the world because of the image and the intention behind it.

Not everyone loves what Elmahdy did. Briana Ureña-Ravelo writes a ton of really good things about how problematic it is that the West is jumping on this when we’re largely ignorant of the cultural context and are habitually appropriating the lives of Muslim women and using them to paint a picture that suits our narrative.

Censorship and the female body

I don’t really want to talk about the picture. I don’t even really want to talk about ISIS, per se, because I don’t have much to say about them that hasn’t been said a thousand times before, better, by other people.

But something has been really bothering me about these blog posts, and the Facebook/Twitter conversations that surround them as they’ve been showing up in my feeds. It’s a subtle thing that plays into the larger ideological issue.

ISIS is bad because they exert violent control over women’s bodies and police them heavily, decreeing how women are allowed to live and very sharply circumscribing their rights. Right? That’s kind of the thrust of the argument, and Elmahdy’s image stands opposed to all that: naked rather than clothed, bleeding rather than clean, utterly defiant rather than deferential, literally smearing shit on ISIS’s flag,

And we, the readers, rightly perceive ISIS as the bad guy here.

But I’m troubled because we often take it further, assuming our own moral superiority. Nothing like that could happen here! Victory Girls smugly opines “I am of the mindset that many fundamentalist Islamic men like to cover their women with as many layers as possible to minimize their very existence“, and we’re meant to roll our eyes along with them. How provincial and embarrassing, this alleged Muslim fixation on covering up female bodies. Thank God we’re not like that over here!

But here’s the problem.

In every one of those sites I linked above, they’ve censored Elmahdy’s image. Black boxes over the vulva, white boxes over the groin, black circles, you name it. Elmahdy was naked in the image she chose to post, but these sites have all chosen to clothe her electronically, perhaps out of the desire to make their posts more “appropriate” for their viewers.

In case that’s too subtle a point, I’ll say it differently: pot, meet kettle.

If we’re arguing that ISIS restricts how women express themselves and controls their bodies, and we’re using Aliaa Elmahdy’s image to make that point, shouldn’t it seem a little troubling that so many of our people chose to plaster their own fig leaves over her nakedness? Isn’t that kind of ideological kin with the idea that it’s okay to control women’s bodies?

I’m not saying that it’s equivalent. Raping and murdering and coercing women is obviously very different from Photoshopping in a black circle. But if the larger point being made is one of contrasts between freedom and oppression, between self-expression and repression, and between openness and control, we would do well to keep our hands clean.

Calling other people out for censorship and control while censoring and controlling the tools we’re using for the call-out? Not cool. If we’re going to demonize one side for doing repugnant things, we’d be wise not to be doing them ourselves.

Put differently: it’s ironic that we’re protesting ISIS censoring and policing women’s bodies by… censoring and policing women’s bodies.

So why does it matter?

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy took a big risk in posting that photo. ISIS recently beheaded a journalist just for being in “their” territory, and you can imagine that Elmahdy’s fate would be pretty bad if she fell into ISIS hands. She took that risk knowing what it might cost.

There’s honor in that. Let’s not diminish it by covering her up just to feel more comfortable. Present her image as she made it, or ignore it, but don’t change it or sanitize it.

*: ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL (“… and the Levant”), shortened its name to The Islamic State when it proclaimed a caliphate in June, so it’s properly called IS now. However, for clarity, I’m still using the ISIS name.

**: Okay, apparently they’re also bad for a host of other reasons too.

RF Interference Testing the Naiant X-R Hypercardioid Mandolin Mic

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After I posted my report on the Naiant X-R hypercardioid mic, which I’m using as a mandolin mic, my friend Dan Richardson wrote in to ask a question about how well it handles RF interference.

Dan’s a great audio engineer whose domain name, www.NotTooLoud.com, encapsulates much of what I appreciate about his work. Let’s do another gig soon, Dan!

Dan writes:

I’d be interested to know how it fairs hanging out near an iPhone that’s pinging a tower. grounding & rf shielding is a hard part to get right. Listen to the mic at performance volume while you take a cell phone out of airplane mode & send a text.  [snipped by me] listening somehow, just get a sense of the relative level of any interference you might pick up.

I don’t have an iPhone, but I decided to try it with my Android phone. I set the mic with the same gain settings I used in the tests I posted in the main article, and I placed the mic parallel to the long axis of the phone with the windscreen touching the phone. In the real world, I would never have a phone that close to the mic, but it seemed like a good idea for a “torture test” to see how much interference we could pick up.

Microphone test parameters

  • Phone: HTC Rezound
  • Location: Potsdam, NY
  • Mic: Naiant X-R hypercardioid
  • Audio interface: Presonus Firestudio Mobile
  • DAW: REAPER64
  • Audio processing: normalize track volume.

I started the recording with the phone on Airplane Mode. When I spoke, I was about a foot behind the mic, so my voice was in a pretty weak part of the mic’s pickup pattern. I turned off Airplane Mode (turning the phone’s radio back on), let it negotiate a signal, then sent a text message.

When it’s normalized, there’s definitely some interference going on there. Looking at the VU meters in REAPER, I found that the voice peaks at -1 dB, the Airplane Mode interference hangs out around -38 dB but spikes briefly up to -24 dB, and the sending-text interference averages -32 dB but spikes up to -23 dB.

This is a “torture test” in a number of ways, so I’ll bow to others’ experience on what these sounds and numbers mean in real-world effects on stage.

Mandolin Mic: Naiant X-R Hypercardioid

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My Naiant X-R mandolin mic just came in the mail! Here’s a quick overview, a lot of pictures, and some sound files.

2014-08-28 00.22.11 edited

 

Mandolin mics

Mandolins are challenging to mic for live sound/stage performance. They’re pretty quiet as acoustic instruments go, so they don’t put out a lot of signal. They also have resonating sound boxes that pick up and amplify feedback frustratingly well. In combination, these factors often make mandolins into feedback nightmares on stage, especially in challenging amplification situations like where Frost and Fire often finds itself. I’ve had several gigs where I had to stop playing mandolin because the sound tech couldn’t stop the feedback.

Which is frustrating!

It seems as though the mandolin world doesn’t have a “go to” mic setup that everyone likes. Some people prefer playing into a Shure SM57 on a stand, some like acoustic transducers glued to the soundboard, there’s a Fishman piezoelectric bridge you can try, some like onboard mics… you name it, there are people advocating it.

I’ve been using a Naiant X-X omnidirectional condenser mic on my wooden flute for a year or so, and I love it. Good signal, great tone, easy to use. And at $44, the price was right. I decided to contact Naiant’s proprietor, Jon, to see about mandolin mics.

After some emails back and forth, I decided to try one of his Naiant X-R mics for the mandolin. The X-R is a really versatile mic system, and I encourage you to check his site to read more about it. I ordered the remote mount (which puts the mic at the opposite end of a thin cable from the XLR connector) and the hypercardioid capsule (also available in cardioid, cardioid low-sensitivity, nearfield cardioid, omnidirectional, and omnidirectional low-sensitivity options). I added the viola/mandolin mounting bracket, and the whole setup cost $125.80 USD after shipping.

I picked the hypercardioid capsule reasoning that its highly directional pickup pattern would help to isolate the mandolin from other sound sources on stage, maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio for this quiet instrument and helping to prevent feedback. There can be a degradation in purity of sound with hypercardioid mics (at least, some people think so), but I was willing to take that chance if it let me play without feedback.

As it happens, I really like the tone of the mic. I haven’t had it in a stage environment yet, but I’m excited.

The mic

If you take a look at the picture above, you’ll see that the X-R comes in several pieces. The cable that’s connected to the large XLR connector is called the “remote mount”, and the smaller piece at the bottom right is the microphone capsule. There’s also a foam windscreen included in the package, and the whole thing comes in a nice velour bag.

The remote mount and the mic capsules connect to each other with gold-plated RCA plugs, which are a clever way of allowing a single amplification circuit to work with a variety of Naiant capsule options. Swapping them out is easy and quick; if I wanted to, I could order an omnidirectional capsule and have this mic do double duty between mandolin and flute.

Here’s the system with remote mount and capsule connected.

2014-08-28 00.23.02 edited

 

 

The mounting bracket

I ordered the viola/mandolin mounting bracket, which is similar to the standard “carpenter jack” mounting brackets used by many fiddle players. There’s a top (black) apart that holds the mic with a friction fit, and then the rest is a clamp with two turnbuckle-style screws for adjusting the fit. The bracket appears to be 3D printed out of some form of plastic, with foam on the bottom surface and cork facings on the metal parts.

I was initially concerned that the bracket might not fit given that my mandolin (an Eastman MD-504) has a Tone-Gard attached to its back. The Tone-Gard does make the placement a bit more tricky, but I found that it was still possible to attach the bracket in several places.

If you imagine the mandolin standing straight up with the neck pointing up toward 12 o’clock, I tried the mic at 1:00, 1:30, and 4:00. My friend Jeff has written about mic placement on mandolins, and you might find his work interesting. You can get quite a range of different sounds depending on how you position the mic.

Here’s the bracket without the microphone in it:

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And a side view, showing the turnbuckle-style screws and the proximity to the Tone-Gard’s plastic-covered attachment (the vertical white thing to the left of the bracket). Again, there is foam or cork protecting the bearing surfaces, so I don’t expect to have problems with the finish on the instrument.2014-08-28 00.49.13 edited

 

Here’s the mic installed, without the windscreen attached. 2014-08-28 00.49.50 edited

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And here’s the mic with the foam windscreen attached. I plan to play with the windscreen on, partly because the dances I play often have fans and breezy windows, but also because the windscreen will provide a gentle “early warning” if I’m getting close to hitting the mic with my picking hand.

I haven’t found that I hit the mic with my picking hand when the mic is mounted in either the 1:30 or 4:00 positions. I did hit it with the mic mounted at 1:00. 2014-08-28 00.50.46 edited

 

With the whole instrument in view, the mic remains fairly unobtrusive even with the large windscreen in place. If I were concerned about the look, I could just leave off the windscreen.
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Sound samples

This is an Eastman MD-504 oval hole mandolin with a maple 11-hole bridge that I made from scratch. I’m playing with a Dunlop Primetone 3mm sculpted pick; to hear the instrument with other picks, check out the huge pick comparison article I did.

These are quick-and-dirty recordings right after work. The signal path is the Naiant X-R hypercardioid into a Presonus Firestudio Mobile into REAPER64 running on a MacBook Pro with Retina. After rendering each take, I ran them all through MP3Gain Express to set them to a nominal level of 89 dB. Other than adjusting volume, none of the tracks have any sound processing.

Mic comparison: K&K Silver Bullet

In my mandolin picks comparison, I used a K&K Silver Bullet through a Shure X2U interface. I played my jig tune, Equinox, for all of those samples, and thought it would be good to compare the sound of the K&K Silver Bullet to the sound of the Naiant X-R hypercardioid.

The whole setup, with its bracket, fits easily within my mandolin case. It’s possible to leave the mounting bracket on when you’re not using it, but I’ll probably take it off just to protect it from accidental damage or loss.

If you decide to order one of these mics based on my report, say hi to Jon for me!

By request, I tested how the mic responded to RF interference from being placed next to a cell phone that was transmitting data.

So far, I really like the mic. I prefer the 1:30 mic position. What do you think? Tell me in the comments.

Why you shouldn’t share videos of suicide death

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Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out:
So where there is no talebearer, there the strife ceaseth.
— Proverbs 26:20

I have some things to say about how we can make communities safer from suicide, and about how we can take better care of people who are suffering grief and loss. I want to talk about what happens when we share images of how a person died by suicide, and about the effect it has on survivors of suicide loss.

But suicide is such an emotionally-charged issue that the underlying factors can be hard to see. So I’d like to start by telling you a story about a different kind of loss—and then we’ll come back to talking about pictures of suicide death.

A parable of loss

When I was in middle school, I had a friend who was killed in a road accident. As I recall, he was out riding his bike one day, wearing a helmet, doing everything right, but a big tractor trailer came by, didn’t see him, and killed him.

I remember getting the news and being shocked and pretty scared: I spent a lot of time riding my bike, too, and I became painfully aware that luck was the only thing that had protected me. I had been lucky, and he had not. I didn’t ride my bike for a while because I was too afraid of trucks on the road, and when I did eventually get back in the saddle, I was pretty nervous.

Time went by, and eventually his death started to fade. I got back to feeling confident on my bike around town, and my friends and I started riding in groups again. But I noticed, after a while, that some of my friends would always lead us away from the spot where our friend was killed. That if we were on that street, they would always head off in a different direction. That, basically, something about the street where he died was still excruciating to them, months and years later.

I’m sorry to say that I didn’t think about it a whole lot more. I paid attention to other things and moved on, as people do. We grew older, made it to high school, got drivers’ licenses and access to cars and the freedom to drive around.

And I noticed that some of the same people still wouldn’t drive past that intersection. It just hurt too much.

Reminders of death

When you’ve lost someone you care about, reminders are everywhere. Every Episcopal church reminds me of my grandpa George, who was an Episcopal rector. Every tune Gordon Duncan wrote reminds me, a little bit, of how sad I am that he killed himself and that, seemingly, none of us could do enough to help him stay alive.

Often these reminders of death are pretty painful at first. I believe that it’s part of the grieving process to engage with them and find ways to make peace with the fact that a person we loved is gone. But whether you’ve made peace or not, the reminders are still there, and the grief response to seeing one can be immediate, overpowering, and totally involuntary. (You might find the Grief Closet to be a useful metaphor here).

So people develop coping mechanisms. I stayed off my bike for a while because I was scared of ending up like my friend. Eventually I made it through that fear and managed to get back onto my bike, even though I was watching like a hawk for any trucks nearby. My friends found it too painful to use the intersection where he died, so they didn’t go there. They planned routes that didn’t take us past it.

And once the rest of us understood that that’s what was happening, we didn’t try to force it. We picked alternate routes too. We did our best not to throw the painful thing in their faces, because we knew they were hurting.

Talking about suicide death

I’ve written a lot about Robin Williams’s death and how we should talk about it this week. I want to help people see that there’s no magic in suicide intervention and prevention—most of it is common sense—and to encourage the idea that suicide prevention is a mission in which everyone can play a role. We are strongest when everyone pitches in.

Once people understand the reasons for guidelines, they often don’t need to memorize the specific rules anymore. That’s why I started this article with a story that isn’t about suicide: because most of us already understand what happened, and we get why and how our community quietly worked to protect the people who were still hurting.

My friend’s death in the truck accident was a traumatic loss for our community. Most people here were affected in some way. Early on, pretty much everyone had a hard time with that intersection, and most of us were shaken and scared. Some of us processed that quickly, although fears of being hit by trucks were common for a while. But others took much longer to return to “normal” after the accident, and some people still can’t drive through that intersection without thinking about what happened there.

This is exactly the same as what happens when someone dies by suicide. For a while, everyone is shaken. Most people begin finding coping mechanisms that work for them, and fairly quickly, most of the population starts moving on. This is good.

But there are still some people in the community who are really hurting. For them, any mention of the person’s death brings them straight back into the worst of their own pain. Images are particularly hard; what has been seen cannot be unseen. These survivors of suicide loss have a longer road to walk before they can make peace with the person’s death, and we make it harder by showing them pictures of deaths.

Pictures and videos of suicide death

There’s a video going around that purports to be a surreptitious view of Robin Williams’s body after he died. I’m not going to link to it, but I’m sure you can find it if you must. People have been posting pictures on Facebook and Twitter that are, allegedly, pictures of his body depicting how he died.

In the aftermath of a suicide death, people often want to talk about the “how” of the death. Maybe it’s because talking about how the person died feels easier than wrestling with why the person died. We have a difficult cultural view of death, and that can often lead to morbid fascination with the mechanics of an ending life.

It’s not my intention to ask you to stop having those conversations.

But please, as you talk about suicide deaths, be aware that you are surrounded by people for whom these images are profoundly painful. Remember that, when you talk about Robin Williams’s death, some of your listeners will also hear the story of how their son, or husband, or mother, or sister, or friend died.

Most of the time you won’t be told that this is happening; people tend to keep their grief on the inside, especially when dealing with traumatic deaths like suicides. People mostly won’t say “hey, my uncle died by suicide; could we talk about something else?”. But there’s a lot of research and a whole boatload of anecdotes suggesting that how we talk about suicide has a big effect on how survivors of suicide loss can heal.

If you think about it, social media has the power to really hurt vulnerable people. Before social media came along, when my friends couldn’t bear the thought of driving through the intersection where our friend died, they had the ability to take another route and, in doing so, control their exposure to the trigger. They could make sure it didn’t bite them out of nowhere.

But with social media, you can’t control what shows up in your news feed. You can’t protect yourself against those triggers because you have no way to know when they’re coming.

The saddest part is that, because of this uncontrollable flow of trigger images in social media, people who are grieving a suicide loss often feel that they have to isolate themselves, for self-protection, when they most need to reach out for support. 

The same is true for people who sometimes think of killing themselves. Talking about how a person killed himself isn’t really helpful to anyone, and for vulnerable people the research suggests it can push them to think more concretely about killing themselves. Being flooded with images of death is really dangerous for people who are considering suicide.

What to do instead

I’d love it if you would skip forwarding the videos. Don’t tweet that picture from the Coroner’s office. Don’t share the article in which an unnamed official tells the gory details about what really happened. Choose not to speculate about the method. Don’t be a talebearer, and choose not to put wood on the fire; help the fire to go out and the strife to cease.

Let’s stop focusing on how people died, and talk about why they died instead. Let’s start a real discussion about depression and mental illness, and then let’s put some time and money into providing meaningful care for people who want it. Let’s talk about how to help the people who’ll have thoughts of suicide tomorrow instead of focusing on how someone died last week.

If you want to forward something or share it on Facebook, share the article you’re reading right now. Or this one.

Suicide has been a taboo subject for too long. We need to talk about it, but we need to do so in a way that’s respectful and that avoids triggering the many people in our communities who struggle with their own thoughts of suicide or who’ve lost loved ones to suicide.

Remember, we are surrounded by people who are vulnerable, for whom images of suicide are horrible reminders of a loved one’s death. For others, videos of a dead person’s body trigger their own thoughts of suicide. So let’s keep the pictures off of Facebook and Twitter, and let’s make the conversation more about how we can prevent harm in future. These people are all surviving, but they can only do that if we leave their coping skills intact.

They can’t control what shows up on their social media. But, together, we can. Let’s do it.

If you need to talk to someone about your own thoughts of suicide, please do. Anywhere in the USA, you can call 1-800-273-TALK and get the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Many other countries have similar programs. Please call. 

I suppose it goes without saying that most of this also applies to the videos of James Foley being beheaded by ISIS militants. Jim Foley’s beheading isn’t something people need to see. Let’s choose to keep that off Facebook, too. People who want to see it will go looking, but let’s not forcibly expose everyone else, eh?

Melting and Metamorphosis

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This post came from nowhere while sketching on an envelope. All of a sudden, there it was. A melting, a metamorphosis, a meditation on the nature of change and our resistance to it. 

Originally, I framed the vessel as being filled, from the beginning, with a layer of ice, but I found myself wanting to point out that life has a way of freezing things up, not that we start that way—and that, once formed, the ice tends to crack and chip and break. And that our goal is to find ways of returning ourselves to the earlier state. 

It came out of the pen with the ice already present, but on reflection, I felt like it needed the change. So, metaphor metamorphosis! When you’re melting, when metamorphosis starts, you don’t always get to choose in advance what’s going to happen. Thanks for reading.

(I typed “meltamorphosis” a lot of times by accident while writing this. Huh.)

We start as beautiful vessels, filled with a glistening pool of perfect blue water that’s wonderfully clear. But over time, we freeze and move and take on new shapes, and as we do, the ice bends… then snaps… until eventually we’re left with ice cubes that don’t fit well at all, any more.

Because of time, and change, and spiritual frost heaves.

We need to remelt the ice. Let it thaw, let it start to run, and like springtime maple sap, re-take the shape of its container. The brokenness comes when the ice tries too hard to hold onto the old shape of its container.

But the new shape can be lovely.

So call it therapy, or prayer, or acceptance, or whatever. But if you’re feeling broken, see if you can find some sun to help you fit your new shape.