Mental health

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      New York mayor plans to hospitalize mentally ill people involuntarily

      by

      New York mayor plans to hospitalize mentally ill people involuntarilyAdvocacy groups for civil rights groups and the homeless criticized mandate: ‘Mayor is playing fast and loose with the legal rights’ The mayor of New York City announced on Tuesday that he is ordering police and emergency services to more aggressively hospitalize those with mental illness who are on the streets, even if the hospitalization is involuntary and they pose no threat to other people.Mayor Eric Adams’ directive would give outreach workers, city hospitals and first responders, including police, discretion to forcibly hospitalize anyone they deem as not “meeting their basic human needs, causing them to be a danger to themselves”, Adams told a news conference.The mayor called the directive an attempt to clear up a “gray area where policy, law and accountability have not been clear”, adding that the mandate is “a moral obligation to act” in light of “a crisis we see all around us”.“These New Yorkers and hundreds of others like them are in urgent need of treatment, yet often refuse it when offered,” said Adams.“The very nature of their illnesses keeps them from realizing they need intervention and support. Without that intervention, they remain lost and isolated from society, tormented by delusions and disordered thinking. They cycle in and out of hospitals and jails.”The Adams administration did not provide evidence that forced treatment is effective in treating mental illness or preventing crime.Advocacy groups for civil rights groups and the homeless criticized the mayor’s mandate.“The mayor is playing fast and loose with the legal rights of New Yorkers and is not dedicating the resources necessary to address the mental health crises that affect our communities,“ said Donna Lieberman, executive director the New York Civil Liberties Union.“Forcing people into treatment is a failed strategy for connecting people to long-term treatment and care.”The Coalition for the Homeless also denounced the mayor’s plan, saying the city should focus on expanding access to voluntary psychiatric treatment.“Mayor Adams continues to get it wrong when it comes to his reliance on ineffective surveillance, policing and involuntary transport and treatment of people with mental illness,” said the coalition’s executive director, Jacquelyn Simone.State law also generally limits the ability of authorities to force someone into a mental health facility unless they pose a danger to themselves or others.But Adams called such limitations a “myth”, stating that the law does not require a person to be behaving in an “outrageously dangerous” or suicidal way before a police officer or medical worker could take action.As part of its initiative, the city said it would open a phone line to allow police officers to consult with clinicians.The mayor has also announced a subway safety plan and vowed to expand outreach teams, made up of clinicians and police officers. But critics called the plan a crackdown on the mentally ill and the homeless.A spokesperson for the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, said the city’s plan builds on mutual efforts to increase capacity at psychiatric hospitals, as well as expand outreach teams in subways.TopicsNew YorkMental healthUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 225 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘If I’d not got help, I’d probably be dead’: Jason Kander on PTSD, politics and advice from Obama

      by

      Interview‘If I’d not got help, I’d probably be dead’: Jason Kander on PTSD, politics and advice from ObamaDavid Smith, Washington bureau chief He was a rising star in the Democratic party and ‘sorta ran for president’ but, as he recounts in his new book, haunted by his experiences in AfghanistanAs luck had it, Jason Kander’s book tour in New York coincided with a family wedding. The star turn was his 95-year-old great-uncle, composer John Kander, who performed Married from Cabaret, the revered musical he wrote with lyricist Fred Ebb.“It was very cool,” smiles Kander, a day after breakfasting with his famous relative. “He’s still writing: he’s got a musical coming out next year. He is my life goal. People who meet him probably figure he’s in his late 70s. He always says if you just keep doing what you love, it will keep you young. There’s something to that.”Twenty years on from 9/11, is US democracy working?Read moreJason Kander is only 41 but already well into his third act. His new, unflinchingly honest memoir tracks his journey from soldiering in Afghanistan to politicking in his native Missouri, from sitting in the Oval Office with Barack Obama to being put on suicide watch in a windowless cell.Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD tells how Kander endured post-traumatic stress disorder for 11 years – and kept it secret from everyone. The more his political star shone, the darker his hinterland became. He tried to outrun his demons by seeking elected office, including the presidency, until an epiphany led him to finally confront his mental illness.“I went to get help because, if I didn’t go get help, I was probably going to kill myself,” says Kander, wearing a grey “army” T-shirt and speaking via Zoom from a functional New York hotel room.“It’s not like, ‘Oh, man, if I’d hung around, maybe I’d be president!’ If I’d hung around and not got help, I’d probably be dead. Instead I’m really enjoying my life and I wasn’t before. It’s not to say I’ll never run. It’s just to say, I’m glad I didn’t then and, if I ever do choose to run, I’ll be doing it as a person who has dealt with their shit. And maybe we need more of that.”Kander trained as a lawyer but, after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, felt the compulsion to serve and be tested like his grandfather and other relatives. To his surprise, he loved the military with its sense of order and mission.He spent four months in Afghanistan in 2006-07 and was not involved in firefights or direct combat (later a source of constant guilt that he somehow wasn’t worthy of PTSD). His work as an intelligence officer involved going with an interpreter to meetings in remote locations with people who might be “bad guys” linked to the Taliban, terrorism or corruption. The prospect of being kidnapped and killed was real.“I was 25 years old and it was an exhilarating experience and that’s why they don’t send 41-year-old fathers of two to war,” he reflects. “If I went into those meetings now, I’d be very aware of everything I had to lose but also probably very aware of how much danger I was in.”When he got home to Kansas City, Kander turned to politics in search of the same sense of purpose and belonging to something bigger than himself. Knocking on thousands of doors, he outworked and outcampaigned rivals to win election to the Missouri state house of representatives and, later, as secretary of state.In 2016 he ran for the US Senate against the Republican incumbent, Roy Blunt, and caught national attention with a campaign ad in which he assembled an AR-15 rifle while blindfolded and advocating for background checks on gun buyers. Kander still lost but by a much narrower margin than Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in the same state.PTSD trailed him like a shadow, however.There was insomnia and night terrors: bad dreams in which he was back in Afghanistan with someone rushing into a room, taking him captive and lining him up for a beheading video on YouTube. Over time these evolved into fears about home invaders threatening his family.There were nights when Kander patrolled the house with a loaded gun. He had symptoms such as back pain, a twitch in his left eyelid and an aversion to sitting in restaurants with his back to the door. “It’s exhausting to be on alert all the time and then, when you combine that with about 10 years without a good night’s sleep, you just get worn out. When you get worn out enough and have all these other feelings of shame and guilt and then you’re having these symptoms, eventually you get depressed. When you’re depressed long enough, eventually you have suicidal thoughts.”His political career, he assesses now, was a quest for redemption. “I had this idea that I hadn’t done enough for my country, I was an irredeemable piece of shit personally and, while I was achieving all these things politically, people didn’t really know that I was completely undeserving of this praise or adulation.”The Hollywood version of redemption for Kander would have had him winning the presidency and casting PTSD aside on inauguration day. And for a while it seemed possible. When, in his final Oval Office interview, Obama was asked who gave him hope for the future of the country, Kander’s was the first name on his lips. The pair had a private meeting in which Obama gave “mentorship-type advice”.Kander was exalted as the Democrats’ new hope, a veteran from the heartland who could provide the antidote to forces that put Trump in the White House. He made frequent visits to early presidential nominating states; his Twitter bio says he “sorta ran for president”.But after a major speech in New Hampshire, things unravelled.“Like any other addict who is not dealing with their own trauma, their own underlying stuff, I was addicted to the adulation, to the crowds, to performing and to the adrenaline that came with it. The only time I felt truly present was when I was in front of a crowd or doing an interview that really mattered.“Those endorphin highs generally for a long time worked in the sense that they would hold me over until the next one. So when I had this moment that was the zenith of my career as a political performer and it lasted about 12 hours, I realised that was a real problem. This wasn’t working any more.”When someone suggested that he lower his sights and run for mayor of Kansas City instead, Kander grabbed the chance to ease the pressure. He was comfortably ahead in the polls and in fundraising when, on 1 October 2018, he walked into the Kansas City Veterans Affairs medical center and acknowledged suicidal thoughts going back 10 years.He was duly put in a windowless cell with pale-green walls and dressed in dark-green scrubs that were about five sizes too big. “So this was suicide watch,” he writes.Most of the staff instantly recognised him but a young resident psychiatrist did not. For half an hour, Kander bared his soul about the night terrors and his consuming fear of someone hurting himself and his family. Then the psychiatrist asked: “Do you have a particularly stressful job or something?”Kander said he was in politics and explained: “I almost ran for president, but then decided to run for mayor instead, and tomorrow I’m planning on calling that off.”Confused, the psychiatrist said: “You were going to run for president? Of what?”Kander told him: “Of the United States.”The psychiatrist asked: “Who told you that you could run for president?”Now irritated, Kander said: “I don’t know what to tell you, man. I mean, I spent an hour and a half talking it over one on one with Obama in his office, and he seemed to think it was a pretty good idea.”The psychiatrist sat back in his chair and remarked: “Barack Obama told you that you could run for president? So how often would you say you hear voices?”Kander can laugh about the exchange now and includes it in his book.The therapy has worked wonders – “It’s getting a master’s in yourself,” is how his great-uncle John described it – and allowed him to rediscover the joys of marriage (his Ukrainian-born wife, Diana, contributes moving passages in the book), fatherhood (their children are eight and one) and baseball (he coaches a little league team).“The difference is now I will frequently choose to sit facing the door but I can sit with my back to the door usually without fidgeting a great deal. I generally don’t get the twitch in my eye. I generally don’t have, most of the time, nightmares.“PTSD treatment is not about getting cured. It’s about getting to the point where the symptoms of PTSD don’t disrupt your life and that’s what I was able to achieve in therapy.”Kander is also better equipped to deal with difficult ruptures such as last year’s chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. He admits: “At first it was quite triggering and then I got very involved in evacuating people I care about from the country. That experience was newly traumatic and I had to go back and see my therapist again but I’m glad I did. It’s not simple but now I have the tools to navigate that.”Kander is the president of national expansion at Veterans Community Project, a non-profit organisation to which he will donate all the book’s royalties, and host of Majority 54, a political podcast. Kander has little time for the perennial moderates v progressives narrative dividing the Democratic party. “Everybody is engaged in this debate about whether the party needs to go further to the left or stay closer to the middle and they’re all completely missing the point. That’s not what’s going on in the part of the country I live in. You don’t get points for being less liberal; you get points for caring about what people are going through.”Kander says he wrote Invisible Storm because it was the book he would have wanted to read 14 years ago. He hopes it will encourage people to confront their own problems and understand that recovery and post-PTSD growth are possible.But given the bottomless cynicism in politics today, there will doubtless be somebody somewhere who theorises that the book is a calculated move towards resurrecting Kander’s career, perhaps even his White House ambitions.He finds that idea absurd.“I wrote this book understanding that if I ever get the desire to run for president again, people are going to say we can’t have a president who could end up stalking the White House at night because he’s worried about intruders,” he says. “If I ever run, it will be on me to be like, ‘I don’t have to do that any more because I got therapy.’“Yeah, that’s probably not the ideal debate to have in a presidential campaign. But I made the decision that if this book turns out to be something that precludes me from ever being able to to run for president but, if it helps a lot of people and saves a lot of lives, that is absolutely a trade I’m willing to make.”TopicsBooksUS politicsDemocratsMental healthinterviewsReuse this content More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Invisible and unheard: how female veterans suffering trauma are let down by US healthcare

      by

      Invisible and unheard: how female veterans suffering trauma are let down by US healthcareWomen suffer PTSD at twice the rate of men yet their symptoms and stories are often overlooked For Felicia Merkel, the PTSD trigger is any loud sound – an overhead speaker, a slammed car door – transporting her back to the blistering heat of Afghanistan. For Liz Hensel, it is looking into her daughter’s chestnut brown eyes, their color reminding her of those of a young Afghan girl named Medina, who lost her mother and leg at the trauma hospital in Kandahar. For Jen Burch, the intrusive memory is of the man who assaulted her before she deployed.More than a decade has passed since these three women were deployed to Afghanistan. It’s now almost four months since the US military withdrew from Kabul on 30 August. Still, specific memories consume them. Three hundred thousand female veterans served in the 19-year war, and as media coverage dwindles and the nation slowly forgets, Felicia, Liz and Jen continue to remember.Their experiences in Afghanistan differed from those of the male soldiers with whom they served. Now, their stateside lives do too. Being a woman in war comes with its own set of distinct traumas. While congressional legislation that has recently been proposed is welcome, essential bills are still being blocked that would help repair the suffering these women have endured for years.Gender differences exist in trauma exposure. PTSD is twice as common in women than in men, according to a study conducted by Kathryn Magruder at the University of South Carolina.Yet they face additional obstacles when seeking support after their deployment.The Deborah Sampson Act passed in January of this year made gender-specific services available at veteran medical centers across the country.However, on 6 December, House and Senate armed service committee leaders tried to block the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act, which would enable veterans to report sexual assault to a neutral third party.Felicia’s husband says she is a lot jumpier now than she used to be. Talking about Afghanistan makes her sad, but as she has gotten older, sounds, not memories, trigger her PTSD. The anxiety hits. She breathes deeply. Then tries, with difficulty, to get her heart rate down.It was December 2010, the year of her first deployment. She was lying in bed at the base at Kandahar, watching American television, when she heard those crashing bumps. Seconds later, the sirens sounded. A rocket had hit. Felicia fell to the floor with a thud and ran for the nearby bunker.It was cold and dusty in there; a dirt track enveloped in a hollow concrete shell. Just feet away, medics worked on a man wounded in the chest; he had no pulse in his left leg. They called for clothing, anything that might be used to stop the bleeding. As the yells of the medics got louder, Felicia’s mind traveled further away.She couldn’t do anything to help. Eleven years later, she still feels that guilt and hears those sounds.She had arrived in Kandahar energetic and excited. She returned to Minnesota a year later, distant and dejected. The months after coming home were the worst. Gritting her teeth through weekly therapy sessions, she insisted that everything was fine. The therapist believed her, even telling her not to come back.On 4 January 2012, Felicia tried to kill herself. She began with a single antidepressant. Then she took five more. Then the bottle. None of her co-workers, family or friends knew about her clinical depression. She spent her 22nd birthday in intensive care.Post-military support at the time, she maintains, was significantly lacking.“Female service members have much more to deal with in the complexity of trauma,” confirmed Jennifer Pacanowski, founder of the non-profit Women’s Veterans Empowered and Thriving. “They also have less access to services, which are not as specialized to their needs as those available to male veterans.”The Deborah Samson Act, a bipartisan bill passed by the Senate in January 2021, will establish a policy to end gender-based sexual harassment and assault by training employees and providing legal services for veterans at risk. It will also staff Veteran Affairs facilities with a permanent female health provider.Felicia wishes she had access to these sorts of resources when she came home. Instead, during a 10-minute evaluation, it was determined she did not have PTSD, and that her grief stemmed only from her mother’s death.She was furious and felt unheard.Looking back, she believes that better healthcare policies for female veterans would have encouraged her to open up about her experiences and struggles sooner. Instead, she dealt with her feelings alone until she needed life-saving help.After deploying in August 2010, Liz began volunteering at Kandahar’s trauma hospital. She had already witnessed death. Just weeks earlier, an injured soldier died with his head resting on her stomach. She dealt with this like any Marine had to do in any high-intensity combat situation: turn off emotion and focus.She could not, however, turn off the memories of the trauma hospital. As the mother of two young daughters, it tugged at every maternal instinct she had.American male service members were not permitted to work at the hospitals. Only because she was female could she see what she now can’t forget.The waiting room that November day was bustling with uncles, fathers, cousins and brothers.No one waited for Medina. Whoever brought the three-year-old Afghani girl had left. Her infected foot could not be saved, and Liz cradled the child as she came out of the anesthesia after the amputation. Rather than waking in familiar arms, Medina’s first sight was this stranger wearing desert camouflage with a pistol at her side. The anguish Liz felt reminded her that she could feel again after months surrounded by death.Now, Medina revisits Liz’s thoughts back in Virginia. She appears in flashbacks when Liz looks at baby photographs of her youngest daughter. She comes to mind when Veterans Day is celebrated on national television.Was the girl still alive? Could Liz have done more to help her? Was she attending school amid the Taliban’s ever-increasing restrictions on women’s freedom?Liz had flown to Afghanistan fearless and determined in 2010 but returned to the US four months later, injured and traumatized.In the weeks after her deployment, Liz felt as if she were watching someone else’s life in a movie. Physically, she was home, but mentally, she was in Kandahar.She tried going through the motions expected of her as a mother and a wife. Doing menial tasks – cooking dinner, hugging her child – things she had been so capable of doing before she left. But it felt to her like a tug of war, the past pulling her back, her mind fighting to remain present.It didn’t help that she felt her pain was invisible to the world. When attending Veterans Affairs medical appointments, the administration staff would sometimes ask her husband, who came along for support, who he was there to see. He would have to correct them and say the appointment was for his wife.It was only when they took the time to listen to Liz’s story that people validated her trauma. Research shows that post-traumatic stress in veterans varies by gender. If hers had been recognized earlier, she wonders, would she still be struggling with it 11 years later?Jen, like Liz, was working in Afghani hospitals because she was a woman. She, too, was haunted by a girl who had lost a foot. But, more, she was haunted by the long-term impacts of sexism and abuse in the military.Jen was sexually assaulted by her supervisor at a US military base, months before she was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010.She was made to report it through her chain of command, but was quickly stopped in her tracks. Everyone loved the man she was accusing.“We’re so glad to have him back,” said the male officer who handled her complaint.Jen wanted to deploy abroad. She knew no one would believe her. So she stopped, fearing that as a victim, she would be isolated.But trauma builds on trauma. This experience made Jen more vulnerable to the horrors she witnessed during her service in Afghanistan. Statistically, a history of sexual assault puts a veteran at higher risk for developing PTSD.Serving at Buckley Space Force Base in Denver, Colorado, when she returned stateside from August 2011 to 2014, things got worse.Jen started to go through some of the lowest moments of her life.Her co-workers assumed that she was being emotional about things because she was a woman. Someone she served with in Afghanistan observed that the only PTSD she had was from eating the bad food. This went on for a year and a half.Jen was assaulted before she arrived in Afghanistan. She worked overtime in the trauma hospital doing mortuary affairs; developed breathing problems; had glass nodules in her lungs. Yet she was perpetually made fun of. It was a very negative culture surrounding her post-deployment.No one wanted to hear her story.Although women are the fastest-growing veteran demographic, she believes that some men still don’t think of women serving in roles of high stress or exposure.Currently, the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act is being blocked. If the act had been passed when Jen was on active service, she would have reported her sexual assault.This is the same for many other women in the military, she believes. And while there is a mountain of legislation being passed to assist female veterans, this is still not enough.“If it means sharing the darkest details of my story, then I’ll keep doing this,” Jen said, “until the gendered gap in veteran healthcare is finally closed”.TopicsPost-traumatic stress disorderWomenUS militaryMental healthUS politicsHealthfeaturesReuse this content More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      The whistleblower who plunged Facebook into crisis

      by

      After a set of leaks last month that represented the most damaging insight into Facebook’s inner workings in the company’s history, the former employee behind them has come forward. Now Frances Haugen has given evidence to the US Congress – and been praised by senators as a ‘21st century American hero’. Will her testimony accelerate efforts to bring the social media giant to heel?

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      On Monday, Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp went dark after a router failure. There were thousands of negative headlines, millions of complaints, and more than 3 billion users were forced offline. On Tuesday, the company’s week got significantly worse. Frances Haugen, a former product manager with Facebook, testified before US senators about what she had seen in her two years there – and set out why she had decided to leak a trove of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal. Haugen had revealed herself as the source of the leak a few days earlier. And while the content of the leak – from internal warnings of the harm being done to teenagers by Instagram to the deal Facebook gives celebrities to leave their content unmoderated – had already led to debate about whether the company needed to reform, Haugen’s decision to come forward escalated the pressure on Mark Zuckerberg. In this episode, Nosheeen Iqbal talks to the Guardian’s global technology editor, Dan Milmo, about what we learned from Haugen’s testimony, and how damaging a week this could be for Facebook. Milmo sets out the challenges facing the company as it seeks to argue that the whistleblower is poorly informed or that her criticism is mistaken. And he reflects on what options politicians and regulators around the world will consider as they look for ways to curb Facebook’s power, and how likely such moves are to succeed. After Haugen spoke, Zuckerberg said her claims that the company puts profit over people’s safety were “just not true”. In a blog post, he added: “The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don’t want their ads next to harmful or angry content.” You can read more of Zuckerberg’s defence here. And you can read an analysis of how Haugen’s testimony is likely to affect Congress’s next move here. Archive: BBC; YouTube; TikTok; CSPAN; NBC; CBS;CNBC; Vice; CNN More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Facebook ‘tearing our societies apart’: key excerpts from a whistleblower

      by

      FacebookFacebook ‘tearing our societies apart’: key excerpts from a whistleblower Frances Haugen tells US news show why she decided to reveal inside story about social networking firm Dan Milmo Global technology editorMon 4 Oct 2021 08.33 EDTLast modified on Mon 4 Oct 2021 10.30 EDTFrances Haugen’s interview with the US news programme 60 Minutes contained a litany of damning statements about Facebook. Haugen, a former Facebook employee who had joined the company to help it combat misinformation, told the CBS show the tech firm prioritised profit over safety and was “tearing our societies apart”.Haugen will testify in Washington on Tuesday, as political pressure builds on Facebook. Here are some of the key excerpts from Haugen’s interview.Choosing profit over the public goodHaugen’s most cutting words echoed what is becoming a regular refrain from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic: that Facebook puts profit above the wellbeing of its users and the public. “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimise for its own interests, like making more money.”She also accused Facebook of endangering public safety by reversing changes to its algorithm once the 2020 presidential election was over, allowing misinformation to spread on the platform again. “And as soon as the election was over, they turned them [the safety systems] back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before, to prioritise growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me.”Facebook’s approach to safety compared with othersIn a 15-year career as a tech professional, Haugen, 37, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest but she said Facebook had the worst approach to restricting harmful content. She said: “I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’d seen before.” Referring to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, she said: “I have a lot of empathy for Mark. And Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform. But he has allowed choices to be made where the side-effects of those choices are that hateful, polarising content gets more distribution and more reach.”Instagram and mental healthThe document leak that had the greatest impact was a series of research slides that showed Facebook’s Instagram app was damaging the mental health and wellbeing of some teenage users, with 30% of teenage girls feeling that it made dissatisfaction with their body worse.She said: “And what’s super tragic is Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. And it actually makes them use the app more. And so, they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more. Facebook’s own research says it is not just that Instagram is dangerous for teenagers, that it harms teenagers, it’s that it is distinctly worse than other forms of social media.”Facebook has described the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the slides as a “mischaracterisation” of its research.Why Haugen leaked the documentsHaugen said “person after person” had attempted to tackle Facebook’s problems but had been ground down. “Imagine you know what’s going on inside of Facebook and you know no one on the outside knows. I knew what my future looked like if I continued to stay inside of Facebook, which is person after person after person has tackled this inside of Facebook and ground themselves to the ground.”Having joined the company in 2019, Haugen said she decided to act this year and started copying tens of thousands of documents from Facebook’s internal system, which she believed show that Facebook is not, despite public comments to the contrary, making significant progress in combating online hate and misinformation . “At some point in 2021, I realised, ‘OK, I’m gonna have to do this in a systemic way, and I have to get out enough that no one can question that this is real.’”Facebook and violenceHaugen said the company had contributed to ethnic violence, a reference to Burma. In 2018, following the massacre of Rohingya Muslims by the military, Facebook admitted that its platform had been used to “foment division and incite offline violence” relating to the country. Speaking on 60 Minutes, Haugen said: “When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarising content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other. The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.”Facebook and the Washington riotThe 6 January riot, when crowds of rightwing protesters stormed the Capitol, came after Facebook disbanded the Civic Integrity team of which Haugen was a member. The team, which focused on issues linked to elections around the world, was dispersed to other Facebook units following the US presidential election. “They told us: ‘We’re dissolving Civic Integrity.’ Like, they basically said: ‘Oh good, we made it through the election. There wasn’t riots. We can get rid of Civic Integrity now.’ Fast-forward a couple months, we got the insurrection. And when they got rid of Civic Integrity, it was the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.’”The 2018 algorithm changeFacebook changed the algorithm on its news feed – Facebook’s central feature, which supplies users with a customised feed of content such as friends’ photos and news stories – to prioritise content that increased user engagement. Haugen said this made divisive content more prominent.“One of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is optimising for content that gets engagement, or reaction. But its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarising – it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.” She added: “Facebook has realised that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money.”Haugen said European political parties contacted Facebook to say that the news feed change was forcing them to take more extreme political positions in order to win users’ attention. Describing polititicians’ concerns, she said: “You are forcing us to take positions that we don’t like, that we know are bad for society. We know if we don’t take those positions, we won’t win in the marketplace of social media.”In a statement to 60 Minutes, Facebook said: “Every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true. If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago.”TopicsFacebookSocial networkingUS Capitol attackInstagramMental healthSocial mediaYoung peoplenewsReuse this content More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Kim Kardashian requests compassion for Kanye West's bipolar disorder

      by

      Kim Kardashian West has spoken for the first time about her husband Kanye West’s bipolar disorder after he posted and deleted a string of erratic tweets regarding his family life after the launch of his presidential campaign in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday.“Those who are close with Kanye know his heart and understand his words sometimes do not align with his intentions,” she wrote on her Instagram Stories.The fashion and reality TV mogul said she had previously avoided commenting on West’s mental health in order to protect her children and West’s right to privacy. In breaking that silence, she said she wished to address the “stigma and misconceptions” surrounding mental health.She wrote: “Those that understand mental illness or even compulsive behaviour know that the family is powerless unless the member is a minor. People who are unaware or far removed from this experience can be judgmental and not understand that the individual themselves have to engage in the process of getting help no matter how hard family and friends try.”In the US, involuntary hospitalisation and treatment is deemed to violate an individual’s civil rights. An individual must pose a danger to themselves or others in order to be held, for evaluation only, which typically lasts no longer than 72 hours. An elderly or “gravely disabled” person may be placed under a conservatorship. Britney Spears has been subject to such an arrangement since she experienced a breakdown in 2008, which has given rise to controversy over its appropriateness to her situation.West was willingly admitted to hospital in 2016, after an emergency call regarding his welfare during a period of erratic behaviour.Kardashian West added: “I understand Kanye is subject to criticism because he is a public figure and his actions at times can cause strong opinions and emotions. He is a brilliant but complicated person who on top of the pressures of being an artist and a black man, who experienced the painful loss of his mother, and has to deal with the pressure and isolation that is heightened by his bipolar disorder.”West has been subject to more widespread media attention than usual since he announced his presidential campaign in early July. While he is not thought to have filed official paperwork, he has tweeted asking fans to get him on the ballot in certain states.In Charleston on Monday, he gave a rambling address referencing the terms of his deal with Adidas for his fashion brand Yeezy, his faith in God and racism in the US, including an assertion that “[abolitionist] Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves, she just had the slaves go work for other white people”. He has since expressed doubt over whether to continue with his run this year, or postpone until 2024.Kardashian West asked the media and the public to give their family “compassion and empathy” and thanked those who had expressed concern for her husband’s wellbeing. “We as a society talk about giving grace to the issue of mental health as a whole, however we should also give it to the individuals who are living with it in times when they need it the most,” she wrote.West has said he will release a new album, Donda: With Child – named after his late mother – this Friday. More