Mental Health Matters - You Are Not Alone - Megan Roddie

so this is like a talk that's usually an hour-long talk I'm just getting it casually probably go for about 20 minutes so you'll see me slip through get through some slides or adjust based on how much time I think I have um which let me pull up my my clock so I can keep keep an eye on that so basically I wanted to talk a bit about mental health hackers how we got started why we got started mental health in general in the industry uh so just a quick introduction of what we're dealing with in the industry we've got our very well-known mental health disorders bipolar disorder depression anxiety ADHD and so much more schizophrenia imposter

syndrome is in the DSM now like there's a whole bunch of things um and it it's super common just to touch on some of those on the main list first bipolar disorder is characterized by cycles of depression Mania the length of those Cycles can vary which ones are more prominent can vary Etc people with bipolar disorder yeah the during the depressive phase just like regular depression that kind of uh uh lack of uh what we'll talk about I don't know why they put depression first in the slide deck but we'll go into depression and then the manias kind of these um times of high energy High motivation but it also comes with its own problems

typically that that little voice in your head that says no will disappear during these times of mania people will get kind of like crazy uh do a lot of adrenaline field activities things like that so risks on both sides uh but yeah that's bipolar like I said depression you got the feelings of hopelessness emptiness loss of interest in your favorite activities or most activities uh irritability over small things and abnormal sleeping habits anxiety this is a big one especially in our industry for some reason I've seen depression and anxiety all over the place insecurity is a very common one that you'll hear people talk about um it's typically characterized by fear of interacting with strangers fear of

embarrassment avoiding being the center of attention and you may avoid interactions that your word will lead to that embarrassment and then the last one I just want to touch on oh wait or that was it uh ADHD we hear a lot about in the industry um I'm myself am autistic and it comes with a little touch of depression and anxiety and ADHD all over I kind of get a lot of these feelings um so so and the list goes on so by the numbers what are we looking at uh in terms of the general population overall one in five adults experience a mental health condition every year and uh the reason we say condition and

there's these two separate experiences uh two separate uh categorizations is because um these mental health conditions you know we get things like seasonal depression um a lot of physical health conditions can manifest in mental health symptoms and so you may experience for example I have thyroid disease and when it's not managed well enough uh I'll experience depression and so sometimes it'll pop up like that as as a symptom of something bigger but just this temporary like work around whereas one is 17 which is still a huge number uh like how many people are at this conference do you estimate do you know how many registrations you got 100. so what like an eighth of people here uh

probably are experiencing a serious mental health issues using that that kind of uh I'm sorry I'm losing words using that proportion um you know that's talking about out of this building every eighth person you meet could potentially be faces here is mental illness and that is those that long life depression with uh Suicidal Thoughts bipolar schizophrenia autism one in 17. I myself like I said autistic in this realm I know Chris talks about his battles with depression and alcoholism so in this room that's already 50 at least uh so this is a very common thing even even these long-term conditions and in terms of onset uh 50 of people with long-term mental health conditions are diagnosed by the age of 14. I've

personally fell into that uh 75 by the age of 24. so in terms of us in the industry most people in the kind of roles we are there at least 20 they're in their mid to late 20s a few early 20s here and there um but that means that like for those who are likely going to experience mental health conditions uh We've we've gotten to that point before we're even in the industry with some exceptions of course autism it wasn't uh widely diagnosed in like the 60s 70s so a lot of people in their 40s 50s 60s now are just now getting diagnosis um just because it wasn't uh diagnosed as well back then um but in general uh usually if you're

going through some of the stuff you're gonna experience it quite early in your life uh this is a quote uh a semicolon a lot of you have probably seen the semicolon to represent a depression and suicide as like uh you know people got tattoos is really big after like five or six years ago everyone was doing the semicolon so you just want to touch quick on what that means um and it's it was used to represent and we even have it in our oh this is our original logo if you look at the mental health hackers logo there's a butterfly and the body of the butterfly is in the shape of a semicolon and it's used

because the author could have ended their sentence but they chose not to so is is kind of that survival of suicide attempts so it's time for change and so we're gonna beat the change this is where I kind of dive a little bit into mental health hackers and our backgrounds uh so we started in October mental health hackers do start in October 2018 but our journey did uh Amanda Berlin our CEO info sister she decided she she came up with this idea of a space at conferences herself having faced anxiety um in the past imposter syndrome she knows that conferences sometimes all of this can be a lot in our industry we have a lot of introverts too so spending

eight hours walking around consistently meeting people can be a lot so when Derby con 8 rolled around she had this idea of how about I submit a village that's a space where people can go to escape relax chill out and there seemed to be interest so she watched it GoFundMe with a goal of I think it was like two three thousand dollars to cover things like you see in our room the inflatable um loungers and coloring books and crafts and stickers and everything ended up getting seven thousand dollars from the cyber security community in step three and the event was a massive successful skip ahead just a shuffle here's photos from our inaugural event we had talks we

had yoga we had these inflatable air loungers that were super popular it was a great time immediate success immediately like you can see October 2018 she did this thing as like an idea that came to mind November 2018 we're officially a non-profit in the state of Ohio and that's because within the first within those first couple weeks after Derby con we had she had tons and tons of conferences hitting her up hey come here hey can you come here she's like well if we're gonna do this like we're gonna need donations if we're raising money like we don't want to be doing gofundme's every week so really the only way to do this is to

establish a non-profit which we did and during this time period from November uh onwards we we continued Villages I think just in those just by the end of 2018 we had done maybe four more in three months oh one of them I think was in Germany too so uh we were very active from the onset in April 2019 we got our 501c3 status obviously it takes a little bit longer we had to work with some lawyers Etc but we got it we're officially a 501c3 allows us to do things like corporate spots or just tax exemptions Etc and here we are today besides KC many many many villages later I know this is our second or third year second

year with you hopefully not the last um so our intent is to a lot of The Villages that have brought us um in previous years we typically come back so it's been great that shows our success right we there's probably half a dozen at least conferences that bring us every year since we started so um here we are uh I got some pre-coveted stats I admittedly need to get back on finding these statistics but before covid so around I think this was documented maybe summer of 2019 we had already spent over fifteen thousand dollars in massages so when people did I'm being touched by strangers before a pandemic took over the world we would hire massage therapists to come in and

give free chair massages uh so yeah we spent a lot of money on that but it was a huge hit we've had over 20 hours of yoga action at event over 2 000 stickers and at the time 70 plus volunteers I checked this morning and we now have 145 Volunteers in our Slack so the other things we've done since that we have expanded on during covet um cocoa became a real challenge because the village is our staple event and we cannot host Villages whether it's not conferences we've tried the online format a couple times like but when you're a place to chill out escape from the noise color crafts talk like it's it's rough so we did have some Zoom

sessions where we had special people come give guest talks um one of our big coven time efforts was we sent out feel good boxes so basically people could nominate co-workers friends family who they thought could use a little bit pick me up uh and we sent them a box full of anything from cyber security stuff to mental health related stuff Journal sticker shirts um and we got we got obviously pretty positive feedback from that no one uh no one's unhappy to receive a random box of of stuff um so so that was kind of some things we did during covid but luckily moving back to normalcy I myself had this year have done Defcon blue team con

here besides charm and besides Nashville I think uh our mind so far this year and the pre-covet I was doing five to six Villages a year um because me and Amanda actually have full-time jobs and we do not make enough money through the non-profit to do this full-time uh we do uh have volunteers um who can who have these kids so we created a version that's basically in a big crate that we ship um so me and Amanda have the big Village but we've got two like mini Villages that um are in different cities and we just ship them from City to City so I think we have two or three villages on top of me

and Amanda's big Villages which means we could technically simultaneously run five Villages at a time which works out because we did one weekend I believe run three at a time so I was in Texas running one someone was in like DC running one and someone was in like Washington State running one it was it was great um so we've really expanded our capabilities we're trying to take this everywhere anywhere that will bring us um because the only the the one good thing about the coveted shutdown is our amazing supporters continue to financially support us even though we weren't running the villages they didn't pull their funding we had almost every we have a patreon and almost every

patreon contributed to contribute hacker one as well as oh forget the name of the uh anti-sipon the uh Black Hills training yeah the hacker one and them both give portions of their sales to us so our bank account built up which the good thing is uh we used to kind of have to really push conferences to help us find sponsors who would pay for like our flights and hotels but we managed to raise so much during our downtime that we're now able to support kind of the smaller conferences that don't have the sponsors we don't have to kind of put that pressure on them okay like we're not paying for it so this year we we got

to go full rank it's basically anyone who asked as long as it wasn't an issue with our availability uh we tried going there so that's that's been really great it's like the whole concept here um when when we announced the Twitter trolls will find any and every way to hate on someone uh I am I've often attacked on Twitter and I I just laugh at it at this point um so when we first announced the formation of mental health hackers the Twitter trolls attacked us they told us this was a horrible idea because we were not mental health professionals and we didn't know what we were talking about um and so my first idea was like hey

Amanda uh I could go get my PhD in Psychology and then nobody can say anything she's like how about let's not go that far um I'm still willing to I'll take the bullet I really like Psych in college you know uh do what you got to do I always love to shut down a Twitter troll so she was smarter and decided to instead back up her her decision with science uh and if you ask her she's got about 5 000 articles on peer support and the success rate of peer support safe the same reason AA works you know it's a group of people facing similar issues discussing our issues finding Solutions uh just into even just being there together like

even if you're not you don't want to open up and talk about it that's why I'm very vocal about my autism and I try and slip it I'll just slip into conversations like I even sometimes feel myself feel weird like saying oh I'm Autistic or oh this because of autism because culture has told me like you keep these things silent so that's one of the things like I tried to do as a peer support and as a member of mental health hackers is just in conversation like I'll do something I'll be like oh there's the autism coming out you know we're like oh yeah I can't really do that because of blah blah blah resulting from my autism try

and casually bring it up because it's that pure support that that we're trying to aim for um that when you walk into the mental health Village you hear a group of people sitting around talking about their recent battles with depression and and what they're doing to try and improve themselves and like oh I've tried this and this works and that even if you don't want to talk about it you don't feel that level of comfort I feel like there's something comforting about just seeing a collective group it's always amazed me seeing these groups of people form in the village to talk about these topics that historically have been No-No topics they'll talk about it openly with each other

um I think that's the end of the slides I created for this but I'll just touch a couple more things um companies a big thing that we try to talk about as we try to gather resources for how companies can support their employees from a mental health perspective uh Delaware does a lot they have a lot of programs IBM who I work for I've seen it come up more and more as a topic there's a lot of things we can try and do as organizations as managers one like I said peer support open discussion if my manager is open about their mental health issues they're facing I'm gonna feel comfortable being open if they're not then I'm like ah do

I say something like are they gonna treat me differently so creating that culture where you know you can be comfortable outside of culture how do we support them from a benefits perspective um companies the idea of a limited PTO has come I think in concept it's great there's always that thing of but now you feel the pressure of like how much can you actually take so really enforcing not just hey you have this unlimited PTO but you need to I saw Leslie they were posting on Twitter the other day a whole thread about this and they said that they get unlimited PTO but not only that because a bunch of people went well that sucks because then you feel the pressure

to not take it and they said well actually we enforce it and if we look and we see you haven't taken PTO recently that we're gonna message you hey you haven't taken PTO like refresh get out of here and if they don't hey uh manager your employee like they they need this phrase so it's really great reinforcing that um at a health benefits level uh does your insurance allow you to file claims for for therapy like visiting therapy do they support your mental health not just your physical health if I get sick or I break a bone I automatically I'm like oh yeah put on my insurance like they'll cover at least some of it but when I

think about my mental health things oh what about meds for mental health what about my therapy appointments what about you know all of these different things I don't immediately say oh yeah I'm sure this has got it because I don't know because that's very hit or miss it depends on your employer and what they've agreed to cover um so there's a lot we can do from a business perspective um mental health actors like I said we're very focused on community like sometimes your company doesn't do it sometimes you're depressed and you're having these mental health crises because you've been laid off like we meet a lot of people who email us or come up to us in villages hey I got laid

off life sucks like I don't know what to do they don't have their company supporting them so we as a community need to be supporting each other um so I think that's the gist of it like I said it was pretty casual I know Chris knows a lot about the organization um but I just wanted to kind of hit some of those key topics uh it was very mishmash of topics but it's important that uh I get kind of a high level out there you guys can understand why I'm doing what I'm doing and why where are doing what we're doing with mental health Packers but in general I just encourage you all to be there for your

peers that's that's our biggest mission is being more open about mental health and sharing that so thank you for your time um and all uh any questions I guess