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Infosec’s Mental Health Role Models

This weekend some friends asked about the reaction this blog has had in my industry. Truth is, I was unprepared for what followed the blog’s launch four years ago. In hindsight it makes perfect sense.

Mood music:

Friends asked if my information security colleagues were weirded out by the blog and whether it had an adverse effect on my ability to interview people.

In fact, the opposite happened.

By the time I was done baring my soul, people I had known through my business life were sharing stories about their own run-ins with mental illness. I didn’t expect that because I had been accustomed to dealing with some pretty tough characters. But people who had previously intimidated me were opening up, and I made dear friends when I least expected to.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, because the security industry is full of high stress and paranoia. More importantly, those who are drawn to the world of hacking and infosec have complex personalities and brain chemistry and are given to depression, feelings of loneliness and self-destruction.

Obviously, this isn’t something limited to the infosec community. People from all walks of life are prone to these challenges. But infosec is the world in which I’ve had the most experience observing the human condition.

As someone who has struggled with plenty of mental trauma, I’m thankful as hell to be part of the infosec community. I’ve witnessed extraordinary resilience and honesty among my peers, and they have inspired me to be a better man, constantly working to deal with the ghosts that still haunt me on occasion.

I’m grateful to infosec friends who haven’t taken the scourge of mental illness lying down. There are those who started and maintain The Information Technology Burnout Project to help those suffering with work-induced emotional and psychological distress.

And there are people like Amber Baldet, who has taken her suicide hotline skills to another level with a presentation on suicide prevention tactics that she has given at least twice at security conferences. Her presentation can be viewed online, as well.

Now more than ever, I believe I’m in the right industry. I’ve learned a lot about the technology and culture. But more than that, I’ve learned a lot about how to carry on in a world of perpetual adversity.

Skeleton Headache

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Honor the Mental Sacrifice Veterans Have Made

With another Veterans Day upon us, I want to thank our servicemen and -women for a very specific sacrifice they’ve made.

Mental sacrifice is always implied when we thank our veterans for the larger sacrifice of life and limb to protect our freedom. That’s as it should be. Still, as someone who has never seen combat but has struggled with mental illness, I’m especially grateful to troops past and present for carrying the mental burden.

Mood music:

I have many friends who have served in the military and have seen combat. They’ve been shot at, lost limbs and lost buddies they served with. They suffer with depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

I wish they could have been spared all that. But I hope they can get some satisfaction and even happiness in knowing that they raised the profile of mental illness as a scourge to be confronted more than perhaps anyone else could have.

Soldiers are known for their courage, and when that courage extends to confronting mental maladies left by war, they are breaking stigmas that have held us all back.

Amid the last decade’s War on Terrorism, we saw an alarming rise in suicide among those who came home and couldn’t reconcile their former lives with where they had been and what they had seen. We saw a lot of troops struggling with depression as they came to terms with the loss of arms and legs. Many of them shared their struggles publicly and, in the process, showed us all how to move beyond adversity toward something better.

One example that sticks with me is that of U.S. Marine Clay Hunt. He survived Iraq and Afghanistan but ultimately fell to depression, taking his life in 2011 at the young age of 28.

Before he lost his battle with depression, though, he managed to help countless people suffering with the same disease. As James Dao wrote in a New York Time‘s blog post, “News of Mr. Hunt’s death has ricocheted through the veterans’ world as a grim reminder of the emotional and psychological strains of war — and of the government’s inability to stem military and veteran suicides, which have climbed steadily in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.”

Despite the ravages of PTSD, Hunt threw himself into volunteer work. Dao wrote that he built bikes for Ride 2 Recovery, a rehabilitation program for injured veterans. He journeyed to Haiti and Chile with Team Rubicon to help organize events for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) and appeared in a public service announcement encouraging veterans to seek help for mental health problems.

Despite how his life ended, I hope his friends and family know how much he did to fight the mental illness stigma.

I want to thank him and all the other veterans who have taken arms against the enemy of the mind. Peace be with you all.

atwar-clay-hunt-articleInline
Clay Hunt participating in a 2010 Florida ride with the Ride 2 Recovery veterans organization. Hunt, who was active in various public service groups, took his own life in March 2011. Photo by the Associated Press

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Depression Takes Another Friend

Thomas John “TJ” Leduc was a constant companion during my childhood in Revere. I swam in his pool and slept over his house. The first time I was weirded out by the sight and sound of Boy George, it was during one of those sleepovers, when we were eating popcorn and watching Solid Gold, puzzling over the girl on the screen who sounded like a man.

Mood music:

TJ had a sunny personality that was often tested by those who made jokes about his weight. TJ was a big guy. I was fat myself but still joked about his weight. Sometimes, I really earned my outcast status. More often than not, we were close buddies.

As we got older, I came to value TJ’s sense of humor. That dude could make people laugh. It was always small things, like referring to steroids as “roids.”

Over the years we lost touch, but I’d occasionally attempt to find him. I checked Facebook regularly, to no avail. It turns out he had moved to Groveton, NH, and was running a market with his father, who I knew well. Based on a news article from their local paper, the market was a popular hangout. TJ is described as a great storyteller with a bright personality and sharp sense of humor that kept customers coming back.

But somewhere along the way, things went horribly wrong. TJ’s dad was diagnosed with leukemia and was quickly slipping away. As the senior Leduc lay in a hospital bed, TJ apparently learned that his father had accumulated a mounting pile of overdue bills. Maybe discovering that debt made him snap. Maybe it was the trauma of losing a father and business partner. It was probably a combination of both.

TJ died on October 1 at the still-young age of 40. His father died the next day, apparently unaware of his son’s death hours earlier. The newspaper article quotes police officers who labeled the death as a probable suicide.

If true, that’s the third friend from the old neighborhood to die that way. Before him were Sean Marley and Zane Mead.

Sad as I feel right now, I don’t feel the gaping hole in the heart that was there after Sean and Zane died. Part of that is because I’ve gained a lot of perspective about depression and suicide over the years, especially in light of my own battles with the disease.

I wrote a list of things I always try to keep in mind when someone dies this way. If you need some guidance, I direct you to “Death of a Second Sibling.”

Sean and Zane died young, with dreams and potential unfulfilled. It looks like TJ lived a good life and made many in his community happy. That article describes him as someone who cared for his customers and always had a free ear for teenagers who needed someone to talk to.

It kills me to hear that his life ended in despair. I pray that he’ll find peace in the afterlife. But I’m very happy to see that he made a difference before he left.

1117264_profile_pic
TJ, with his dad.

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Never Too Late to Renegotiate Your Life

When you have legal problems, mountains of debt, bad relationships and a job that makes you unhappy, it’s easy to feel like there’s a point of no return, that this is how your life turned out and that’s that. It’s not true.

Mood music:

I can say that, because I’ve lived it.

I’m thinking about this after talking to a friend who allowed an addiction to get out of hand to the point where he’s now facing jail time. One of the points he keeps making is that if he goes to jail, his career is over. He won’t be able to provide for his family, and all will be lost.

I’ve felt like all was lost many times. I felt that way as a kid as the Crohn’s Disease shredded my insides and I simply assumed I wouldn’t live to see 30. I felt that way when my weight shot to 280 and I failed at one attempt after another to turn it around. I felt that way when relationships with friends and relatives snapped over the years. And I sure as hell felt that way when I was in a job I absolutely hated.

Yet here I am, with a job I love even after coming clean about old and frequently reappearing demons. I’m married with two kids and pushing 42 even though age 30 seemed unlikely in my teenage mind. My addictions can still be a knife in my side, but I’m having more success in controlling them than I ever have before.

That kind of blows the notion that there’s a point of no return to smithereens, in my humble opinion.

I’m betting my sister felt that point-of-no-return feeling back when she suffered from crushing depression. Yet this weekend I watched her getting married, looking happier than she’s looked in years, and thriving months into a new job.

I’m betting my father felt that point-of-no-return feeling in the months following his stroke last year. Yet there he was the other night, walking with the assistance of a simple cane — walker pushed to the corner — walking his daughter down the aisle and later dancing with her.

Yeah, life can seem brutally overwhelming sometimes. When you’re knee-deep in legal, financial or relationship problems, it can be hard to see coming out the other side with a better life.

But it happens. All the time. All it takes is the will to survive.

If you have that, then it’s never too late to renegotiate your life.

Phoenix Rising

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Suicide in the Blood

A friend sent me a fascinating article yesterday about medical advancements in which a person’s severe depression and suicide could possibly be predetermined by biomarkers in their blood.

Mood music:

The article in Nature outlines how six biomarkers in blood can conceivably identify people at risk of suicide. Indiana University psychiatrist Alexander Niculescu and six of his colleagues published their findings in Molecular Psychiatry.

They identified nine men with bipolar disorder who are part of a larger, separate study. Between testing visits, the men had gone from no suicidal thoughts to strong suicidal thoughts.

These men’s blood samples were compared to blood samples from nine men who had committed suicide. According to the article, “This enabled [the scientists] to narrow their list of candidate biomarkers from 41 to 13. After subjecting the biomarkers to more rigorous statistical tests, Niculescu’s team was left with six which they [were] reasonably confident were indicative of suicide risk.”

The researchers have a lot of work left before they can prove beyond reasonable doubt that suicidal tendencies are detectable through blood tests. Still, I’m for any medical research that might speed the process of identifying people before they’re too far along in their suffering to be helped.

I don’t think it’ll ever replace the hard work a person now goes through to achieve mental wellness. Imbalances in blood and brain chemistry are problems that must be addressed. But it’s just as important for someone to identify the environmental and historical triggers that put them at risk.

My own challenges with depression have been shaped by personal history. I went through stuff as a child and young adult that will forever color how my mind perceives and reacts to life’s everyday trials. To get to where I’m at today, I had to talk to therapists about what I was feeling and untangle the web of memories that left me prone to out-of-control OCD and long stretches of melancholy.

Changes in diet and medication were also required.

To be fair, despite vicious bouts of depression, I don’t recall ever being suicidal. Whether my blood had the warning signs is anyone’s guess. It could be that I was lucky enough to get help before my problems became suicidal material. Or it could be that suicide was never something I was at risk for. Between my depression and watching more than one friend’s life end by suicide, it is a subject I’ve become obsessive about.

Maybe a blood test could have found signs of trouble in my friends and me earlier on. I’m not sure we’d have escaped the hardships that developed, but maybe we could have gotten treated sooner. Either way, it doesn’t matter now for us. They’re gone and I’ve found ways to manage my mental health through other means.

But if it makes a difference for people in the future, then the work of these researchers is something to celebrate.

Blood Viscosity

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Depression Causes: Add Sleep to the List?

Yesterday’s post on my sleep apnea diagnosis got a lot of response. Two big lessons from all the feedback: Far more people have sleep apnea than I knew, and those who have since been treated recall the huge mental distress caused by inadequate sleep.

Mood music:

Said one friend: “BIll, I too have sleep apnea. It’s a vicious, horrible physical problem. You don’t even realize how badly the lack of REM and deep sleep is changing your behavior and your emotional stability. Also impacts you physiologically in many and varied ways, including poor metabolism and blood pressure.”

I’ve attributed a lot of things to my occasional bouts of depression: past battles with addictive behavior, the OCD when I let it run hot for too long, personal experiences with illness and death and lack of daylight in the winter. I never really considered the sleep angle, though I suppose I’ve known about that all along.

Getting to the bottom of my sleep patterns started as an effort to deal with snoring and was more for Erin’s sanity than mine. (She’s a light sleeper, which means my snoring really messes with her own sleep quality.) But the benefits of this experience may turn out to be much deeper.

I’ve also gotten a lot of feedback on the usefulness of CPAP machines. A couple of readers reported that it was of little help. Many more readers said the device changed their lives.

Said another friend: “The first night I slept with the CPAP machine was the best night of sleep I’d had in two decades — no exaggeration.”

I’ve been told the success or failure of this depends on how accurately the sleep doctors fit me for the mask. You can bet I’ll keep that in mind when I have it done.

I thank you all for the responses. I’ll keep you posted on how the machine works.

CPAP Masks

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The Paul Revere Owl of Rage

A friend of mine from Revere found a drawing I did in junior high school. I had totally forgotten about it, but once I had a look yesterday, I remembered what it was about.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/JCGvONbVCa0

I was asked to draw something that could be used for the Paul Revere School eighth-grade graduation program. I was a misfit back then, a fat, slovenly kid who sucked at sports and verbally fought with just about everyone. But I could draw, and my peers appreciated the skill. My drawings were one of the few things I’d get praise for. So, naturally, I drew a lot of pictures.

This one was modeled after the scholarly owl in the 1970s kids program New Zoo Review. I decided to inject my attitude into the creature’s face, however, and you can see it best in his angry eyes. The picture is a bit blurry, but the eyes come through clearly enough:

Bill drawing from 1984
To be fair, I was just getting into heavy metal music at the time, and that had some influence on this “owl of rage.” But 1984 was also the worst year of my life up to that point. My brother had just died, and it was the first of my two years at Paul Revere School, where I didn’t fit in the way I had at the Roosevelt School in the Point of Pines.

One thing I remember clearly: My drawings always reflected how I was feeling. And at that time, I was feeling rage.

More on this time period in “Seeds Of Rage At The Paul Revere School

The rage lasted all through high school and beyond, though it moderated and mixed with the chaotic emotions found in all teenagers.

I eventually found God, a stable family life and a career, and today I can’t relate to the look in that owl’s eyes as well as I used to.

This makes me happy.

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Assessing Suicide Risk and Learning Intervention Tactics

Having lost my best friend to suicide in 1996 and suffered my own bouts of depression over the years, I’m grateful for those who rise up to stem the tide of this often-misunderstood scourge. In my industry (information security) I’ve met a lot of good people who suffer in silence. Among them are folks who refuse to sit back and take it.

And so we’ve seen the rise of such endeavors as the Information Technology Burnout Project and talks at a series of hacker conferences on how to spot someone with depression and intervene before it’s too late. One such talk happened at the DEF CON 21 conference in Las Vegas last weekend. The talk was given by Amber Baldet, who has also given the talk at such events as SOURCE Boston.

Mood music:

Baldet wrote of last weekend’s experience on her Idiosyncratic Routine blog and has graciously shared her presentation with me and others who couldn’t make it to the talk. You can view the full slideshow here, but let me give you the highlights.

Early in the slideshow, Baldet describes suicidal behavior as a contagion that “directly or indirectly (via media) influences others to attempt suicide.” I never attempted suicide myself, but my experience is that the depression of a friend, colleague or loved one can rub off on those who inhabit the same environment. It can deepen someone else’s depression and, if that person is so inclined, it can make them suicidal. Media coverage adds fuel to that fire, as noted in this slide:

We're Doing It Wrong

Another slide focuses on the clinical aspects, conditions that lead to depression and, in some, suicide:

Clinical Stuff

There are a lot of traits in the security community and beyond that spark depression and suicidal behavior. One is the tendency of hackers to stay up all night as they follow one code-based rabbit hole after another. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead, too busy CRUSHING IT,” as Baldet puts it.

There’s also a high degree of paranoia in our community. Paranoia is a disease I know well. I’ve lived it and watched my best friend get eaten alive by it.

The most valuable slides focus on specific ways to help others:

Rethink Our Service Model

Indetifying Risk

Oh Shizz Now What

Building Rapport

Bringing 'It' Up

Threat Assessment

Action Plan & Next Steps

I highly recommend you check out the full presentation, Suicide Risk Assessment and Intervention Tactic.

Thanks for sharing, Amber.

DefCon 21

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Dennis Wilson and the Manson Family

As someone long fascinated by the Manson Murders case, I’ve taken a special interest in the late Dennis Wilson, drummer of The Beach Boys and one-time friend of Charles Manson.

His time with Manson scarred his mind and soul for the rest of his life, something that’s evident if you listen to the entirety of his solo album from the ’70s, Pacific Ocean Blue.

The story of Dennis Wilson is an extreme case study in what happens when you make sex, drugs and booze the center of your world. In this case, it’s the story of a guy whose off-the-rails pleasure seeking led him into the baddest of the bad crowds. His troubles began when he picked up two girls who were hitchhiking on the side of the road. He took them home and had sex with them, and in short order the entire Manson clan moved into his house.

One of those girls, Patricia Krenwinkel, would end up with a lot of blood on her hands, participating in two nights of murder, first at the home of Sharon Tate and then at the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

Wilson didn’t mind having the family around at first. They provided him with a steady supply of sex and drugs. Manson wanted to use Wilson’s connections as a way into the music industry so he could become a recording star and spread his apocalyptic visions in his songs. He particularly wanted help from Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day.

Wilson introduced them and there was talk of a record contract, but Melcher was immediately creeped out by Manson and never came through on the promises Manson claims he made. Melcher was the resident of 10050 Cielo Drive immediately before Sharon Tate moved in, and though Manson knew Melcher was no longer living there, the speculation is that he picked that house to scare Melcher.

Long after Manson and his core followers went to prison, guilt continued to eat away at Wilson. He had something of a career comeback as a solo artist, but his substance abuse continued until late December 1983, when he drowned.

I sympathize with Wilson. Having had my own bouts of addictive behavior, I’ve always considered myself lucky that I was able to find my footing, remember where my priorities belonged and ditched the friends who were most likely to get me into trouble. Many are not so lucky, and when your soul is damaged all the money in the world won’t fix it.

Below is the first in a series of YouTube videos called “Cease to Exist.” It tells the story of Wilson and the Manson family in details never before covered, giving viewers a deeper insight into the world of addiction and depression. I highly recommend you watch the whole thing when you have time.

Wilson and Manson

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A Super Analogy About Mental Health and Summer

I’m in the middle of a campout as I write this, and though some of those around me are wilting in the 90-plus degree heat, I have to admit that I’m loving it.

Mood music:

It’s not that I enjoy the sweating and humidity-saturated clothing. What I enjoy is my mental state during long, sunny days. I’m always in better humor, more creative and more in the moment than I am in the dead of winter, when I’m more given to depression. The sun seems to play a role in balancing my brain chemistry for optimal performance. This is often called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

The new Superman movie, Man of Steel, presents an interesting analogy for me. Superman gets his strength from the sun. His Kryptonian cells drink it up and become batteries that propel him to great feats.

I remember one Superman comic book series in which the sun temporarily goes out, and Superman’s powers go out with it. The sun returns, but it takes some time for his powers to come back because his cells require a lot of time to recharge.

In a similar fashion, my optimal mental health doesn’t appear immediately after the clock springs ahead for more daylight. This past year, in fact, some of my most winter-like behavior surfaced mid-spring. But once the sun seeps deep into my brain chemistry, I’m good. Very good.

My goal is to get that state of mind to last longer and longer. That my mood fluctuations got worse in spring may actually be a good sign. Usually they rear their ugly heads in early February. That could mean progress. Or it could just be coincidence. I also admit that some of my spring-time brooding was the result of months-long uncertainty about where my career was headed.

I don’t know what the future will bring. I only know what I’ll be doing to make it as good as I can.

For now, I’m just grateful that we’re in the tight grip of summer.

Man Of Steel