Mental Health for Hackers

all right welcome welcome welcome thanks for hanging out with us I know there's an open bar right next door and I just wanted to say that this talk is gonna share some personal stories um so whatever happens this room I know it's not gonna stay in this room but the good news is that your Q&A session will be private it will not be recorded so if you have any personal questions on these topics do not worry you are not being recorded and if you feel awkward about doing that we'll also be in the hallway for a good 20 minutes afterwards so we can help you guys out so before we begin I just want to say

that overall in InfoSec we all work really long hours and not just that we work all the time because that is security it's all ours and because of that we all run into depression burnout and as well as anxiety so I'm gonna let my wonderful panelists next to me introduce themselves I'll start I'm Susan PD Akal I am here as a representative of mental health hackers I am their chief wellness officer that just means that I teach a lot of yoga for them but I'm a board member and it's been great so far and I'll tell you more about the organization later by trade I'm a threat intelligence analyst so I'm in the cyber community for about 15 years now however

one that besides is actually my first beachside setup so it's a great group out here so thanks so much I've seen you guys on Twitter so it's been really great so you guys are doing really great things so really happy that anyone took the time out this afternoon to I think about yourself and mental health and what it means to be well in this hackers world my name is Ryan Louie I'm a board-certified psychiatrist I work with a medical group called VY 2d and I actually work in a hospital right here in San Francisco in between Knob Hill and Tenderloin at the st. Francis Memorial Hospital in the psychiatric unit and I've been really interested in

just working with different people from different walks of life different backgrounds and here in this this room here hackers and cyber security and about mental health so I think we could have a great conversation together my name is Claire mr. Yee I'm the VP of strategy over at point three security I'm also the founder women hackers and the co-founder of whoa sec women of security and I am so happy to be here today because mental health hackers is one of those organizations that every single person in the space should know about and so we get to touch on that a little bit later but first I think we need to talk about what we're actually dealing with I did mention that

we work all hours I mean sometimes we'll be working at 2:00 3:00 and the weekends and Brenna is really prevalent and what ends up happening is that were basically also self-medicating ourselves many of us are drinking some of us are doing drugs some of us are doing risky behaviors and some of us use food as a way to protect ourselves or to help us cope and I'm really happy to have Ryan here who can actually share a little bit more on the medical side of things so we can share a little bit more about the truth out there about mental health Ryan it's up to you sir so first of all I just want to let everyone know that deep down

mental health is not just something for a certain profession or a group it's not just for psychiatrists it's not just for people who are trained in mental health it's actually everybody because deep down everyone already has it in his or her own DNA and and if you think back to mental health and what it means for you just think back to your own experiences and think about how it made you feel how do made you think what kind of actions did you take just kind of reflect on that and everyone has the permission to do it themselves so so keeping an open conversation so in terms of mental health just as a general background you

can tell from the slide that it's super super common I'm sure that maybe someone has a very likely to have known someone with a mental health condition and maybe even ourselves or what a friend or a family or a colleague and it's a very very very common and oftentimes it starts very early in in life sometimes it happens in middle age and sometimes older older people get it also so there's a wide spectrum but they're very common and and oftentimes being aware of it and detecting it and doing something about it it's what it's all about too often times people talk about stress in that maybe some of you in the audience have seen this curve

it's actually made over a hundred years ago called the uruk's Dodson curve I didn't talk about this idea of like there's different levels of stress and different types of stress overall meaning that if you see on your left side that if it's not stressful enough it's kind of boring you know it's like it's the same old same old you know they could do the job probably do it pretty well but it's not really that fun and then when you kind of ramped up the stress a little bit you get kind of like in the middle zone where you kind of feel like yeah you know it's pretty stressful and it was challenging and it was hard and you know

we we stayed up pretty late and you know I went through some hard times but overall I think it was good it was a good it was a good time we're learning a lot you felt you grew as a team grew as a person and then as you start getting towards the right side get into the bad stress and that's when stuff starts going downhill you start noticing that you know there you're not feeling yourself you're not feeling like the work is worth it and just overall not not feeling that good so um Chloe and Susan have been very kind to share some stories have both personally and the things that they've seen and I'll also

share some things that I've that I've seen as well but maybe we could launch by going into the field of anxiety all right you're looking at me so I will start recently you probably maybe saw that I wrote an article for a tripwire talking about openly about having anxiety so myself in 2011 I experienced my first panic attack and it was the scariest thing in my life I'm not gonna lie I literally thought I was dying and I didn't know what was going on and so basically ever since then I think for about a good four years I would have a panic attack every single month and every time I did I saw the symptoms

which was the tingling sensation in my toes and going a little bit higher up and that's when I realized I'm gonna curl up in a ball and I'm gonna put my timer on for eight minutes because I figured it out that if I put the timer on for minutes I know this is just a panic attack and I'm gonna be okay so it's set my timer for eight minutes krill bin a ball and think of as many positive things and reinforcing the idea that once again I'm having a panic attack now the issue with that was that during this time I was scared to go out and about because I didn't know when it was gonna

hit so imagine you're like in a crowd like this and then suddenly like you start feeling this sensation you're like I can't breathe we're gonna do you go to the restroom where everyone else is in there I mean at RSA as a woman maybe you won't have anyone in the restroom but here there's a good amount of people and it was really hard and I realized what was happening was it was based over control because when I was little I planned everything to tea it's like at the age of 23 I'm gonna do the following things at the age 25 I'm gonna do the following things and you know what happens it doesn't happen and then that's when you

start having the panic attacks and that was one of the lessons that I definitely learned so I'm pretty sure this slide is me right now being on a panel at besides SF and having anxiety it's it's apropos but being at cons in general I think that they're slightly anxiety inducing there's so many people and it's a sensory overload almost which is again why mental health hackers does what it does and tries to provide a chill-out room at conferences when it's invited and then also from personal experience I think the time I feel anxiety the worst is usually when it's there's like an impending deadline and you just want to make sure it's the perfectionist in me I

want to make sure I'm turning in like the perfect product the perfect deliverable and it's it's probably like the worst experience until I finally hit Send and it's gone and there's nothing I can do about it then so I'm sure we all have there's hundreds of examples I can give you right now but yeah keep it short yeah thanks to Susan Chloe I mean a lot of these things that you've described as I'm sure everyone kind of has felt some part of that at some point in their life and it's a it's anxiety can be a normal response of stress it protects us so lets us know that there's bad things out there and then we got to

be careful and just kind of avoid it or deal with it and kind of keeps us alert but when anxiety becomes kind of like a more serious kind of thing is then when it becomes somehow out of proportion to what would be appropriate for either at that situation or the stage and life of a person or the context of it so it's a it's a it's kind of a scale almost and and anxiety disorders are super comments so lots of lots of lots of people are can be affected by it several different types of anxiety and and on the internet and different sources there's a lot of information there so you just just as an

example for educational purposes you know there's different types of anxiety there's panic disorders there's there's a generalized anxiety disorders where there's anxiety about things in general and broad things then you get into things like social anxiety disorders where where there's social situations that that cause the anxious feelings and and things of that nature then you have to all the different kind of phobias and and oftentimes we've heard in the media about various phobias and there's constantly new ones so but all of them have this element of anxiety and then finally there's a anxiety that's oftentimes caused by things that are beyond mental health or psychiatry things to do with substances like drugs and alcohol in their medical conditions

and finally there's other things that are related to anxiety such as PTSD and what we call that justment disorder meaning that there's something that happened and people are trying to adjust the best that they can to take care of this so I listed on the right side of the slide just various kind of symptoms and I'm sure these are very familiar to everyone who's ever felt panicked or or anxious essentially the queasiness sweating palpitations feeling uneasy don't feel like eating you know can't sleep all that kind of stuff so and just a brief educational slide about treatment the most important thing is to is to find someone that you trust find someone that you trust in and don't

be afraid to go out and reach out and get some help if this could be a friend a close colleague a mentor someone that you could go to say hey you know there's there's something going on I I want someone to talk to about this kind of thing and and you and maybe after speaking and self-reflecting get this you take the step to seek a professional it could be a mental health professional a physician and get get a check so that you could make sure that you're not missing anything that could be more serious and they can work with you to find a program that's appropriate for people in terms of their lifestyle and what they what what they like to do

and you know there's lots of different tips on how to handle anxiety and the general thing I like to tell people is find something that you feel that you could do on your own that you can feel happy about that you feel satisfying and that you feel personally rewarding because that's what's gonna keep you going when things get tough you want to be able to make sure that you could do the things that you enjoy and of course you know get get people involved I get get people that you trust involved get get doctors and physicians on board and and get it all comprehensively moving forward then we're going to talk about some depression I guess I'm going first

again okay so I've never been clinically depressed and so what I've gone through is episode depression which is from an event that occurs in your life where suddenly you get depressed if symptoms this depression for me I had a breakup with someone that I loved so much and hurt me really bad and a week later I lost my job so I was a complete I was just a disaster in a sense like I was crying like every single day I was putting on weight trenee like put some sort of barrier around me some way and it was just crying a lot and no one knew about it because I was also being very productive also looking

for a new job so that lasted for like months on end maybe I should have gone first because she took my answer but no it's very much the same where I think anytime I've ever felt depression it's always been event driven and I always felt very selfish for labeling and as depression I felt like I shouldn't do that because I know people in my life who have been diagnosed with depression manic depressive and like Khloe said it's all usually you're still high-functioning you're still seemingly normal until you go home and you're on the floor and it's always been like breakups or the job really having some sort of failure at work family induced but yeah it could be

any of those things but I'll leave it to Ryan to talk about actual depression like the symptoms and everything Chloe and Susan brought up a great point in that the idea of depression there's always going to be some points in life that definitely that you know people feel down there's gonna be ups and downs for sure and oftentimes people ask you know hey is this like actual depression or we just feeling depressed or just feeling kind of stressed like how this is all kind of work in in many cases it's a we have a common language in psychiatry - clinically that I know something but in actuality it's all the same biology we are all the same

molecules we're all the same cells inside our body and it's it's a gray zone actually to be able to say like you know what's kind of like okay stress and what's kind of like super stressful and what's clinically you know completely serious it's oftentimes a gradation and to be able to know where each person is in terms of his or her own life and what feels right what doesn't feel right I think each of us knows ourselves the best so just kind of keep that in mind and keep it open mind towards being aware of oneself and we could get places so but in terms of psychiatrists and then people in the mental health field

in terms of what actually depression is that is the diagnostic Statistical Manual called the dsm-5 and it's the man of all the clinical diagnosis so you know we have criteria that that that are used to actually diagnose depression so I'll leave this up here on the on the sly for everyone to read but essentially it's stuff like don't feel like hanging out with people don't feel like doing things for fun feeling kind of guilty you're not just guilty but inappropriately guilty maybe too much guilt about stuff that happens feels like you know you don't want to you know hang out with people with having problems concentrating your you're fine like you're eating too much or either to a little same for sleep

sleeping too much sleeping to too little hard to get out of bed hard to get started these are some of the things that people kind of describe and feeling depressed for most of the day and sometimes even getting to the point of having thoughts of self-harm or maybe even suicide and and that's when that's when things get very serious and it's time to look out for each other in ourselves to try to get some help and similarly the symptoms some of these are our physical manifestations like in terms of what our bodies feel when when when we get depressed and um and again oftentimes these are felt and other kind of mental health conditions as well they

kind of overlap with anxiety and depression but it all points to the fact that we're human bodies where were human beings and everything that affects us in one part of our mental health oftentimes kind of leaks over to other things so again we talk about things like feeling feeling depressed and down overall so I'll leave this up and and I think these slides will be available for people and certainly contact us and we'll send you a copies and treatment wise overall it's its idea of don't don't do it alone that's the general message you know you find someone you trust I get it get the help of a professional you get I go see a counselor a therapist

someone that you could talk to you just so that you're not by yourself so that you've got people around you you got a team just like here I besides you know no one's doing cybersecurity or hacking and things like that no one's doing it by themselves you know although it's an individual endeavor deep down it's a community effort so that's you think about everyone in this room everyone's sitting here so this is what we do we all we all do it together and the things at the bottom are when we talk about when things get really serious in terms of danger to self danger self harm so these are certain some of the flags that we could look out

for ourselves or to our for our colleagues in terms of you know what to look out for and things like wanting to end things maybe getting things organized preparing for things maybe by their their change in their behavior and maybe their outlook or the way they do things and in the way they say things so so just kinda looking out for everyone to continue with the talk about suicide I think many of us have lost someone in InfoSec because of suicide and it's really important to talk about that there's two different types of suicide and usually we don't really know about this the first one is an active thought an active thought is like today next week next

month next year I'm gonna take this many pills on this one day and I'm gonna end it all now another one it could be sudden where you're like you look for a blade you see it and you're like I can't do this anymore like this is it I've had thoughts this is the time to do it that is one of those things that is an active moment now there are suicidal tendencies and passive thoughts passive thoughts can be anything from I am going to not look in my rear window I mean my mirror and I'm just gonna go and merge into the outline and if I get hit I hit I get thrown iodide and this is great

for me because I don't want to do this anymore another thing could be not looking when crossing the street these are other ways to spot suicidal thoughts and I'm pretty sure that most of us at some point in our life know someone who has gone through something like this or ourselves as well we're gonna move into the area burnout and when Susan and Chloe showed me the slide you know in terms of InfoSec I said why is that just three years going from baby Yoda it's like Master Yoda and like a Jedi Master but but overall it puts the general idea that this is thing called burnout and essentially you know let's talk about what burnout is you know I

think everyone kind of knows to some degree like you know what it was what it sort of feels like in terms of burnout I kind of liken it to this like when your cell phone battery like for me let's say I'm tweeting a lot and then it you know it goes down to 10 percent 5 percent 3 percent Oh starts turning red stars blinking stuff this the screen start to dim and then I can't do other functions I everything runs really slow and it's it gets the phone suddenly knows that that they just need to preserve the most basic things make phone calls send messages and somehow get whatever data if we can something like that you know we gotta

make the most of what's going on so I for burn out its when the energy is essentially all drained out emotional depletion is is one of the features it's the idea that just drained it's this a flashing red icon on your cell phone detachment cynicism oftentimes people start making off-color jokes and making comments about different things at work or or about about life in general or about different problems and then it starts to become something noticeable that there's kind of detached from their work low personal achievement this idea that hey you know this is when I first joined this this job is really fun I really really excited I want to do great things in the world and build my career

and and kind of go for it but after well it's it kind of levels off a little bit maybe even kind of goes downhill in terms of like hey it's not what I thought it was anymore and in depersonalization it's the idea that it's not connected to you as a person anymore some people describe it as like looking at yourself in a film or looking at yourself as if you were an exhibit at a museum or something like that so all these things are are signs of burnout and interestingly burnout is not part of that dsm-5 manual that I talked about it's actually a condition that's not officially a psychiatric illness but some people think that it's on its way

to depression but whatever it is it's a it's it's it's affecting people's lives and also interrupts sorry so we were gonna share personal stories about this and I really wanted to make sure I spoke on this one because this is the one that I experienced most recently so I was with a consulting company I'm not working right now for this reason for burnout specifically so I was with a consulting company for 14 years at 14 months Jesus 14 years and that whole 14 months I didn't have a single vacation I didn't have a day off I took three weeks off to go do my reserve duty and they counted that as my time off when I asked

for time off they were likely just took three weeks off and I'm like to go serve in the reserves I mean that's not really sitting on the beach with a drink in my hand so I try to ignore it kept trying to ignore it I was like let me just make it to one year made it to one year had prana clients had a project going on I was like okay let me just make it to the end and my body Ryan talked about physical manifestations and my body was just not going to let it happen anymore so come July I was having a migraine every single day it's just literally as soon as I woke up in the morning it was

migraine and I kept ignoring it took my migraine medicine later on about a week later I developed a facial twitch and I went to the doctor and I was like I can't get this to stop and he was like that's because you're about to either have Bell's palsy or have a stroke so that was the day that I put in my two weeks notice and I quit my job and no regrets about it I knew that it was the right thing to do I had the support of my friends and family when I tell people about it they were like good for you it was just something that was necessary and I needed to that was one of the

reasons why I really wanted to make sure I spoke today because I was like it's just something that we want to keep pushing through and ignoring but after a while like you just can't anymore that picture was literally me Oh Chloe I don't know if you have any um so and before I wanted to InfoSec I was in humanitarian work and that I also included education I was placed in Oakland a school district to work with special ed kids and I was not trained I had kids that were being prostitute at the age of like eight or nine I had kids that were being stabbed multiple times like in other places of their bodies so

wouldn't anyone would be able to notice it I was dealing with kids that saw someone get murdered in front of them and I was not trained for this and I remember just being so burned out because not only that but people quit all the time in special ed in Oakland cuz there's no resources for you and you're like where did the money go and the thing is is that with that burnout people leave and then you take on their cases so suddenly it was had 12 kids and then suddenly it went up to 42 and I was not doing good and if you heard a little bit earlier about being in a car and you're looking in the

mirror you're like well what happens if I just don't look when going to the other lane and that was the moment I realize like okay I'm burned out I need to get out this is not good for me if I'm having these type of thoughts and yeah the same thing you recognize it but sometimes it's too late and it's really important to recognize that now yeah and and and and the idea of recognizing it now doing something now that's so important like everyone here is at this session as you it's the last day of besides SF reflect on the people that you've met here today reflect on the sessions that you've been there ideas that you were thinking about in and

think about what this means for you and and where do you like to be checking where yourself constantly is it's a great place to start so that's how we could start to tackle these ideas and things I believe in the power stores I think Susan and Chloe have have have shared very powerful stories so with everyone I'll just leave the slide up just general physical scientists signs and symptoms of burnout things to do with behavior emotional signs but I think overall from the stories that we've heard I think I think that encapsulates very well about this idea of what it means to feel when you feel burned out oftentimes people talk about what's the difference between stress and

burnout and this is a slide that we got off the internet there but but in general sometimes it's kind of gray and sometimes it's kind of hard there's no delineation in terms of stress and burnout oftentimes one goes on to the other side and the other one comes on the other side but in general stress as we talked about that curve there could be good stress bad stress everything in between kind of stress when it becomes burnout is when you when you start hitting that red battery so the red battery flash and battery got to do something and there's different types of things that can cause burnout they could be caused by things that the workplace

that's the most common things that people hear about that that causes a burnout and stress things like not having control over your work having not given enough resources to do the work you've been assigned to dynamics between colleagues and just really stressful high-pressure kind of environments it could also be caused by lifestyle kind of things like maybe things in terms of not being able to turn off when you go back home like you know you clocked out you're done for shift but you're back at home when you should be enjoying stuff with your family but then you're thinking about work and checking your phone and and and trying to do stuff like that sometimes it's a

it's built into each of us and we talked about that idea that everyone's different and everyone has a different level of threshold for what stress is good and when it's bad and sometimes this could be built into our own DNA our own personality so being aware of that and what works for us and what doesn't is oftentimes a big step to go forward and again treatment in general it's it's again don't do it by yourself you know just go out and find people that you trust go out and get some help and then talk about what might be needed different things that we could treat not just burnout but also depression anxiety sometimes it could be used there could

be medications for for for treatments sometimes it's talk therapy sometimes it's a combination of both and oftentimes we try to look for the underlying cause so just solve the underlying cause try to try to find into that and and there's a whole bunch of different kind of ways to manage symptoms so I'll leave this up for everyone to take a look at it but I generally find people that you trust find a group of people that can help you out do something that you enjoy that you feel you could do on your own just out of enjoy ability and keep moderation in in terms of things that you do and always keep tabs on yourself too to

understand where you are I think this whole presentation we're trying to show that you should never go through anything alone I mean we are a community of people that like we have many of our dams are open and we're always trying to help each other out and I think that's one of the things that keeps us in this room and keeps us going to be sides s of it it's it's the community and we need to be part of that and just note that like it's very hard to talk openly about your situation but there's plenty of people out there that are willing to look into and help you out anytime you want started dry throat

honestly I think the industry needs to change we need to be a little bit more open about these things and also to have open dialogue the other thing is that you know we usually treat anything but the health concern pretty well so like a broken leg diabetes but we never really do anything when it comes to people that are dealing with like depression anxiety and PTSD and whatnot and that's one of the things that we really need to talk about because it does impact us in our everyday work at the same time and we're still going through the stigmatism that come with mental health as well so like I was saying share your experiences is

going to be really important but also you can do is reach out to the resources that we're going to share towards the end and also note that you can actually build a support network yourselves to to help each other so everyone has someone that they can call when they need someone to talk to now change in the workplace like I said earlier if someone has a broken leg you take that seriously you're like you can stay home you can't walk it's totally fine but we should also do that when people are dealing with some things and mentally and that's one things that we need to change because a lot of us when we're going through something we don't tell HR we

don't tell our manager because we're coming where we're going to get fired let's be real and that's a real problem but the other thing is that if we don't say anything then we might get end up game fired because we were dealing with something and we're not getting the right treatment that we need so just remember that is that if a company is not going to help you out at all you shouldn't be working there period and before we actually basically announce that we're going to be doing this talk we started doing research ourselves and we asked the community do you have any employer that has helped you with your mental health we got zero responses and

that's just letting you know the problem is very real and we are definitely being overworked and especially when someone leaves our team we're taking on more work and we're not being respected or appreciated so this is why it's really important if you're a manager in this room please push something forward this is really important to do so I wanted to give you some quick facts about mental health in the workplace go off of what Chloe just said depression and anxiety have a significant economic impact the estimated cost globally is one trillion per year in lost productivity due to mental illness work is good for mental health but being in a negative work environment can lead to

physical and mental health problems like we've already Illustrated who here has worked a negative work environment before kind of surprised there's not everybody but I need to know where you work so I can apply there so it's usually through like some harassment or bullying at work those are the commonly reported problems they can have a substantial adverse impact on your mental health unemployment is a negative risk factor on mental health but returning or getting work it has a positive impact negative working environment can lead to as Chloe stated before it can lead to physical and mental health problems but also harmful use of substances or alcohol it can also lead to absenteeism and the lost

productivity for every one dollar that's been put into a skilled treatment in a company they see a common return of $4 in improved health and productivity so it's a 400% return for any company that does invest in these kind of programs so to move on to that we don't want to present just or bring light to this problem we want to potentially give you solutions to that you might be able to take back to your employer or if you are a lead in a company maybe take these initiatives back so some of the changes that you can do in your workplace give your team flexibility so you want to invest in mental health in your

workplace and you're not sure where to start let the employees choose so one option is potentially a monthly stipend that can be used at their choice for therapy appointments massages meditation apps gym memberships spa days and then potentially healthier working hours so we had talked to someone about how they were kind of drowning at work and their supervisor recognized this and changed his work hours and he was almost instantly happier and healthier so everybody has like different rhythms some people are early birds and people are night owls having that level of autonomy at your work sometimes really helps and resonates with the people and it's apparent in their productivity so next slide we talked about getting

employee buy-in and so there were several companies on inks 20 19 best workplace lists that said that they offer monthly and annual stipends but employees don't always take advantage of these benefits even the short-term ones short-term services for people struggling with perhaps like addiction or personal problems of some sort and so only half of the employees were actually aware that they were given this benefit so awareness to your employees is huge if you do offer these programs and getting employee buy-in is easier and smaller companies usually because of the tight-knit culture that they have there and having leadership again as Chloe mentioned that's open about their own struggles with mental health so if you have I mean even if you're not in a

position of leadership just being open and vocal sometimes just helps everybody else employees that see that mental illness isn't shameful it can be managed and more likely seek help before they're in crisis and potentially lose their jobs so next slide so one of the other things an employer can do is making it easier to get help so opening the workplace dialog is one way and teaching coping strategies is another you can go a long way in aiding employees mental health and sometimes people just also need professional treatment though so while most health insurance plans cover some mental health care therapy can be very expensive even with the insurance so one of the things that they're doing

to close the gap is companies are turning to online services and then to the next point they're actually bringing in-house professionals so one of the there was an Illinois based accounting firm that provides all of their employees with access to a psychologist on the company's dime and during the company time at their location so it makes it super accessible for the employees to take advantage of and the company also started bringing in a certified life coach to work with employees at least once a year and it wouldn't be a talk at a cyber conference unless we mentioned metrics at some point so how would you measure that this is actually working and I mean the the

program sound good in theory but you it can be difficult to measure their success because how do you measure happiness and there are a few things that you can do potentially track productivity the quality of output as well as the turnover rate and absenteeism inside so I told you I'd talk to you about mental health hackers a little bit I was privileged enough to be at Derby con 8 and it all began out of a tweet our illustrious CEO Amanda Berlin info sister a lot of people know you know her his info sister on Twitter she's just amazing and she's spoken about mental health extensively and she's done many talks at cyber cons about them and she saw that this was a

problem and she wanted to present a solution so she went to the creators of or the people who run Derby con and they were super supportive and they gave her a room and they said you know have a mental health village and she invited me to teach yoga and and I jumped on the chance to go to Derby and be able to do this for her and that's where it all began for us was Derby Khanate in October of 2018 it was such a success and it was so well received by the community that we knew it had to be something so she formed a board I think our board members are listed on the

slide so please go and follow them on Twitter and by November just the following month she had us incorporated as a non-profit and by April of the following year we were a 501c3 we received our status on that which was amazing so our goal is to have hackers helping hackers and we kind of say it's a a for mental health one of the things that we want to grow into because right now we provide mental health villages at various cons and in our first year we did cons in three countries and and 10 in in 10 different states and upcoming in 2020 we're already committed or speaking to 12 other cons and what we do at our mental

health village is we have presentations and discussions yoga like I mentioned before we have massage chairs which people love who doesn't love getting a 15 minute massage in the middle of the day and then we have different tables set up so there's like a fidget table coloring adult coloring books setup we have a crafts table we had a session on paracord crafting knitting essential oils there was a therapy dog that showed up that people really loved we filled a unicorn cool with like beads and people loved running their hands through it it was it was crazy but we want to be able to do this more and we want to be able to expand and one of the things we want

to do is there's a mental health first aid training out there and we want to be able to bring that to the hacker community it's basically CPR for mental health is the way that we like to look at it we want to make that more accessible so we would love everybody with on want to get involved there are definitely ways to donate and we would love the support in that way but we also would love it if you would volunteer and you could do that through our website and also follow mental health hackers on Twitter our handles up there hacker hackers health and if you see us on at cons please come say hi and enjoy the mental health

village we're there for you and I just want to mention that I do have stickers and swag afterwards for anybody who wants them yes so just find me after I absolutely love the fidgeting stay so the first time I found mental health hackers was an B says Austin and I was like there's so many things I can like play with while I was like waiting to get a massage I was like this is luxurious like I wish every conference had this because I could use a massage every time but it made me feel really comforted for sure I think it lets you know that you're not alone like I said it's sensory overload so it's nice to

take that break but it's also like a room of people who are just there for each other that's what the discussions like I think the first one at Derby eight there was like we went through so many boxes of tissue like there was sharing their stories and they're just crying it was great it's very cathartic and I and I first heard about a mental health hackers actually on Twitter and I think Amanda ended the whole team and it was Susan everyone they've done really exciting work so I was really happy to see that people cared a lot too to put something together for people in the hacker community overall we're really hoping that when you guys walk out of

here that you kind of want to give back in a sense because we need to all come together to change what needs to be changed at this point but most importantly you do not know what each person is going through so please be kind and that means on Twitter I'm looking at everyone in here be nice on Twitter because you do not know how that's going to impact a person so if even if you want to troll you're gonna have a snarky remark that's cool and everything but think about it before you press tweet we have a really good page for you and I'm gonna ask for everyone in this audience to take a photo of this

I want you to share this everywhere if anyone ever were to connect with you and be like I'm dealing with a situation I want you to send this photo to them post on Facebook post on LinkedIn post it everywhere you possibly can because that is how we let people know about the resources that are available now like I promised we're gonna stop the recording so if anyone wants to ask some questions don't worry it's not being recorded and if anyone asked any questions please keep that within the room meaning don't bring it out don't share it that this person did this or talked about this literally just keep it in this room please and I know

whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and we're not in Vegas but let's be real every time we ride like how people are taking photographs okay so