 Okay, great. My name is Mitch Altman, and this is kind of ad hoc, but a few of us are going to talk about geeks and depression and suicide. This is a fantastically uplifting part, a way to end 28C3 in the lightning talks. But we're actually going to make it, at least I'm going to introduce it as something worthwhile and maybe even a little entertaining. The thing is, oh, so Nick's going to close the lightning talks, and we're going to have, I'm going to have a few slides, and then Christine's going to talk, and then Jimmy, and then Meredith and Christine and Jimmy and I will have a little conversation. The thing is, depression is actually a big, big thing in our community, so I hope you stick around and Nick will now close the lightning talks. Okay, yeah. This is a session that's important to me, and so we have some time, and that's why I'm going to allow Mitch and his panelists to do that. But the lightning talks are now officially over. Give everybody a huge round of applause. I'm really, really sorry that we couldn't get to all of the lightning talk presenters, but I really hope that you'll stick around for this presentation because I believe it's really important and topical, and I'm going to hand it back to Mitch, and while he's running through the slides, we're going to get the table, try to silently set up the table for the panel. Is that okay? Okay. So do I have slides? So I'm going to recycle some slides that I did for a presentation a while back for Ignite, where I told the story of how I went from a depressed blob of a kid to being a person who actually loves my life. Sorry, Mitch, can you run them off your laptop? I can, yeah. Okay, I didn't, I didn't make that. Yeah, no problem, great. So yeah, most people who know me think that I'm a happy person, and I am. I totally love my life, but I didn't start off my life that way, and, oh, Michael's here. Do you want to be part of this too, like, yeah, great. So yeah, I started off my life way totally depressed, and actually went from being someone who had no clue how to live or enjoy anything to being someone who, you know, loves my life, and as a result, I've been able to empathize with a lot of people who suffer from depression and, you know, help people with their journey in life, and I'm really, really happy I can do that. One of the things that spurred this talk is a friend of mine, Ilya, killed himself last month, and I don't know if any of you in the audience, I'm sure a lot of you in the audience actually know someone who fell close to kill themselves, because I recognize some people who have had that experience. It sucks. It fucking sucks. There's nothing you can do about it, but there is something you can do in your life, and one of the things I did to cope is start discussion groups in San Francisco and encouraging others around the world in geek communities to talk about depression and suicide, and I wrote a very personal blog post that went viral, and I got hundreds of emails from people thanking me for putting out that blog post, and it was really clear that not only me, when I was a little kid, afraid to tell people I was depressed, but lots of people now suffering depression are afraid to tell other people they're depressed, and they even think that it's safer to kill themselves than to reach out for help, which is incredibly sad. So if we can create an environment where it's just a little bit less unsafe, maybe someone can reach out rather than harm themselves and live another day and do amazingly cool things with their lives and make our world a little bit better place as a result. So that's my intent for all of this, and you probably know people who are very depressed who you don't know they're depressed. I bet you all do. So let me run through just a few slides. I actually do love my job and my life, and it's really a huge part of our society that people don't love their work. How many people here don't like their job? Wow, this is a great community here. We do stuff that we love, but according to the internet, 80% of people don't like their work, especially in the US. But my name is Mitch Altman. I turn TVs off for a living, and I love my job. So like I said, you can too. If I can go through what I went through and learn to love my life, anyone can. I didn't start off my life though, loving my life. I started off my life totally depressed, propelled there by bullies who beat me up for being an introverted geek, gay, fat, bad at sports. And parents and teachers were absolutely no help at all, and life was total hell. So when I go on home, I retreated into the magical world of television, where everyone was beautiful, had loving parents, were supportive friends, where all of these problems were resolved at the end of a half an hour. It was incredibly depressing. So I only retreated more into television, becoming more of a targeted school, only to come back home to retreat into television again, which I call addiction. Can you say addiction? But there are many other ways of avoiding oneself, even things that later became positive in my life, like geeking out I could do at home. Electronics, which is my thing, is not abusive. The parts do what they're told. And you can do such cool things, but it's also solo. And it's another way of just retreating inward and not dealing with other people. So these pluses and minuses with all these things. And also travel. My parents did this U.S. middle class travel ritual, which is stuffing the whole family in a station wagon and calling it a vacation. But from that I learned that travel actually has some cool things, but can also be used as an escape. And I have to talk about pot because it saved my life. In my high school, all you had to do was smoke pot and you were considered cool. And then I found out I could actually enjoy hanging out with other kids. They did not only not beat me up, but we could hang out and be silly. And it was fun. But of course it has its downsides and I abuse the hell out of it. Work is another way of avoiding oneself. And I learned that from my workaholic father, who were treated from all the problems in our family into his work. And I started doing that in all of my jobs, because that was the example set for my father. And, you know, I was working in a job in a town that I really hated, a closet case, addicted to TV, addicted to pot, addicted to all these things that I was avoiding myself. And I chose all of those things. Choice is incredibly powerful. Choice allows us to do what we hate. It allows us to do what we like. It allows us to do what we love. And by making a choice the first time in my life of quitting that job and moving away from that town that I hated, it was the first time in my life that I could make a choice for me. Make a choice for what I thought might be good for me, rather than making a choice of what I thought other people wanted of me. Making choices for what I thought other people wanted of me was absolutely absurd, because I didn't even know what I wanted, how am I supposed to think what other people wanted of me? But when I started making choices for what I thought I wanted, then I made many mistakes. But I started learning from the mistakes and making new choices so that I could have a process that I'm still on and I will be on until I die of learning from my mistakes, learning from my successes, learning from my choices, and making new choices as a result. That led me to doing TV Be Gone and led me going to hacker conferences which led me to start hacker spaces and helping other hacker spaces and doing all these incredible things that I love and helping people any way I can. So I do want to say that I thought I had my contact information here. I guess I don't. If anyone wants to contact me for any reason ever, please do. My email is Mitch at cornfieldelectronics.com and you can find me easily online or at any cool hacker conference in the world that I can go to. So that's about all I want to say for introducing this topic. And Jimmy is going to speak, oh no, Christine is going to speak next. So you have some slides too. Sorry. Are we still actually streaming? Here we go. Okay, great. Give a round of applause for Christina. Thank you. Can everybody hear me? So I've been involved with this geeks and depression thing with Mitch for a few weeks and it's important to me in particular from the standpoint of depression as it relates to abuse and trauma and how one survives in the world after having a severely traumatic experience. First I'd like to say like many of us are here because we're different. We don't fit in wherever we grew up or in the families that we had and we feel this difference very acutely and even if it doesn't manifest very obviously as trauma, often it manifests as social ostracization or just the knowing that you're different and having people behave that way towards you and it manifests as depression. We are social animals. We want the comfort of others and then we put barriers up because we're not getting that comfort, we're just getting pain and we guard ourselves our emotional vulnerabilities. People who have survived long-term abuse are far further removed from being able to connect socially with others. We don't have a paradigm to draw on of any kind of positive interaction. We just have a cycle of pain and reaction and defense and as a result we are often misunderstood by others. We often clash with other people and end up continuing that cycle just by accident. The mental health profile of a trauma survivor will differ drastically from most other people. Hypervigilance is one of the biggest ones. We are on alert constantly for signs of aggression and potential pain because we're used to that. We're not able to communicate very well with other people or communicate in a way that makes sense to normal people. We can execute defensive actions preemptively, strike first when perceiving a situation of high personal risk whether it's emotional or physical, using offensive action as a defense. Often we just straight up hide what we're feeling. Look happy, fake happiness, fake being okay with being where we are just to make sure that nobody can hurt us. There's also a phenomenon called triggers where certain input will basically trigger a full sensory memory of a previous traumatic event and then that event is re-experienced and reacted to in the present moment and often it's a layering of the first traumatic event and then all the subsequent previous trauma. When under stress we can exhibit strange behavior, shut down, become nonverbal, become incredibly conflict-oriented, often can become a completely different person. And of course prone to passive or active suicidal ideation we can dream about killing ourselves or getting out of the world or not being there anymore because it seems like the only way out. Abuse and trauma often happens to children and children can't protect themselves. Parents and family members are often the ones who perpetrate abuse and there's no way to escape from that kind of abuse because it is your parent, it is the person that you're dependent on, it's your guardian, it's somebody that you trust and when somebody that you trust hurts you when you don't understand how to pick apart whether or not you should trust somebody that can, it basically permanently changes your world view on how to trust people and how to interact. There can be physical abuse, there can be hitting, beating, cutting, burning, withholding food or nourishment, confinement, emotional abuse via manipulation, reward punishment systems, personal devaluing, statements of worth, forced or coercive sexual abuse. Nuclear family structure is a huge point of failure. What's that? Because the nuclear family structure is so, so inter is, children can't really alert somebody that something is wrong because of nuclear family structure because if they try and go outside they will generally be disbelieved, not taken seriously, abuse can result in all of these different personality disorders, most often post-traumatic stress disorder or borderline personality disorder. Sufferers of depression are told to reach out, it is difficult or impossible for abused survivors to reach out. It often seems like the only way out, the only way to end the constant pain and often we don't know if somebody wants to help us we have no way to communicate that we want help. And we get together at cons, we get together at hackathons, everybody's having fun, everybody's like doing something constructive and we can often feel that we are the only ones feeling sad, feeling anything negative. For me personally, I have had a very traumatic personal experience. I was abused by my mother and had no way out and had no way to communicate that I was being hurt and then I grew up feeling that this was right and I couldn't communicate to other people what was wrong and I got into this situation where other people appear to be doing awesome things and I feel like I'm the only one who feels bad and for a very long time I couldn't reach out as a result. But hacking and our hacker community is our chosen family, I left the family that hurt me to find a family that I wanted to be with and being a family as well as a community means opening up to each other and supporting each other and you probably know somebody who is an abuse survivor but you don't know that he or she was abused, you don't know what they're going through because they don't feel safe telling you. And abuse survivors are often relearning how to interact with the world in a positive way and rewriting their own narrative because they got one that was honestly really shitty and I am hoping that other people will become aware of the fact that a lot of people do get abused and to learn how to accept each other and to help each other and to be there for each other and to make it safe to say I was abused, I was hurt and I would like support from my chosen family. Thanks. Hello, my name is Jimmy Rogers I'm going to keep this fairly short because we're running short on time I've dealt with depression since I was very young due to a lot of issues in my life Depression is always a very personal thing for everybody so I don't have to specifically go into it but when I was 16 I tried to end my life and luckily my mother came home just in time and I had this epiphany with a gun in my mouth that my actions would affect the lives of everyone around me and I was very lucky in having this realization because depression and specifically suicide is a very, very it's a very selfish act it's about as selfish as you can get it's not necessarily bad to be selfish in some ways but it's important to realize how this affects other people and if it wasn't for this realization I wouldn't still be here later in college one of my friends also he actually managed to kill himself and what I would like to say to everybody is there are people out there that you can speak to and it's not easy sometimes you just don't see it or you get into a mode where you're just so apathetic or separated from your body or all of these things you can get help there's an unfortunate trend with our western cultures and most cultures that mental health is your problem that you need to deal with and that is completely fucking false you can get help there are people to help you sometimes medication helps as well but talk to somebody I am here anytime I know any of these panelists are here to talk and the point of family that got brought up here this hacker scene is really important because this is also my family and while I'm not willing to talk about my specific issues here in general I will absolutely talk to any of you individually if you want to come to me I'm also a rape survivor so I've had to deal with some issues with that as well and I'm willing to talk about that in a very intimate setting but also not publicly for triggering type of issues but please talk to us we'll put up our contact information we'll get a slide up with our email addresses usually in a hardware area at a hacker conference near you but yes people are here for you so a lot of us have been through some hell in our lives and us here on this stage are not unique in this way we just happen to be people who were talking about this and we're willing to come up here and there's nothing special about us I wish there were but this is something huge in our community so we don't really have much time we have just a few minutes but one of the things that the three of us mentioned in our own ad hoc speeches is that all of us were afraid to reach out to other people and people we know who killed themselves were afraid to reach out to other people so this is really the way it is I know when I was a little kid I didn't want to let other people know I was depressed because I just proved that I was as defective as I believed I was so do you want to say something Meredith? well I was just going to say that was a particularly big issue for Len, my husband as well Len was also struggling with disability issues he was diagnosed with chronic depression when he was 15 Crohn's disease at 17 and then in 2006 he out of the blue developed a seizure disorder and some kind of degenerative spinal condition I mean it just got worse and worse and worse and as somebody who you know had been going to conferences and speaking and working at PGP getting into the crypto program at Kyle Levin you know he felt like it was imperative to maintain this external facade of competence and just not let on not only what was going on you know emotionally but also what was going on physically after Len killed himself in July I think the biggest reaction was wait him but he had the gap that you have to cross over to reach out and ask for help and I wish he had been able to admit that that things were hard because things are fucking hard for all of us and they're hard for all of us in different ways but you know the person sitting next to you is struggling with things that they haven't told their friends about but it might actually be easier for them to talk to you because sometimes it's easier to talk to a stranger you know Emerson do you mind if I talk about the conversation we had outside for just a second so I barely freaking know Emerson I ran into him like at camp basically and we you know and I was outside smoking cigarette and he said and he steps outside I say hi what are you going to be doing today oh well I'm going to be going to the geeks and depression panel and he asks he asks me so what did happen with Len and it was actually easier really for me to start pouring to somebody that that I don't even know very well but he said look I'm willing to listen so you know keep that in mind too because we have good fucking people in this community we have people who care about who you are they don't care about the image you put up they don't care about the shield that separates you from everybody else they care about who you are deep down they care about who you are in here and in here they care about the cool things that you create they care about the cool things that you bring into the world but they also care about the person that you are even when you can't thanks for that I want to say something hi I'm Michael I'm from Vienna I'm with Mithalab and in regards to reaching out the first step is also realizing possibly that you are depressed for a number of years I didn't really know that what I was going through was something special like I just considered the state that I'm in normal and horrible I realized it was horrible but I didn't even like get to the point where I thought like oh I have a problem there's something in my head in my heart wherever that I maybe should be talking to someone about it was just not there and it really took years for me to get to the point of like oh right this is what's happening and statistically speaking I seem to be in the bipolar spectrum so I have episodes where everything is horrible everyone here you are our community we're extremely exposed to horrible horrible details of what's going on out there so we have this special view that a lot of people around us apart from our community don't really understand so it's this load and then there's times where also coming to camp this year for example which are so exhilarating and wonderful and emotional that yeah there is extreme highs so this understanding in that particular situation where you're at that hey maybe like this complete bliss that I'm right now I should tone it down a little and also the depressive episode that hey talk to someone what's in your head maybe thinking about like the self-worth issues that you're in right now that hey you're doing cool stuff talk to people about what you think of them and you'll notice that there's a lot coming back of how people perceive you and I just had a conversation with someone that's sitting back there yesterday and I was really struggling again with like fuck I'm not doing enough there's all these wonderful people around me there's Meredith me Christina there's me there's Christopher there's I can name everyone Willow Arthur I don't care and they're all doing amazing stuff and then I'm looking at oh what I have done this year it doesn't feel like I achieved anything and then I hear from people like I hear from him that no you're doing a whole lot you're doing a lot and people love you for it and it's like this disbelief that that I was struggling with that yeah I said I'm a jack of all trades and a master of absolutely none right and these things talk to people find context for the spot that you're in and and reach out talk to people about you everyone cares this year I've left where I was immediately dropped everything to help someone nine times nine times this year five different people nine times there's a lot of messed up people that are so fucking wonderful that I would not want to do something stupid ever because they're helping everyone around them so much like every single one of them has so much going for them and personally at Metela we had a case where probably one of the most talented people that ever showed up he co-founded the Austrian pirate party he influenced the pirate party movement quite fundamentally bringing it from just a single issue party to hey we need to think about a lot more privacy, data retention he co-founded the graffiti research lab he co-founded several other startups that then turned out to be quite successful and everyone around him was just like realizing oh my god this is an amazing person and yeah, in 2009 two years ago 16th of December he out of the blue took his own life and it's something that Metela has been struggling with as a community since then but the wonderful thing that everyone realized is that hey we're people and we care about each other when something is wrong we're more and more a far more sensitive and so yeah I would ask everyone this community we really care about doing amazing amazing stuff but it's not only the doing it's also the people themselves that we care about that we need to admit that we do that let me just step in for a short second as you're aware there's a talk we're going to give you guys as much time as you need for this very important topic so let's say another 10 minutes but we absolutely need the other 10 to set up the room for the next talk is that okay with you? yeah for sure I was just going to wrap up so yeah I think the thing is this community of ours is one of the more amazing ones on the entire planet which isn't to say that it's perfect we all do things we're proud of we all do things that we wish we wouldn't have done we even hate but whatever you know or don't know you have something to share with others you know something that other people don't know no matter how much you know you can learn from other people and this is part of what makes this community so amazing is we teach and learn and share with one another and even when you are feeling terrible about yourself just know that you do have something that's really important to share and I hope you can feel at least safe enough to talk to someone to do so let's make the best of it and you know I think that's why we're all here we're helping each other, supporting each other and doing just that so unfortunately this is a topic that is being kind of a topic and we only have no minutes left so we can talk about if we have five minutes left, okay so does anyone want to say anything so this is a very heavy topic and I would like to thank Mitch for bringing it up and bringing it into this environment and getting people here and talking about it and I'd like to say that you don't have to be the wonderful person contributing amazing you everybody here deserves to continue their life and we would absolutely love to have everybody here and everybody outside and everybody in the world continuing their life and we really want everybody to feel like they can talk about mental health issues and you don't have to be suffering from depression to talk to your friends about depression you don't have to be feeling suicidal to talk to your friends about suicide you notice changes in one of your friends and you're worried about them you can ask them if they are feeling suicidal there is no evidence to suggest that asking somebody if they are having suicidal thoughts that they are at more risk of attempting suicide it is quite proven that the opposite is true and just asking somebody and talking to them and letting them know that you're there for them there are so many services available it is so easy to get help if you know that you need help and anybody can go up to their friends and say how are you going and if they give you two answers it's probably likely that they're not going very well and that they will want to talk about it eventually and provide as many resources as you can we have services in Australia like Beyond Blue I'm sure there are services all over the world which are there dedicated to helping people with depression and suicidal thoughts so get on the internet and find them so that you know where to point people when you're worried about them you kind of touched there on other mental health issues and I just wanted to make the observation that one of the cool things actually about this community is the amazing spectrum of neurodiversity that we have and I'm straight up ask me it is sometimes really challenging for me to convey to a neurotypical person what it is that I'm experiencing internally but one of the best things that ever happened to me was when I was in grad school about the time that my diagnosis was shifted from a nonverbal learning disorder to Asperger's syndrome I ended up with a therapist who basically said look I don't really understand how it is you think but I'm going to learn the language that makes the most sense to you this guy basically gave himself like an undergraduate computer science degree just to like help me chew on what was going on in my own brain because that was a good common language that worked and there are people in this community that can do that too and if reaching out to a person with one direction of neurodiversity doesn't result in the kind of connection that you need try again please please tell that person I feel like I'm not able to express myself right do you know someone who I might be able to communicate better with I mean ask, it's okay the diversity of our community is its strength and I would just like to very quickly say that shit gets better it really does the thing it gets better online it's kind of a cliche but it's absolutely lootly true and if I would have ended my life when I was 16 I would not have had so many of the amazing experiences that I've had even in the past year with camp and congress and all of the amazing people that I've met I still suffer from depression and even this year I've had some major issues where I've receded for a month or two and just not talk to anybody but I eventually come back up and things always get better and no matter how bad it seems as Mitch pointed out just do fucking something because you know you have nothing else to lose at that point and in a way you get a lot of freedom from that and just follow what you love and you'll find an amazing life at some point so there is no shame in reaching out and anybody who tries to shame you for it is a cock yes there is no shame in asking for help there is no shame in using medication and anybody who tries to shame you for either of those things is a cock so we have like what one minute left does anyone want to say a half minute comment great right at the moment when I stick a piece of bread in my mouth I'm one of those people that's also I'm one of those people that's also available to talk to anybody about anything as part of this community and your name is my name is Michael known as Exile Surfer online thanks so I think we have to vacate now yes unfortunately so if people want to continue talking let's do it out there and it's a topic that I think we're all into talking about here on this those of us up here so find us and let's talk one thing sorry as the ATOX signal angel I want to express the thanks from ISC they all would want to hug you but sadly they aren't really present and I suggest you join the channel Hackersdown on free note where we could continue discussing this topic thank you all I also want to talk a little bit about appreciation so thank you