Mental-health

Most people nod and don’t know what to say when you say you’re getting sober. It’s like getting pregnant in your mid-20’s. Is it congratulations, or indicative of a darker turn we didn’t know about that will get rougher in the future? There has been slight proudness and well wishes. It is mostly just awkward glances or words unsaid that people don’t want to peer into. Maybe they just don’t know how to.

Stopping someone from posting about their suicidal thoughts doesn’t make them go away. Hiding comments in a celebrity’s post about their body does not stop people from dissecting it in other platforms. But, content moderation also gives these platforms a chance to deploy their answer to a question everyone is asking. What is a content generation platform’s responsibility to the greater world it exists in?

I used to think that the pinnacle of my life was to do something with pain, and now I know the real answer is to accept it without letting it rule you. The goal is to not try to banish the pain from the room, but to give it a place. There is no running from pain, there is no endpoint to suffering. There is just finding a place to put it down.

Social media has been evolving into another form of weaponry for school shooters. Schools now simply shut down when an anonymous account posts vaguely threatening messages, or pre-existing shooters are turned into figureheads within online communities. For every large group of people that see the shooters as beyond human, there’s a small number of people who see themselves. In its wake, we now are catching up to guidelines about how to report in the media responsibility, and to not infame shooters into what they want. But, the process is slow and the hidden internet communities where people lurk are numerous. We have to confront the fact that the cycle of violence is enabled more easily with technology. But, the solution might not lie there.

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