Securing Your Sanity: Mental Health Strategies for Cybersecurity Experts: Mental Health Panel

ready to go you doing an intro oh I got the H up from har so all right um I'm just going to stand up real quick uh instead of sitting down here so welcome to our securing your sanity panel uh my name is Michael sping in my professional life I lead the information security team at the University of Alberta um mental health has been a pretty outspoken thing for myself in the last recent years um I've been talking about it quite regularly at various conferences and talking about my own personal experiences with it and uh this year for bsid Edmonton we decided why don't we do a panel um I think it takes it takes a lot of courage and guts to get in front of a room of people and talk about yourself uh be quite vulnerable talk about your your issues that you've had with it talk about things that aren't maybe necessarily easy to talk about so uh we were blessed to find four amazing people who have all sorts of different experiences when it comes to cyber security uh no cyber security experience at all and mental health so I'm going to stop there and what we're going to do we have a handful of questions I'm just going to pass it down the line and uh we'll get started so very first question uh just introductions and personal Journey so we'll start with um this end of the thing and share your name role in the community uh and just briefly touch on your personal professional experiences with mental health including maybe some key turning points sure um my name is ernestina malero I'm the founder of an e-learning company uplift learning and we develop and deliver um online and Blended training and we specifically also focus on delivering training about workplace resilience um because when you understand what it builds and affects resilience it's very tied into workplace mental health anyhow personally um my journey with mental health has been really a lifelong journey right I've uh dealt with uh long periods of of depression and also um PTSD and it was actually my own lived experience that uh drew me into grad school to actually do research um around PTSD and really start to get a handle on you know what's the connection between our lived experience and the state of our mental health and so that research um was it changed it upended my whole life just changed my whole view about how how mental health is and um gave me a chance to look at the research that's you know 40 years old but isn't yet commonly understood by healthc Care Professionals um or the public but it's something that really needs to change um that we come to understand how our lived experience affects our Mental Health um was that sort of it I think so that was great hi I'm Jennifer smaraka I've been in the IT industry for over 20 years now I started off as a Microsoft certified system engineer engineer Darren and I work together so he can't look at me when I say that I know how funny that is I'm very very technical Al no um NT 4.0 guys so it was a while ago and Darren probably wishes I would stop saying that um um working in it for over 20 years when I first started my career I was a freight train and I was going about a 100 miles an hour and taking a lot of damage it was like I had somewhere to go and I was going to get there plowing through and I started working for an organization and they um did a training called colors and it personality profiles and that was the first time I realized that how I was built but also how others were built it uh also changed kind of like the trajectory of how I saw people how I thought about myself and my mental health journey I guess so happy to share some insights as the questions evolved and very nice to see you all one thing one thing I want to bring up real quick don't feel bad about about the NT 4.0 so if you see Bud's shirt bud is actually wearing a shirt it literally says M I took a picture of it earlier Microsoft Windows 2000 Global launch partner so I think I think you beat him with 4.0 but yeah I'm young I don't want to make it an agism thing but we wanted some more experienced people on the panel so I thought I won it with bud but also right like I feel like the conference badge also lends to pretty awesome you know 4.0 awesome go for it Dar I I can tease you but I was right at that nt4 as well so it's fun to tease but I was there uh my name is uh Darren gynan I've been in it now for about 25 years uh security about 18 um my story is more um I joined pre-sales technical pre-sales for a public company and if you understand that that means public company means stock which means pressure everything is based off of you got to be driving that stock up and that pressure comes from the top down um so over my career I've had um some moments where definitely anxiety played uh you know played a role and it really definitely affected my sleep where I'm at night and my mind is going a mile million miles and I'm just sitting there all night and I look at the clock and it's 8:00 a.m. and I'm starting the next day with no sleep so I've definitely seen how that progressed uh and then we had coid hit right how did Co help all our mental States it uh it didn't help I went from uh flying 78 flights one year to zero and working in a I call my dungeon a basement and that was not good for my mental health which led me to actually quit my job take a break re Focus take that high pressure off and try to figure out what I want to do next and find the right place to go that fit my own personal policy so that's my story great take it away Bud okay uh my name is Bud van and I have uh I've been in it since 1985 so I represent I guess the Aging side of this population I I would be a Gray beard I guess is what we call those old people but uh I have alope so that is not an option I uh I have uh had spent 17 years at EPS Edmonton Police Service which I consider quite a stressful it role managing cyber security and uh that is really my story of stress um all the other employers I have had uh the the job wasn't really that stressful and didn't uh cause health issues so my hope today is that I can influence you guys and talk to you about this and I really have to pay a lot of tribute to Michael Michael who helped me understand that the stigma of having M mental health issues should be ignored I mean we're all people we're all human beings we should be able to assess where we're at and treat ourselves accordingly so normalize if we all start talking about it it takes a stick more away and it's uh it's an everyday thing exactly yeah yeah so normalizing I I didn't talk about my history how much um this is going to be the most pretentious thing I'll ever say but just search my name on YouTube uh you can find videos that I've talked about at other conferences so I won't I won't go into details there but my history goes back many many many years hit a massive breaking point in 2018 um there were days where I was calling in sick to work because I just I physically could not get out of bed um I couldn't get in my car and drive more than like 10 minutes without having a panic attack um yeah it was it was pretty rough ended up uh seeing a therapist so I see a therapist once a month uh for the last 5 years now and one of the key things that that she's taught me over the years is to normalize it it's okay to talk about it I can be quite vocal and opinionated about all sorts of stuff so I have no problem standing up here talking about yeah my my mental health was a train Rec it's a lot better now but I learned in talking to so many people in the community especially Bud uh that it's it hits everybody whether you've been doing this for decades whether uh you were doing computers in 1985 or you weren't even born yet um it's been it hits everyone just a show of hands if if you're willing like who here is stressed out who here is anxious who here is if you don't put your hand up put your hand up we're all stressed out to some degree uh so it's it's it's it's the it's Universal right what do they say everybody has to deal with death and taxes it's like death taxes and and stress and anxiety and and mental health so we'll get into the next set of questions here um one thing that uh I wanted to talk about was culture and stigma around mental health I think this this was a good uh good segue into it so how do you perceive the current culture around mental health in cyber security and have you faced any stigmas discussing it um and also how does diversity intersect with with some of those challenges so I'll I'm just going to throw it to the panel and if anybody uh has answers just throw them out there I heard a good saying one time also came from a therapist um and I'm a huge advocate of therapy uh I think it's extremely important and essential I think that every human should have therapy um but the therapist said what other people think about you is none of your business and I'm just going to say that again what other people think of you is none of your business so that doesn't mean that you can you know do whatever you want or like act in a certain way but you're never going to be everybody's cup of tea and there is a certain freedom to staying true to yourself and whether that's being up here talking about for mental health or being vulnerable about your journey some people might not be ready to be there some people might have feelings or judgment on that but that has that's none of your business your business is you and the path that you want to go down and I think that culturally that it can set the tone and make it safe for others who maybe are at the beginning of that journey I think that's a good great saying uh I my personal opinion is looking around and being in a number of organization I that there's definitely still a stigma not enough people are talking about it I think people are afraid that maybe it perhaps makes them feel that weak or maybe they think if management or somebody in organization um knows about hey they struggle with mental health that maybe they're not able to take on another position maybe a higher level position so the way I kind of look at it I'm try to normalize it as much as possible talk about it as much as possible keep throwing out there I you know me and you have had a lot of conversation most of our lunches we talk about mental health more than it nowadays so to me the more we keep talking about it we get rid of that stigma I'll I'll add real quick to that yeah so so like Bud and I we have we have lunch maybe once a quarter and to Darren's Point too like we don't really talk about computers anymore you know we don't really talk about it anymore it's more how are you you know it's it's almost it's how are you doing it's how are you feeling like let's what's going on in your life these days and and same with same with same with Darren Darren will come to University and and we'll have lunch and it doesn't even have to be like a formal setting it's just just these nice one-on-one discussions with people you can be open and honest with each other um my therapist said something very similar so for my for my personal issues um what she said was was Michael if other people think you're great at your role that's their problem and that was like no one had ever said that to me because I was always chasing these achievements and these Ambitions and I had to look good and be awesome and and one day she's just like Michael but if people think that that's their problem not yours and I was like I never even thought of it that way and it just allows you to just relax chill and and stop worrying about what other people think of you um and use use your own inter Compass right like your own set of values that you think are important yeah I was having actually this conversation uh literally like 5 minutes ago about you know I was just sitting out there by myself just looking at my phone catching up on stuff and like I was feeling good and I was like normally I would have been you know felt obligated to attend a talk or go do this or go do that and it was like no I I'm allowed to just sit here and do what I need to do so anything you want to add to that ernestina sure when I think of workplace culture um and just generally the attitudes that we find towards Mental Health health and Society the conversation needs to change currently whether it's spoken or not when you're dealing with mental health issue what's not often said is or yeah maybe what's unspoken is that the stigma is around well what's wrong with you what's wrong with you if you can't keep putting up 80 hours a week and trying to deal with the rest of your life what's wrong with you that you can't keep up and um really the conversation needs to change to you know at work and everywhere uh towards what's happened to you right is it normal for anyone to be able to work that much for so long and um and our sort of like grind culture you know productivity culture it needs to be really exam re-examined because human beings you know we need more than 80h hour work weeks to be healthy and to be functional so when I'm thinking of things at work like workplace burnout and that kind of thing we need to really start thinking about um what is the support that that the culture that the workplace needs to offer that we need to offer one another as staff um those are some of the things that come to mind about workplace culture and when it comes to say um people um people of color uh different cultures that those folks might go about their Wellness practices in a different way and that that also needs to be considered I'm thinking of my indigenous friends for example and how they approach uh workplace Wellness in in different ways and to make space for people that come from different cultures and have different backgrounds so those are two sort of lenses on culture that come to mind so uh it's not what's wrong with you it's what's happened to you or what you what you've been going through and it's totally predictable that after a pandemic like you know Mass Collective trauma right a loss of choice a loss of control increased sense of helplessness those are the key drivers that affect our mental health at work and personally right and so um it makes perfect sense that we're having a mental health crisis after a pandemic because that's what happened right whenever we lose a sense of choice control and feel helpless that is when we're most likely to have um significant impacts to our um mental mental health and workplace mental health I'm hoping maybe the whole coid and and making the mental health uh pandemic like a second part of it is maybe now we're bringing enough exposure to mental health that maybe in a long run it will help I really like that it was it was interesting for me because like I've been seeing a therapist for 2 years pre pandemic and then it was fascinating just to hear her advice on how things Chang in those initial months when everybody had to adjust to working from home and not being around people and then 3 years later now seeing the opposite of those adjustments and now seeing people having uh that's normalized and now having to talk about the issues with with people maybe wanting to have to come back to work or not wanting to come back to work and you know we're kind of three years into this this interesting social experiment like I can tell you had I not been going to therapy for the last three years I would not have dealt with Co nearly as well as as I had um bu was there anything you wanted to add on the the diversity side I was going to add one thing about the soft stigma or the stigma in there's there's this soft piece that I hope maybe I can get through to people um if if you don't think that mental health is something to ever affect you you may not be aware of the programs available through your employer I think I felt that way is there a phone number to call or is there how do you start the ball rolling if you turn a corner as a result of hearing realizing that you're having a mental health problem uh however the many ways that happens um do you have are you aware of what's available through your employer and how do you start the ball rolling I I feel that's a piece of ignorance that I think I had and maybe other people have had so I thought I'd bring that up so I think that that actually leads right into our next Point um I'm sitting here kind of thinking like we're we're we sound a little depressed which might be May part of the panel let's let's Spruce it up a little bit let's talk about how we how we've been doing better um education and initiatives what educational resources strategies and support services have you used to teach yourself and others about mental health let's focus on on some of the the good stuff that's gotten us to where where we are today again I'll throw it to the panel I think this is probably a good time to talk about when Darren and I work together and back to what I was talking about with colors or Myers Briggs or personality profile because I had done it in the job that uh previous uh when I came into the employer that great uh that Darren and I worked for there were culturally some um hard undertones that were happening within the teams and so one of the things that I did was knowing how impactful it was for me is I brought colors into for the team to do and I also invited their spouses to attend cuz it was you know you're you're a whole person you're not just a professional version and a personal version and sometimes um I certainly encountered this is how once I found out how I was built and so I I have a probably like a lot of you in here have a data brain that wants all the information about all things but I'm also very impulsive and so I have a hard time sitting down for a long period of time to get that information and a person like me that is moving very quickly and speaks quickly thinks quickly can be chaotic for people that maybe are emotion based or maybe like structure or like to do a sequential task and so I would guess if you think about your spouse or your partner or your significant other probably the opposite of you like I don't know why that happens in life but we tend to attract the exact opposite person of how we are so when I went through that I was like oh that makes sense this I'm built this way I'm married to this person and so I thought with the team bring like let let help them understand each other and the strengths that each of us brings some are emotion based some are databased and then also their spouses I think there was just a lot of like good learning there it it was as the person who took it from what you organized and I brought my wife to it I found it I found it so valuable to understand my own personality understand where my wife fit and then one of the co-workers that we worked with went and sat with my wife on the 100% emotional side and I was like I would have never guessed that suris and every day I came to work and I had a desk that faced him we had we faced each other and every day he's nice and happy and this one day he came in and he did not look good and I remember thinking okay I understand he's really emotional I just looked at him I know do you need a hug and he's like yeah I need a hug and that was very foreign for me but I got up he came over and gave him a hug and he instantly relaxed and he felt better for the day I love but the fact that you know the personality and that was I'm not the hugy type but I understood what he needed I want you gave me a huge hug when you saw me earlier I sensed you needed it okay but anyway it's um I think understanding your personality understanding how you can relate to others and how you can help others is so valuable my own personal Journey on trying to manage my own mental health and that I definitely know that when things get tough I stop wanting to exercise and do those things that need the most um like Michael I I ended up seeing a psychologist for a number of