Is online discussion good for democracy?

Habermas, the grand theorist of communicative action, actually had his doubts about online discussion.  Rather than facilitating democratic participation in the public sphere, he worried the Internet might just fragment it even further.

We’ve certainly seen how this can happen.  Like befriends like on Facebook and Twitter, and pretty soon we’re cocooned in a political echo chamber.  Or Google learns our search preferences and we’re trapped in our own personal filter bubbles.  For a lovely TED talk on these issues, check out this one by Ethan Zuckerman.

There are also cultural reasons why online discussion can produce fragmentation.  According to Habermas:

Transformative communication occurs under ideal speech situations, in which (…) people’s claims are comprehensible (understandable to others), true (they are not logically or rationally false and can be defended by argument or data), appropriate (justified by a shared purpose among participants) and sincere (people state what they mean). (Labonte, Feather & Mills, 1999; cites Habermas, 1984)

Hopefully nobody points out this all sounds very idealistic, because that is acknowledged in the name: ideal speech situations.

In my experience, online discussion is usually the opposite of these four things.  Nobody reads posts or articles in-depth, anymore; they just skim the text for launching-off points for diatribes in the comments section about their pet hates, which they carry from site to site.  When those positions are challenged, they just dig in deeper.

Far from ‘agreeing to disagree’, people don’t agree on enough to have a disagreement.  We just divide into tribes on every position  and nobody ever expects to change anyone’s mind.  In what Jay Rosen has called “the cult of savvy”, in political discussions we no longer debate the meanings, we argue about how to argue them.

I trained in law, English and cultural studies at university, and I work in HIV prevention, where I have a minor specialisation in the multi-disciplinary study of social stigma and the impacts of ethnic prejudice on social connectedness and health.

In an earlier post I attributed the increasing pointlessness of debates about HIV prevention to the influence of tabloid and talkback culture.  But there are also middlebrow sites like New Matilda, Crikey, and the Drum where bloggers can become ‘opinion celebrities’ and this creates an opinion economy in which controversy is currency: hotter topics mean bigger social media uptake means more hits for your post.

The ‘debate’ over #hysteria

Recently Justin Shaw and Ben Pobjie wrote articles for Shaw’s publication The King’s Tribune, which has just started charging for its print edition.  In the same edition they both wrote about feminist responses to porn and they both used the word hysteria.

Tammi Jonas (@tammois) politely took this up with Shaw (@juzzytribune) on Twitter.  He very quickly conceded her point, but he also sent these side-tweets to Pobjie (@benpobjie):

@juzzytribune: @benpobjie you ready for the hate, big guy? It’s started…

@juzzytribune: @benpobjie our p0rn pieces. I’m a sexist pig, you’re (as usual) making rape jokes..

In the shitstorm that ensued, Pobjie made a claim I want to interrogate here:

But Shaw had referred to anti-porn crusader Gail Dines’ “hysterical screeches”, and unless she was laughing uncontrollably or unable to speak from emotion on Q&A, the dictionary definition Pobjie cited couldn’t possibly fit the usage.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, ch 6.)

“Hysteria” no longer literally means pathology of the uterus that disorders the female mind, but that is the history to which its modern-day use as metaphor refers.  Pobjie knew this ahead of time, since he mentions nineteenth-century treatments for the condition in his own article:

There are many reasons a person might be weird enough to not like pornography. For example, that person may be suffering from nervous hysteria and just need a good finger massage or fire-hose-induced orgasm to set things right.

At this point the whole thing is looking a lot like a setup.  We’re no longer arguing about porn, if we ever were — now we’re arguing about whether words mean what the dictionary says they mean.

Following John Howard’s eleven year war on post-modernism and political correctness, Lefty writers seemed to retreat into a bunker of political naturalism: a cult of common sense worshipping in a temple of the taken for granted.

It’s a world in which words mean what the dictionary says, in the way their authors intend, and interpretation stops there;  where you take a man at his word when he says he’s not anti-feminist;  where arguments consist only of premises combined according to the rules of formal logic;  where the Queensberry Rules apply to women debating men on Twitter.

A retreat to the intellectual conditions of the 1950s, in other words.  John Howard would feel right at home.

It makes no sense to refer to a ‘debate’ over #hysteria, because Pobjie performed a public refusal to engage with Jonas.  He wanted to dismiss her point and shut her down; to suggest that talking about male privilege and its effects on his perspective was a complete waste of breath; when his responses didn’t achieve these functions he sought to filter her, as if she were noise, from his stream; and finally, he set his entire Twitter account to hidden.

Above all, he wanted to deny the rationality of a feminist response to Shaw’s article.

The ‘ad womynym’ attack

That denial was perfectly continuous with the historical logic of the diagnosis of hysteria: it began its life as a medical hypothesis but quickly entered popular circulation as a condition any man could diagnose at will in a woman he no longer felt like listening to.

The nature of male privilege was made blatantly apparent: educated white men think they get to define rationality.  And then they get to have natty jackets made and decide who gets admitted to the club.

This kind of response was repeated over and over again in the firestorm of criticism that engulfed Jonas in the following days.  Instead of disagreeing with her, they simply refused to recognise what she said as argument, preferring to characterise it as an emotional overreaction, oversensitivity, an ego trip, a personal attack, and a failure of niceness.

To use a debating metaphor, these participants don’t see themselves as debaters, they think they’re adjudicators — that their critical stance and 140-character emanations operate on a higher plane where they argue-about-argument instead of actually engaging.

Their responses — abuse, stonewalling, ‘gaslighting’, derailing, dismissal and denial of rationality — reflect a stable and predictable pattern that emerges whenever educated white men and their apologists feel challenged by a woman: the ‘ad womynym’ response.

The label was coined by Tseen Khoo after some numpty accused Jonas of ‘ad homynym’ (sic) attacks.  I think it’s particularly apt, because it involves the dismissal of a ‘straw womyn’ — a reduction of all feminism to a single caricature of the queer, postmodern and critical theory-inspired feminism found in universities.

For anyone writing from the Left about porn, that dismissive response is unforgivably stupid, because it’s exactly that school of thought that has the most to offer anyone looking for counter-arguments to Gail Dines, Melinda Tankard Reist, Bettina Arndt, Steve Biddulph and Steve Dow and all the other opinion celebrities peddling essentialist crap about sex and gender in modern society.

So why do they do it?

As Gramsci used it, the word hegemony refers to the way in which social inequality is made to seem normal and natural, common sense, just the way the world works; it can be seen operating in all those responses that insisted on taking the word “hysteria” at face value, ignoring its history and multiple layers of meaning — all of which are conveyed when it is used.

Hegemony is what makes feminist interpretation vulnerable.  Like any critical theory, it works by de-naturalising, by posing questions that reveal the hidden ideological baggage of common sense and every day life.  That’s never an easy feat; there’s a lot weighing against it — not least the desire to live a simple, easy, comfortable life, unplagued by difficult ethical questions. Sure enough, Shaw’s article is all about how feminists overthink everything and the porn issue is all really very simple.

So what have we learned?

This brings us back to Habermas and the problem of fragmentation for the possibility of transformative communication.  Jennifer Wilson (@noplaceforsheep) took Jonas to task for wanting to convince people:

In Wilson’s view, the purpose of discussion is to “express POV” (points of view).  I’d like to draw out the difference between “expression” and “communication”.  Expression doesn’t need anyone to hear it — expression could be two people shouting about different topics from opposite ends of a room.  As long as they get their views out, expression has occurred.

Communication, on the other hand, requires both parties to listen as much as they speak.  I think Wilson gives a pithily accurate summary of the ethos of most ‘discussion’ on Twitter and in blogland, and indeed of articles in the middlebrow opinion economy in Australia.  It’s about getting your views out, not seeking to persuade anyone.

What’s missing in this view is the speech condition of appropriateness — the idea that disagreement is justified by a shared purpose.  This is what I meant above when I said we don’t agree enough to disagree.  We don’t agree on the possibility of agreement — we’re not open to changing our own views and don’t expect to convince anyone.  It’s just serve and volley of opinions.

Wilson goes on to add “respond to challenges [and] engage with them” — but how is that possible when someone replies #block #fuckyou, I wonder?  Pobjie didn’t engage: he dismissed, ad womynym. In the classical formulation, an ad hominem attack fails to separate the man and his argument.  The underlying logic of ad womynym isn’t attack, it’s refusal to engage.  It says ‘nothing you say can ever persuade me of anything’.  It dismisses the person and their argument.

A further challenge to online discussion is that we’ve all studied in a highly fragmentary education system.  Separate subjects, separate streams, separate degrees, separate departments, separate majors.  Jonas took a patient, good-faith approach to explaining the underpinning of her views to Shaw and Pobjie, setting out to make her claims comprehensible.  But we are coming to argument in the public sphere from ever greater conceptual distances apart.  It was a distance Pobjie just couldn’t be arsed attempting to cross.

Finally, it was striking how many of the responses on Twitter evinced concern trolling, and how most blog posts and articles on hysteria/Dines/porn have adopted a tone of very heavy sarcasm.  Maybe we’re all embarrassed by talking about porn.  Maybe it reflects the fact that so many saw it as a flamewar rather than a discussion with a real point to it.  But the whole thing lacked sincerity. As for truth in the porn debate, that’s a topic for another post.

Once I opened the wardrobe in the bedroom of a guy I was going out with, looking for towels, and I found a list: ‘What I am looking for in a partner’.  He’d been reading that awful, stupid book, The Secret, which told him to tell the universe what he wanted and this would ‘call it’ into being.  So he made a checklist of all the things he was looking for:  tall, white, professionally employed, et cetera; and the horrifying thing is, I was a pretty close match.  The relationship blew apart pretty soon after that, not because of my chagrin at being typecast, but because we were completely incompatible — sexually, emotionally and in our values around relationships.

Ever since then, if I even get a whiff of a ‘checklist’, I run a mile.  Guys post their list on their Manhunt profiles, or in chat, they’ll ask “what are you looking for” in the expectation that we’ll swap lists and tick off all the items we have in common.  It is desperately boring.  It’s a mercantilist take on human relationships, like a buyer and a vendor meeting in a marketplace and negotiating over an exchange of goods.  Guys who partner up on these terms often treat them as a contract, and cry foul when their partner turns out to have undisclosed interests or dimensions: “He didn’t tell me he wasn’t over his ex!” 

Most importantly, they’re operating on what I have called a logic of sameness, which assumes the most important predictor of a good relationship is matching — either literal similarity between the partners (‘pets who look like their owners’ syndrome; partners who could be twins) or close fit between your partner and your checklist.

The former is called homophily and it’s an incredibly reliable pattern in studies of dating and relationships: people tend to partner up with people who are similar on salient characteristics like class and religion.  The latter is an ego thing: it’s the belief that ‘I design my life, and I will design (ahead of time) the kind of partner I want, and I will choose a person who fits the bill, and we will have the kind of relationship that matters to me’.  I meet these guys in their thirties, bewildered by never having had a relationship longer than a few weeks or months (if that), saying in their profile “looking for the one”, painting themselves as the Last True Romantic.

In those brief, abortive relationships they never manage to ‘get outside their heads’, to see the person in front of them, to perceive them as a stranger — to have an encounter with the Other.  They can only see their checklist and keep measuring him up against it.  If you ask the Last True Romantic to set aside the checklist and play it as it goes, he’ll bridle, refusing to ‘lower his standards’.  And there’s the truth of it.  His ‘standards’ are a shield, there to protect him from the radical uncertainty of trying (and often failing) to live in relationship with an other.  He wants a Long Term Relationship instantly, skipping over the steady, day-to-day negotiation of differences.  He can’t manage the day-to-day, he can only manage Forever.

It’s a powerful desire, fundamentally egocentric, and it’s the same desire that drives the demand for gay marriage.  But that’s a topic for another post.

These posts always get a reaction from my friends — a mix of catty, hilarious remarks and thoughtful conversation on the issues involved. Someone recently said ‘hey, you should post these on your blog’.  It has been done before, with the infamous Douchebags of Grindr.  I admit to chuckling at first, but pretty soon the posts came to seem pretty douche-y themselves; there’s no moral high ground in the business of public humiliation.

There’s another problem that’s specific to citing text from online profiles: many personals sites feature keyword search, and a canny reader can enter unusual words from the quote to locate the source, destroying the possibility of anonymity.  I see this done in research papers, especially on the role of the Internet in facilitating bareback culture, and it always makes me wince.  If you think this is implausible, go on a date with someone under 25, and see how thoroughly they ‘facestalk’ you beforehand.

But I see some themes again and again in people’s profiles and I really want to respond to them, in some way more efficient than just sending them all messages.  Here’s a recent example:

i wanna make more friends but it seems to be hard to find out here.. everyone comes then goes away with the same reason coz i couldnt accept them 4 sex in the 1st time… how ridiculous…!!!!

This is from a young Asian man. Before posting it here, I sent him this message to ask for permission:

i write a blog at http://badblood.wordpress.com.  i sympathise with the trouble you’re having making friends, and i’d like to write a blog post about it.  would it be okay if i quote your profile text in my blog post?  i won’t say your nickname but there is a small possibility someone might trace it back to you if they had a [Gaysite] profile and searched for the words in the quote.  hope you can have a think about it and let me know.

And then he didn’t reply, so I replaced the unique-ish words in his post with synonyms and checked to make sure he can’t be found by searching.

lonely, looking for friends

There are a lot of men, often (but not exclusively) Asian men, whose profile text expresses their frustration about the difficulty of making friends on gay chat sites.  The text will sometimes say they are looking for friends first, implying there may be some subsequent progression. Sometimes the text will say ‘lonely’, and this is often written with some frustration.  I can only speak for myself, but I have come to avoid messaging people with this text in their profiles.

I feel guilty about it, because I know Melbourne friendship culture is difficult to break into.  We don’t refer to friendship directly – you would never ask someone to be your friend; it’s expected to develop organically, through the discovery of sharing interests and sense of humour.

Friendship in Melbourne is ferociously homophilous: like befriends like, and likeness is judged by subtle criteria.  If you’re new in town, it will just seem like the vast majority of people are polite but not terribly interested in pursuing a friendship with you, and the harder you try, the more they back off.  Plenty of single migrants give up on Melbourne and move to Sydney or Brisbane, and I don’t blame them.

But it’s not entirely cultural — sometimes the breakdown happens at the individual level. Take the guy I quoted:

i wanna make more friends but it seems to be hard to find out here.. everyone comes then goes away with the same reason coz i couldnt accept them 4 sex in the 1st time…how ridiculous…!!!!

It’s hard to find friends on Gaysite, and he’s having zero success, but his response is to express anger and keep trying.  There are two things he could question here.  The first is fairly simple: is Gaysite the right place to look for friends, if everyone else is looking for sex?

My answer would be there are other, much better ways of meeting gay friends.  Taking part in a Young & Gay peer education workshop at the Victorian AIDS Council / Gay Men’s Health Centre; volunteering for a gay community organisation like JOY Melbourne, ALSO Foundation, Melbourne Queer Film Festival, Switchboard, Pride March, Midsumma Festival — the list is extensive and there’s something for everyone.

But there’s another possibility, and it’s encoded in the wording ‘friends first’.  Some users lament the lack of friendship but persist in spaces they themselves identify as hookup joints.  Maybe they are looking for sex.  Many recent migrants find Aussie hookup culture a bit repellent, especially in its rapidity and impersonality: “i couldnt accept them 4 sex in the 1st time”.  So they say “looking for friendship first”.

It turns out that’s just about the worst thing you can say to an Aussie guy, because we do not fuck our friends.  We might fuck first and then become friends, and there are sexual friendships, but for the most part, friend sex is taboo.

(If you disagree, tell me about it in the comments. Lots of detail, please.)

I’ve asked Asian men on gay chat sites about this and they say it’s exactly the same in their countries of origin: you would no sooner go to bed with your best friend than you would with your brother, so it’s a bit puzzling that it translates into “friends first” in Australia.

A better thing to say might be “I’d prefer to get to know you before we get it on.”  Saying it this way avoids sounding like you’re judging everyone else who does things differently.  The smart guys will adjust their approach to get into your pants, and the inflexible guys will pass you over, so you both avoid an aggravating conversation.  Everybody wins.

next week:  looking for LTR

Next Friday, I’ll post part two, on what happens when your profile text says “looking for genuine guys for a long term relationship”.  In the meantime, please feel free to post your thoughts in the comments.

The first was that marriage is a contract assigning sexual consent, so that a husband could not be prosecuted for raping his wife.

The second was a comment on the supposed difficulty of proving the charge of rape.  This became known as the cautionary rule and was read out to juries at the end of rape trials:

[I]t must be remembered that it [rape] is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, though never so innocent.

Both rules have been abolished in most common law jurisdictions, but they lasted on the books until surprisingly recently.

And while nobody these days would argue that rape in marriage should be legal, the cautionary rule lives on — in the culture of our legal system and intense media scrutiny of anyone who cries rape.

Geoff Lemon trots it out on Crikey in his defence of Peter Roebuck:

Apparently a reminder is due that allegations do not equal guilt, and that sexual impropriety is the easiest charge to make and the hardest to dispel.

The problem with the cautionary rule is that it is demonstrably false.

Rape and sexual assault are heavily under-reported. Where complaints are made, they suffer high rates of attrition at every stage, from the recording of the complaint, investigation by police, and the decision to proceed by public prosecutors. Victims of rape undergo brutal cross-examination and the conviction rate of contested trials is much lower than comparable crimes.

In truth, the opposite is true: it is difficult to charge and much easier to defend.

The reminder due is that we don’t know what happened between Peter Roebuck and his accuser.  His death has left the waters murky, but that tells us nothing about the truth or otherwise of the allegations against him.

But one thing is crystal clear – it does nobody any good to repeat the specious idea that complaints of sexual assault, as a class, cannot be trusted.

And so we get this:

So now we’re celebrating something so bland and asinine, everyone can get behind it, i.e. LOVE.

There’s a really weird double standard in the logic of this rebrand. Before the new logo, symbols are taken to matter: calling it ‘gay and lesbian’ is said to exclude bisexual, trans, intersex and straight people. After the new logo, symbols are taken not to matter: removing ‘gay and lesbian’ does not signify the de-gaying of Mardi Gras and replacing sexualities with love hearts does not de-sexualise it.

But symbolism matters all the time, and its meaning isn’t governed by the stated intentions of the brand’s authors (see Barthes, 1967).

Why does it matter? I asked a young (early twenties) Facebook friend, without consulting Google, what the purpose of Mardi Gras was.  He said to promote tolerance and celebrate diversity. Let’s call this the cover story.

I told him I view Mardi Gras as a commemoration of a historical event. His response was really interesting:

Ok, I didn’t know that. But then that seems like the perfect reason for Mardi Gras to rebrand themselves; their original purpose has evolved. I’d say that most people my age don’t know the origins and don’t care. They think of Mardi Gras something closer to the dictionary meaning: ‘day of carnival and merrymaking’.

Isn’t the Mardi Gras allowed to evolve and change? Or is it expected to forever chew on old cud; potentially alienating its market? The Mardi Gras and its experience is a product, their owners are right to cater to their market.

And let’s call this the real story. As people forget the history and grow up without the experience of oppression that makes it intelligible, they see Mardi Gras as just another party option, one among many. With patronage falling, sponsorship becomes more important for survival, and it’s a lot easier to get sponsorship without Gay & Lesbian in your title, especially with a conservative Liberal government in power. And I’m sympathetic to all of those concerns – getting the balance right is a matter of life or death for the organisation and the festival it stages.

But my young friend’s response really highlights what’s at stake: a lot of young men are embarrassed by sex, embarrassed by activism, and not terribly interested in the history that gives meaning to both. They see venues as commercial spaces and parties as products, and wonder why their experience of gay sociality is so harsh and impoverished.

I’d love to believe that queer theory can fill the gap, but lately it has all but abandoned community – as a concept and in practice – and retreated into cliquey academic elitism. Institutions like Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras that bridge the old and the new, the historical and the everyday, are more necessary than ever.

I’m flying Malaysian Airlines to KL and from Saigon back to Melbourne.  Those flights are the backbone of my trip.  The limbs are shorter flights, from KL to Denpasar, and Denpasar to Jakarta and onward to Saigon.  I’ve been hoping to fly AirAsia for those flights.  But for weeks, their site has repeatedly declined my Westpac Mastercard.  It turns out I’m not alone.  I’m a classic Gen Y – I will exhaust every other option before I get on the phone – so I tried their e-form, their online chat, Twitter accounts (@airasia, @askairasia, @tonyfernandes) – before finally calling.

The online information services all gave me unhelpful advice or canned lines.

In response to your email, we are extremely sorry to hear that you were experience difficulties while making online booking with us. We would like to inform that we currently having difficulty in verifying some card issued by certain bank. We recommend that you to use another credit card to make your purchase.

@airasia Hi, suggest you try to book with a different card

e-Chat:  Try signing into ‘My Account’ on our website and registering your card as a 1-Click payment option, or use one of our Direct Debit services.

AirAsia claim that Paypal can be used for transactions from Australia, but they seem to determine your country of origin based on the currency you select or your destination, and AUD is no longer listed in their currencies list, so that left me with Indonesian and Vietnamese bank options.

Finally I called and the operator I spoke with confirmed that AirAsia has been having a problem with Westpac Mastercards.  So this afternoon I hit up Australia Post, picked up a prepaid Visa debit card, loaded it and used it successfully to book my flights.

I used to like AirAsia.  They’re quick and efficient with a friendly public image.  Now, I’m not so sure.  There are two possibilities:

• They might be incompetent as a learning organisation, so that knowledge available to their call centre doesn’t get passed onto their online team.
• Or more likely, they don’t want to admit a failing in an online environment, fearing it will ‘go viral’ and get RT’d all over Twitter.

But let’s look at this from the customer’s point of view: what is the value of having online contact methods if you get bad information from them?  You’re just wasting my time inviting me to contact you online if you’re not going to be honest and upfront in that space.  And you’re wasting my money; in the time I spent trying to fix this issue, three or four weeks, the price of the flights increased.

AirAsia got my money and my custom, but lost my respect in the process. Isn’t that what online engagement is meant to strengthen – the customer relationship?

If there’s one thing Australians hate, it’s companies who treat us like idiots.  It was instructive when National Express – who operate large chunks of the train system in Britain – quit their contracts in Melbourne because the operating environment was just too difficult.  We’re meaner than Britons, for god’s sake.

A few years later, Connex got the boot for essentially similar reasons – everyone knew they weren’t responsible for the rolling stock and track work that was causing the delays, but their inept public relations pissed us all off.  I’m betting Tiger Airways is next – they’re mean, obsessed with rules, and their ‘lounge’ is little more than a cage on the tarmac.  To date AirAsia has done a struck a good balance between friendliness and efficiency in the Australian setting – but this experience creates doubt about their ability to sustain it.

Postscript.

@AirAsia Hi, we will highlight your feedback to the relevant team for improvement. Thank you

Update:

Couple of intriguing developments in the referrer stats for this blog post.  A number of visits came via http://standard.cotweet.com, which I’m guessing is the Twitter CRM platform used by AirAsia.  Another visit came via a Google search for the blog title and my full name, which feels a little bit invasive – but then again I do put myself out there.  Most intriguing is a visit via a Google search for “airasia”.  My first thought was “Aha! Proof that blogging about bad customer experience can help create pressure for change.”  Until I ran the search myself… I stopped looking after twenty pages of results.  (My guess is that AirAsia has invested in a huge amount of SEO; for example, the Skytrax customer review page for AirAsia doesn’t appear until page 18 of the search results.)  Some poor numpty has had to keep clicking until they found it, probably to ascertain where, and then (god bless ‘em) they clicked that link and let me know they were looking.

Let me start with some positioning.  The study is published in Frontiers in Evolutionary Psychiatry.  (Yeeee-hawww!) Not to put too fine a point on it, you have to be pretty fucking out there before evolutionary psychiatry considers you a cowboy.   Evo psy- is the justificatory structure of choice for people who want truthy explanations of why men rape and whites have higher IQ scores.

This has nothing to do with this particular study — I mainly just wanted to register that I’m not an evo psych fanboy.

But.  In the past two decades, the dominant narrative about depression has been that it’s an illness caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain.

Maybe it’s caused by some psychic insult such as a breakup or bereavement, or maybe you’re born with it because your parents are both depressives, too;  in that narrative, actual cause of depression doesn’t matter. You take pills that increase the kind of chemicals you’re low on, and voilà, your mood improves.

I took anti-depressants for a couple of years in my mid-twenties. I was financially under pressure, had some extremely heavy emotional shit to deal with, and one of my parents lived with major league depression all through my teen years.  It was the perfect storm of distress and unhappiness.

During that time, SSRI ‘worked’ only briefly, as an emotional anaesthetic; after a few months of use, they washed all the emotion out of my life, including the good ones.  They didn’t lift my mood, at all, but it was a huge relief to take a break from the heavy stuff.

The one drug that really did lift my mood, I took for a year — a year in which I failed all my subjects at university, because it messed with my sleep patterns, memory formation and concentration span.

During this time, I was going to a really good clinic here in Melbourne; although private, they get a lot closer to the ideal of primary health care than most community health centres.  But I never saw the same GP twice, and I was never referred for counselling, or psychiatric consultation.

As a result of the chemical imbalance narrative, depression is now understood as simple enough for a GP to treat with a prescription, monitoring only for unwelcome side effects which might prompt a change of medication.

So when I failed all my subjects, yet another GP switched me over to Zoloft.

Predictably, I gained weight and lost all my sex drive, but these were a problem because I’d begun a relationship. My partner was strong enough to tell me: “I need you to get your shit together”. I ditched the Zoloft.

This is the part where the Hollywood movie of my life cues up a montage of Daniel getting shit done.  I’m tearing up just thinking about it.

It didn’t happen.

What actually happened was my partner, my friends and colleagues helped me back into the world of paid work and the land of the living, creating peace and quiet in which I could face and address the reasons for my depression.

We all live with an emotional history, not all of it our own.

There’s a growing acknowledgement that depression may be functional: it’s a state of mind in which we can obsess over and analyse our current situation and all the shitty stuff leading up to it.

Joyful emotions that might distract us are ruthlessly muted, and so are the normal processes of discounting and excuse-making that normally serve to protect our ego from rational scrutiny.

It is a deeply unpleasant place to be in, and there’s no question you can get stuck there and sick of it — which is where an SSRI ‘holiday’ can be a lifesaver.

The report in Frontiers in Evo Psych (Andrews et al, 2011) describes an ‘oppositional tolerance’ it claims the brain develops, where it adapts neurochemically to the presence of the anti-depressant, producing less of the neurochemical targeted in order to maintain homeostasis.

This is almost certainly true — it’s the reason why withdrawing from anti-depressants is such a miserable experience — but explaining it in these terms is completely missing the point.

For one thing, it’s just more of the same chemical imbalance talk that led us to see SSRI as a miracle cure in the first place. And secondly, it fails to ask the question evolutionary psychology is meant to ask: does the brain adjust in this way to maintain a function served by depression?

I learnt about this study via a write-up by a journalist in Psychology Today, Robert Whitaker, who’s written one of the many books castigating big pharma for its role in creating an epidemic of depression in the American people.

He knows the PR and marketing origins of the chemical imbalance narrative, yet he still can’t wean himself from it, not even when critiquing it; indeed, that was its point: it’s a story that’s easy enough for journalists to sell tell.

Whitaker and the studies and experts quoted in his article use all the same tactics as the problem they critique: slap a diagnostic label on it, in this case ‘tardive dysphoria’, and offer the chemical imbalance explanation plus homeostasis (which everyone remembers from highschool biology class).

They don’t even have the cultural smarts to listen to their own word choices. They adapt their diagnostic label by analogy from ‘tardive dyskinesia’ — a delayed-onset condition that sometimes results from anti-psychotic medication.

Yet there’s no delay involved in their condition; it simply results from the withdrawal of the medication. The question they failed to ask is: does long-term anti-depressant use delay a reckoning with the reasons for depression?

That matters, because delay (along with confusion, sleep deprivation, reduced memory formation and concentration span) will affect your ability to dig up and process the emotional history that depression evolved to help you address.

The hardest kind of history to address is the one you can’t remember.

In one side of my family there is an emotional history of helpless rage. From what I can tell, it spans three generations. I could say it started with my maternal grandfather, a violent and abusive alcoholic, but that would be 100% artefactual, a conclusion from convenience rather than evidence, because I don’t know his own story.

It is incredibly difficult to deal with, because I learned it deeply and I can recognise its appearances in my life,  yet have no memory of how it came to be and thus no way of fitting it within a story and making sense of it.  When I first took the law subject, Trauma and Psychoanalysis, I would walk out of class crippled by grief that sprang from no ‘traumatic’ event (in my own life at least).

That was the year that I failed all my subjects.  I couldn’t write about what I was realising, and I couldn’t write about anything else, either.

I don’t know what filled my grandfather with rage against his family.  I don’t know why my mother laid her own emotional history on my shoulders when I was too young to bear it, but at least that grief has an explanation behind it. And in recognising my own rage, I am learning to forgive it in her, and reconnect.

Six years have passed, and depression is now an occasional thing in my life, rather than a constant reality. That boyfriend eventually dragged me, kicking and screaming, into couples counselling, which led to family counselling with my mother. Our relationship ended for good reasons, and I moved on to a new job, and eventually a new relationship, and began making long-term plans again (notwithstanding the smoking wreckage of my academic transcript).

Media liaison in community organisations is invariably the exclusive responsibility of executive officers and Board presidents. Mid-range orgs might hire a PR company and the major orgs (like VicHealth) will have their own media team.

Everyone else is counselled not to engage with the media.

Media engagement, in other words, is seen as a matter of organisational risk management.

Yet gay community life has become radically intermediated (Hurley, 2003).

What does that mean?

As a network of personal and social relationships, gay community still exists — but those relationships are inter-mediated, i.e. the connection is made through communications media. And our engagement with gay identity and community increasingly takes the form of consuming entertainment and news media, e.g. watching Glee and True Blood, rather than turning up in real spaces like gay clubs.

Something similar is beginning to happen in ethnic communities, as well (O’Mara, 2010).  In one refugee community in Melbourne, newly-arrived from one of the least developed countries on earth, I recently learned the best way to contact people is through word of mouth via Facebook and SMS. In another community, adult women bypass local health information altogether, and find information and entertainment in their own language via the Internet and cable television.

And all around Australia, agencies are earnestly trying to reach them with printed information, brochures and posters, in simple English and clunky translations.

In other words, if health promotion doesn’t engage with the media — news and entertainment, informative and social — that’s a recipe for irrelevance and ineffectiveness.  But the suggestion I heard was, ‘there’s no point in a bunch of health workers sitting around talking about the media.’  We should leave that to the experts.

So I was very interested to read this speech by long-time Labor Senator John Faulkner, talking about the impact of ‘leaving it to the experts’ on Labor’s effectiveness and relevance.  These words in particular:

Progressive, socially aware activists passionate about social and economic reform must never be outsiders to the Labor movement.

Labor cannot thrive as an association of political professionals focused on the machinery of electoral victory and forming, at best, contingent alliances with Australians motivated by and committed to ideals and policies.

A Party organisation staffed by experienced and competent strategists and managers is necessary to serve the campaign and organisational needs of Labor’s members and supporters, not to substitute for them.

The same is true for health promotion and community organisations.  Risk management is important, but it’s not our purpose.

To her, this was obvious, because “slut” refers to people having promiscuous sex and you could never call “a chick” or “your missus” a slut.  Der.  Guess she’s never met a gay man or a sex worker in her life.  And no, I’d never call someone else that word, but I’ll happily support someone who uses it to make a point about a cop who blames women for ‘inviting’ rape.

I’m forced to reply here, because after sending me that misogynist little missive, she blocked me so I couldn’t reply.  Good thing you’re pretty, lady, because otherwise, you’d be venal, dumb and ugly.

Peter Morville:
This finding is emblematic of the intimate relationship between search, learning, and decision making, and it brings to mind the paradox of choice. After all, the search box offers unrivaled selection. You can ask it any question. Or at least it often feels that way. For a student, this freedom can be simultaneously exhilarating and totally paralyzing.

Also, most students lack a useful mental model of search. They don’t know how search works or what’s being searched, which may be fine for casual Googling but not for navigating dozens of research databases.

Finally, selecting a topic is inherently difficult. It’s like buying a house or finding a spouse. The process is fuzzy and uncomfortable because we’re not sure what we want. So, all too often, we procrastinate. We wait until the last minute to begin, which is a shame because getting started is half the battle.

The key is to recognize that search can be an iterative, interactive journey of discovery that not only helps us find what we need but also lets us learn what we want to find. When we embrace this more playful model of exploratory search, it’s not so hard to get started.  (source)