BSides Leeds 2019: Hackers, Hugs, & Drugs: Mental Health In Infosec - Amanda Berlin

can you guys hear me in the back or do I yell yeah good all right sweet so first off thank you mark for inviting me this is like he said my first trip to the UK only ever been to Europe twice so I'm still messing things up on here so I usually start this talk with a little bit of a story about let's see here now it's been about eight years ago I was married with two kids living in the middle of nowhere Ohio if anybody knows where that is I'm sorry nobody's probably ever visited it first off super shitty house in like this glorified trailer park and my second son was about one first son was eight and without

going into a whole lot of details my marriage really didn't have any control over my life at the time that being said I remember the one night I realized something was really wrong with me like I knew the other things that were wrong with me already but something like truly really wrong with me um I just got out of the shower and like just getting ready for bed broke down crying like couldn't talk couldn't couldn't think this is the closest representation I can think of it was actually going out of my head my husband had no idea was wrong he thought like the world was ending he had no idea what was going on and I tried to force myself

to speak and it physically hurt to try and talk right and I just thought I thought the world was ending like it I just had this impending doom and I thought everything was ending right it took about an hour and a half before I finally calmed myself down enough to tell him what was wrong and it was my shower curtain was dirty stupidest thing ever to cry for like an hour and a half about right but that's what finally like tipped me over the edge I felt super stupid and immature right and looking back in a lot of it now a lot of the anxiety problems I had were due to uncleanliness in the house and and

whatever that I couldn't control and that in itself is a whole other book of stories and the funny thing is I even when I knew something was wrong internally I didn't ask for any help I thought you know at the ripe old age of 25 I had made it this far why can't I handle everything else on my own right so why in the world am i bringing this up here right usually we have technical talks we have people hacking things if people protecting things policy not usually much policy but yeah we talk about technical things right well like the hacker community and InfoSec has been the first group of people that I found that really truly give me

you know I a lot of you have gone through the same struggles that I have growing up like you're kind of an outcast yeah it made fun of for being nerdy that kind of stuff and when I first started posting and talking about mental health like my own personal mental health issues like on Facebook and Twitter and everything I got a whole lot of feedback they're like but you seem so upbeat like you're always laughing you're always cracking jokes like you how were you even depressed right and then I just realized there was a lot of people with the same kind of issues that I was having so I figured why not talk about it right so that's

what we'll cover a little bit about today is just how this is all happening in InfoSec and tech as well right because a lot of us have the same issues and looking back now in my life after I finally got some help I had been struggling with this since my teens and I just didn't realize it so we never want to admit anything's wrong with us right what's the first step of any like 12-step program yeah ask you for help admitting to yourself that you have an issue right hmm but if you kind of stop there and don't go any further you're not gonna get any better right you'll just become more angry and more

depressed and not not only do people in our industry have the normal stresses of like your average nine-to-five job but we have family and you pressures from our our bosses and a lot of us are in specific industries that deal with things like Incident Response or you know catching pedophiles or you know human trafficking cases like there's a lot of really difficult stuff to deal with even if you're in the technical industry right and when you come you combine all of like the normal pressures along with us sitting behind a keyboard for what 12 16 depending on what you do you know it really starts to build up so I never thought I would do

so much research on mental health this is me yeah this is a lot of us and when I started reading about this topic the first thing I googled was mental health issues and STEM fields and holy crap most of them were about women but i removing women as a search term it took it from 6 million articles down to 2 but really when it comes to mental illnesses like the sexes are different right women are more likely to be diagnosed with things like anxiety and depression where men kind of tend towards substance abuse and anti-social disorders but the reason why most of those articles remember women is because we're the minority right minority you want to focus on minorities a lot of

times so that's what all the articles were about not saying that you guys don't have problems I know some of you you have a plan approach okay you start talking about it but the hypothesis I was trying to prove is that it seems like people in stem might have a higher rate of mental health issues I I mean I've known way too many person people personally that have committed suicide or gone through self-harm or been can you know committed themselves to a mental institution because of depression or suicidal thoughts and I actually through this research found it's called the Savannah IQ interaction hypothesis and I think I have a quote from this yeah so it states and kind of backs this up

that the finding of an association between progressively increasing risk of bipolar disorder and higher arithmetic intellectual performance as rather surprising he talked about like having really high mathematical scores also correlated with people having a tendency of experiencing mania so it was definitely in there studies showed that the people with the higher IQ is tended to have higher mental health problems it also talks about people with those higher IQs tending to self-medicate way more than the average person so how many of you I'm not gonna give no any spoilers but how many of you like mr. robot or watch mr. robot okay the shows kind of how much either either they does a lot of research into this or

they just got really lucky because the main kal main character Elliott suffers from social anxiety disorder depression delusions of paranoia and he's he's self-medicates right he self-medicate with morphine and eases suboxone to kind of bring himself back down and not suffer withdrawal symptoms but that's basically like he's a great case study for that paper right because he's super super highly intelligent and self-medicating himself no I don't recommend that lets prophets preface no morphine for you unless it's prescribed so I'm gonna move on to some more statistics some of these are us-centric um but we're just gonna assume mm-hmm applies to a lot of us so there's a study by Berkeley that showed that 42 to

48 percent of PhD students suffered from clinical depression it's like almost half of them suffer from clinical depression where it's like 10 percent of the major population does so definitely sorry if you're in uni but you're probably gonna be suffering from it more than the average Joe which makes sense in those Google results there were significantly more results involving those women because like I said you know the focus on minorities and the lack of reporting from men so I know this just says in the US so ignore that part I'm just trying to prove a point right yeah same the UK and all of this and we still think that everybody has it together better than

what we do right I know I'm guilty of it a lot of people have given talks about impostor syndrome right so the you thinking that you don't belong cuz you you know why are you getting paid this amount to do what you don't think you know how to do and just that never goes away I don't care who you are how much you've done how much you've learned that never goes away you just feel like you're drowning while everybody else around you is doing fine and I can tell you it's definitely not the truth so I know I can think of a good amount of people that have watched us have talked me through different situations like

this as well as all the other kind of times that I've been limited because my brain have has decided to go in like some crazy direction so I thought the US Preventive service task force recommends that all all Americans be screened for depression which all right you know we're a first world country right like we got say we ever fit together because obviously that's not right is it like I was just thinking like all of them like all of us like we're all supposed to be screened for depression is it because of our diet is it because of our you know it's probably because our government probably the same reason why you guys need to have these screen

for depresses your government yeah yeah definitely but I mean in the grand scheme of things we don't really have that much you know going bad for us when you look at you know how while we're doing compared the rest of the world but that really doesn't matter when you're like shriveled in the corner and can't talk right so I'm gonna dive real quick into different types of mental health issues and their characters I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this this like I'm not a doctor and I can't memorize all of the different symptoms for everything but we'll cover some of the quick ones and I'll tell you some of my terrible stories about mine so a few

of my slides I use these pictures with the hashtag inktober there's a really good artist in Ohio that have that created these for like mental health awareness and he was actually one of the original artists for cyanide happiness if anybody knows a cartoon yeah so first there's social anxiety disorder which is me fear of situations where you might be judge worried that you might offend somebody say the wrong thing look at them the wrong way fear of interacting with strangers physical symptoms that might cause you embarrassment like flushed cheeks sweating you know that kind of stuff avoiding situations where you might be the center of attention which don't ask me how I can get up here every time I

just fake it really mm-hmm I'm anxiety and anticipation of a upcoming event and one that I do a lot is spending times after a social situation repeatedly going over every move that I made every word that I said and how it may have come across to the other person and you just expect the worst possible outcome for everything that you do all the time so you might say to yourself as I go through these that these are things that happen to you every now and then but all of the diagnosis talked about how this is recurring and intense fears that happen are intense issues that you deal with with all of these right you might

avoid normal social social situations like going to the bathroom eating in public I had a friend that I used to work with that review to eat out with us at all she would have to eat at her desk because she didn't want anybody watch our - or swallow making eye contact I know I have a problem calling people on the phone which I hate that but dating is super fun when you're in the middle of nowhere in your mid-30s it's like just it's with anxiety it's just a special kind of hell I can tell you attending parties or social gatherings that kind of stuff anything to do with people and I don't know how many relationships I've ruined

because my panicking can't panic our anxiety attacks and I don't just mean like romantic relationships right I mean friendships or business relationships anything like that just because you know you can't always get across what's going on side your head and you really just make up situations that are happening that haven't actually happened um I'll like over invest myself in these relationships and just punish myself in my head over and over again just because you know you make up the situations that are happening and they're not actually so next up is depression definitely one of the most talked about mental health issues out there a lot of people will associate this with just being sad definitely not the case right it is it

is way more than that and according to a recent World Health Organization study it's actually the leading cause of physical illness in the world because a lot of physical problems manifest itself well when you have depression you have feeling of sadness angry outburst a lot of the times you get a huge loss of interest in anything that used to make you happy you know whether it's your your hobbies or your work or your family anything like that just doesn't you know doesn't really hold you anymore right sleep it's sleep disturbances either way you either sleep too much or don't sleep at all tiredness lack of energy so I tried I tried at least some funny memes to this cuz I

realize how super depressing the entire talk is but hopefully hopefully add something to it to make you laugh um feeling of worthlessness or guilt blaming yourself for everything trouble thinking and concentrating and again unplanned physical problems

next up super fun one this is bipolar disorder as previously known as manic depression and there's two sides to that first is the manic part where you're super upbeat and jumpy and wired and you want to take on the world um with that though you also make really rash decisions when it comes to money or relationships or you know a lot of different things and then the second part of that has all the normal characteristics of depression so manic depression part right both sides I don't have anything else to say for this one it's just funny and then posterman hosts traumatic stress disorder a lot of times as associated with people that have been an active combat right but it's it's not

just that it can be anytime you've witnessed like a tragic event so being attacked being raped you know if you've seen a murder yeah death of a parent like anything like that and it will yeah any kind of trauma will bring back really terrible horrible memories and flashbacks of you know whatever that trauma was you get offsetting dreams like severe emotional and physical distress and reactions a borderline personality disorder is also called disassociative identity disorder it's a mental health disorder that impacts the way you think and feel about yourself and others and it also you know you end up having it's like multiple personality disorder as well there's some more he'll have rapid changes in self-identity I thought

I had a good Oh who's ever read well the movie doesn't really count but who's ever read Dark Tower series by Stephen King yeah alright some of you so I never make references so I don't know why there's so many in this talk because I never get references myself but in the book they do a really good job of explaining what it's actually like to have schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder because the one of the main characters just doesn't realize that the other person exists right because they're completely separate a lot of times it'll come as a coping mechanism of some kind of trauma one of the worst cases of schizophrenia ever recorded was a seven seven year old

little girl named Janie so in 2007 um sorry 2009 she was diagnosed and she had these hallucinations of these Imaginary Friends her doctor recorded over four was at over 200 different cats dogs rats all of them would tell her to do harmful things to people right and herself um at one point in time she but you know once she got to a certain point her parents even though they were divorced had to stay in the same house together because they also had a son and they had to do shifts so you know told our chefs sleeping on and off because she would wake up and she tried to kill her baby brother several times as well as herself

you know and it was these manifestations and and you know friends that she had these cats and rats and stuff that were telling her to do these bad things or they would hurt her and to seven so that's just this again like way end of the spectrum of a very intense case of that but still you can see some of the some of the things that would be pretty difficult on she she had already attempted suicide seven times by the she was ten there's a obsessive compulsive disorder um a lot of people will associate this with like I like putting in things in spreadsheets I like having clean towels or something I don't know but no OCD is definitely

more than that it is a need to have that kind of stuff done Nikola Tesla was one of the more famous cases so he would he had to walk around a building three times before he entered it he wouldn't eat with women like eat or drink with women and he owns it he had a intense fear of sir Claus circle-shaped objects which that would be very difficult getting through life a fear of contamination or dirt unwanted thoughts including aggression so we can all agree that having one or even more than one of these conditions would royally suck right so how do you cope with these or help others that have them that you love and care for how do you help them cope a

while back so this has been like almost two years ago I put out a survey to like my Twitter followers just asking them a barrage of like twenty twenty-five different questions on how they viewed mental health which I know is not super scientific or anything that I just kind of wanted a baseline of of good answers right and this is the response for the question do you do you participate in it any activities to reduce dull or improve the stress or feelings you're having such as alcohol prescription drugs other drugs exercise medication or other so going back to the whole me having crazy eggs anxiety after I put this out I realized if I would have taken it first

I wouldn't have messed it up so much because this was a multiple-choice no you just had to pick one right you couldn't pick more you can do more than one answer and more most of the responses I got in the other category we're like I do all of these and I can only pick one so out of out of those 860 responses I got for this my favorite other entries for that for that category were pretty done pretend to be a Vulcan Kats masturbation and Twitter which I'm not sure how some of those help you cope with anything especially Twitter especially Twitter so when I when I did this I also reached out to a

friend of mine that does mental health counseling and he told me what the two best ways were to increase the or they improve the chemicals in your brain without drugs or whatever does anybody have a guess on what those two things are exercise is one of them nope there you go but only if you're doing great sorry that was sex for anybody that didn't hear it in the back so they use my mom for a sounding board for a lot of the talks that I do which is great because I love making her shake her head at me as much as humanly possible and when I talked about when I started talking to her about like counselling and

psychiatry and you know medication all that kind of stuff she actually mentioned her great her grandma which would have been my great grandma right and how when she started going through menopause they they like committed her and sent her away right because it's not something you talk about back then and you know she was suffering like from withdrawal and just sad behavior right as she's gone through menopause and for treatment at that time she was just given regular shock therapy treatments right which is fantastic I mean there's no better way to cure your depression than just shocking the [ __ ] out of you but now we have better options right so I won't apologize in advance cuz I add

apologies once at a conference because someone thought this was terrible and it's a pun if you don't get what puns are I'm sorry but I can think we can agree that like the majority people don't need safe spaces right but one of the main reasons why I started mental health hackers is for a quiet space at conferences to just go and chill out because I would have major panic attacks at conferences after I work I work at home all the time alone for days on end with only talk to my kids sometimes and then I'll show up to a conference and for several days straight just be surrounded by people and go into like crazy panic attacks so

I'm like why it'd be nice to have something that's a little slower paced that people can kind of just go and like do some have some massages or color or do something that's you know super low-key as opposed to just getting you know pounded with information the entire time but even if you don't use like any kind of coping mechanism or whatever it can still feel good to externalize your feelings whereas like you can do that now back then you couldn't you would get sent away to get shock treatments you know you couldn't talk about mental health you couldn't talk about divorce teen pregnancy and I've had all three and I get to talk about all of them without

getting shocked and you can talk to your friends you can talk to us definitely check out like counselling or therapy you know if you think that would help we have some great information and we have people gonna be writing blog posts about like be stigmatizing counseling and what to look for if you're interested in that kind of stuff as well so back to getting all doped up the last 20 years has seen a 400% increase in people taking antidepressants which is in it's crazy that amount and while we don't really want to throw pills at something or devalue anybody suffering there are better not better but sometimes there are other non-medical solutions that exists right

but if you need to take some that's fine too but there's a lot of things that will increase like your dopamine levels automatically which we talked about a little bit before so when I was I was prescribed my first antidepressant I was used you zoloft which I'm not sure if it's the same name-brand here or not citrulline this was the explanation I get for my doctor that it's just a simple chemical reaction and they are giving you a medication that's gonna level you out that was it that's I mean it made sense at the time right something biological isn't quite firing right in my brain and this is gonna give me the chemicals I need to fix it but

during my research I found out that this is not mean it kind of true but not necessarily um but because from what I found out in medical journals doctors really have no idea why some of this stuff works which is great they're just throwing they're just throwing [ __ ] at the wall to see what sticks which all right I get that science can be hard right studies have point out that other things you know can cause these faulty mood regulations like you know your G you know your family history or other medications that you've been on that kind of stuff and this is the actual Psychological Association article that I found that them talking about it said we do not

dispute the possibility that neurotransmitters and other brain chemicals can play a significant role in the etiology of depression however we are also concerned that the chemical imbalance explanation may not reflect the floor range of causes of depression and it may be given greater credence by both consumers and practitioners then supported by sound research and it's made it may be understood in an overly simplistic manner but really I mean what what do you not get an overly simplistic man manner from your doctor we do the same thing I'm users right we're not gonna explain every everything that we've gone through we're gonna give it to them and bite-size chunks that they can understand mm-hmm so I started

taking Zoloft about six months before the end of my marriage and it was amazing I wasn't sad anymore but turns out that I also had no emotions anymore which is one of the side effects that some people have on Zoloft you kind of just feel dead inside which also is not healthy well it's about today I have two skips on this part cause I'm gonna run out of time so yeah after I found out that zoloft wasn't great for me in the long term because I kind of eventually wanted to have feelings again I switch to xanax and I take sorry Zola wellbutrin and I take xanax every now and then when needed or two bottles of

wine works great dude so what are some other coping mechanisms that we can work on even if you're probably not negated [Music] even if you're probably medicated you can have some struggles and still do some stuff to them you know make yourself feel better I listen to a podcast called the hilarious world of depression and I'm there somebody had come on and talked about naming their anxiety you know they named it Steve and every time Steve would tell them something they would say shut up Steve you're a [ __ ] and that's not how the world works and I know that doesn't make any sense it's it's you like that that terrible person in your brain is the one

doing all of the decision-making right and other times crying can even do some help something I found super cool is there's an actual tear expert which that's kind of a cool title right he actually found that there are the difference between reactive tears and emotional tears emotional tears actually contain more hormones that like after you've had a good cry sometimes you do feel better afterwards and that's exactly why because it's boosting the right hormones and getting rid of the stress one's out of your tears which is kind of neat so I've also use breathing exercises things like this is a nice gift to just have on hand as well as something called binaural beats which

are nice when you have headphones because it's nice and soothing it's cool to meditate too sometimes a whole bunch of that on YouTube just for free you can pop in your headphones and calm yourself down though sometimes yeah if you inhale and head yeah yes you don't want to you know you want to follow the gift you don't want to do it on like two times speed or anything like that you'll just pass out I also found out about this five-four-three-two-one coping technique so it is you can do it with me if you want some of some of these anyways others might be weird five is you acknowledge five things around you you can see four you can acknowledge four

things around you they can touch just ask permission first if you're gonna touch the person next to you acknowledge three things that you can hear so air-conditioning people outside chairs shuffling around anything like that another one I can tell it's two things are in you can smell apologize in advance this person next to you ripe after a full day of conferencing and then the last one can do code go to different ways I've seen it's either one positive thing that you can taste so like take a drink your water coffee whatever don't lick your neighbor shouldn't have to say that or one positive thing about yourself so now that we've covered a bunch of my

personal baggage we're gonna go in some different coping mechanisms that you can help others that are struggling because I mean even if you're not struggling I can guarantee you with those numbers you know somebody that is even if they're telling you or not um so things some things not to say right I've heard some of these before and since I started talking with other people in the industry about this they have as well you know they've been blamed for their own issues they've been told to like man up or you know just yeah yeah they're you know it's it's somehow their fault right I was super surprised that that was a common reaction and I get a lot of this and

truly I have a lot going for me I have no I feel like I have no right to be depressed right like I have three super awesome healthy kids I have a house I have a really good job I get to come do this stuff and travel and meet amazing people how how could I be depressed like you know I shouldn't I shouldn't have that right but you know what I've caught myself saying the same thing to other people that seem really super happy like wow you don't seem to press okay you're happy all the time you're always cracking jokes like how is that even possible and and while you know you can say you know I love you you're amazing

that kind of stuff and it's and it's nice to hear but sometimes it doesn't always help and one of my favorites maybe try thinking happier thoughts I

[Laughter] just collect this kind of stuff so if you ever see any of it send me your memes so like I said before a good amount of mental health issues blooming fess themselves as physical physical problems right you can't just tell somebody to make more of an effort to heal their broken arm you're not gonna be able to do the same thing about their mental health and none of all not only have I gotten like positive and negative stories about interactions with people of mental with mental health issues but almost everybody that I've talked to has have surprised others when they've when they've talked about them you know they're bringing up their inner demons so here's some of the do say's

definitely important how can I help I think is a good one I say oh man that sucks a lot but that's just in life in general another thing another trick that I've learned is I've given people I've given people mental health safe words which is funny but it works right like those at those times when I was having major panic anxiety attacks I can't I can't tell you what's wrong I can't tell you why it may be a while before I stop crying but if I can utter out one word to that person that knows what I do need like we're all gonna need different different stuff right like I may need to be left alone do not touch me or you may

need like no just hold me until I stop crying like there's a whole big range of different stuff when you do you know how many of you do like um like dr planning like you're not just gonna assume your backups work right here you're going to test them and you're gonna talk about a prior you're gonna have a plan in place for when [ __ ] goes down same thing with your mental health it's not too hard to do you just have to open that dialogue with people that care and sometimes there's nothing you can do to help right you just have to listen and you know wait to see if they can come up with

something that they can give you to help there's a great article at a friend of mine sent me called this is how you love somebody with anxiety and boy is a lot of that and their true as well like silence kills anybody with anxiety right so like you open up to somebody or how you just say hey how's it going and you don't get a reply like sure like my brain knows those people are probably busy and have lives and are doing other stuff but that jerk in my brain all Steve tells me no you pissed them off or you said something really weird like you made an ass out of yourself so yeah and nothing beats a blanket fort also

hopefully soon coming to the mental health and wellness village she's blanket forts so not only is it difficult to talk about in the beginning so many other things come up that make you want to like force that [ __ ] deep inside and never talk about it to anybody I want to talk to you about a few things that our communities already doing much time do I have oh not much all right one is I Ronan calm and semicolon project and then another one is mental health village that we started awesome awesome people involved in that will be officially a like 501c3 which is like the American like designation for nonprofits as soon as I get like the forty pages of IRS

homework done that I have to do and then I hope does audio work it's like over hi play video will find out so this is move X my friend move HD is a really good video on this your [ __ ] hi I'm in job for and I'm a hacker now every single one of you watching probably has a different definition of what that might be but I guaranteed not a single one of those definitions includes race creed color religion sexual preference or anything in between the hacker community is filled with human beings people from all walks of life in our community like any social community there are people among us friends acquaintances comedy clubs that

many of you might not even know they have we have watched too many of those friends to suicide drugs applause depression and crying many of us go into the world of computers and the internet because it was a place of acceptance but there's a dark side to this world it is too easy to disconnect to miss those markers would all you see is what someone tweets or IMS you can't see when you hurt in crime there are many ways to help us that need it and are afraid to ask because one of the biggest biases we still have in our community is showing weakness but you can let those around you know you care that you are there for

them and this door is open to talk anytime but one of the best ways is just to be around each other hang out go to a movie have a good time talk about your day to be a true friend but just another face in a lobby of an hour if you wants to join me in this fight please make a video or just tell your friends your Khan buddies or your acquaintances that you just see if that Lobby Khan that we are all hacking together so that's one of my favorite mean yes is if somebody like that like Rob is super badass if he can talk about that on video and just like tweet it out to everybody

I believe you can too I believe in you so let's do some hacking together my my door nobody's gonna visit me Ohio but my doors open my [ __ ] my PM's aren't open either you can tweet at me or catch me in slack or just email me contact me somehow I'm on everything a lot of times I'll like tweet out a like if I'm feeling disconnected I'll just tweet out like a Google Hangouts video and just you know [ __ ] with people all the kids will come on and say hi you know just just to talk to like another because I don't get that often enough and this is the spot hmm this is a

slight I usually cry so I'm gonna turn really hard not to the saddest part of the survey results that I put out was hmm answer the question have you ever felt like you weren't worth much as a person and 50% of people answered yes which like just breaks my heart a lot of these again are American base but guaranteed you have a lot of a lot of UK resources or whatever country you're from there's you know there's definite resources out there a lot some of these - you can even chat online if you like me and don't like talking to people on the phone you know you can just they just have apps now that you can do that kind of stuff

on mm-hmm and I'd like to finish up with picture of puppy because I know like the first time I gave this to mom my son was in the audience which was hard hard to do when you know your kids are in the audience listen to this stuff and he came up to me he's like damn mom that was a donor what are you doing so then I added the puppy so that's me thank you so much for making this an awesome b-sides and my first trip to the UK you can contact me on Twitter if you want and be good to each other