Survivor

Update from MaleSurvivor Board of Directors

March 27, 2019 Looking for the Light1 Comment

Dear Friends,

I want to thank you on behalf of MaleSurvivor, our Board of Directors, our staff, our members, and the thousands of survivors who visit our website and frequent our Discussion Forum and Chat Room.

Your stalwart support as an Advisory Board member facilitates our ongoing efforts

to remain the premier place of learning, sharing and healing for male survivors across the country and abroad.

The Board of Directors has several new faces, and the new leadership is committed to investing in our members. This includes enhancing existing services and developing new ones:

We are completing the re-launch of the Discussion Forum and Chat Room on a new, user-friendly platform
We’re building an engaging new website that makes access to healing resources even easier
We have revitalized our collaboration with the Weekend of Recovery program and MenHealing to open more doors for our members
We will soon be offering a webinar series for survivor education and professional training
We have restored our Dare to Dream program of healing day events in various locations nation-wide
We are organizing a roundtable-style colloquium with representatives from diffuse service providers and programs to develop a unified network of resources for addressing male sexual abuse in its many contexts
We would like to develop a national 24/7 hotline specifically for male survivors
With your support we will be hosting a major conference, as we have in many years passed, for survivors and professionals, with late 2020 as our target and New York City as the site.

In light of these exciting developments, I am reminding you to please make your donation now, either as a recurring monthly donation, or by giving a one-time annual donation. Every dollar you contribute allows us to go further and do even more to help male survivors find the strength to reclaim their lives.

Your contributions and continuing support are invaluable to the work we do at MaleSurvivor on behalf of our members, and your generosity is immensely appreciated.

In sincere gratitude,

Murray David Schane, M.D.

President, MaleSurvivor Board of Directors

You can also mail your donation to:

MaleSurvivor

PO Box 276

Long Valley, NJ 07853

An Olympic training approach to managing bipolar disorder — Guest Shedding Light on Mental Health

March 26, 2019 Looking for the Light1 Comment

Guest Amy Gamble from http://www.sheddinglightonmentalhealth.com

I was talking with a friend at the National Council on Behavioral Health’s annual conference in Nashville. We had just watched a movie about Andy Irons a world-class surfer who had bipolar disorder and died at 37. It was an emotional documentary. I felt sad. But the emotion that got my attention was anger. […]

via An Olympic training approach to managing bipolar disorder — Shedding Light on Mental Health

Moving Forward

How can we save the Bee’s, one hive at a time TED.COM

March 26, 2019 Looking for the Light3 Comments

Moving Forward · Travel

Where in the world will you find the most advanced e-government? Estonia. IDEAS.TED.COM

March 26, 2019 Looking for the LightLeave a comment

IDEAS.TED.COM

Mar 15, 2018 / Andrew Keen

This tiny republic has the most startups per person and the fastest broadband speeds, and it offers something no other country does: e-residency. Estonia is aiming to create the ideal information society. Technology thinker and entrepreneur Andrew Keen goes there to find out how it works.

The future sometimes appears in the unlikeliest of places. The tiny country on the northeastern edge of Europe known as Estonia — or “E-stonia” as former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves calls it — has the most startups per person, the zippiest broadband speeds, and the most advanced e-government in the world.

Estonia has had the ill fortune to share a border with Russia and a sea with Denmark, Sweden and Germany, regional powers that have all been rather too related to the little Baltic republic. And yet this land of just 28,000 square miles is today — with South Korea, Israel, Singapore and its Scandinavian neighbors — one of the most wired and innovative countries. The government and people of Estonia are trying to invent the ideal information society and figuring out how to live well in cyberspace.

Estonia is the first country in the world to offer “e-residency”: an electronic passport that offers any businessperson the right to use legitimate Estonian legal or accounting online services and digital technologies. With this initiative, the country is disrupting the age-old intimacy between physical territory and citizenship. The e-residency program underwrites online identity by establishing fingerprints, biometrics and a private key on a chip.

“We want to be the Switzerland of the digital world,” says the director of the e-residency program in Estonia.

The goal is to have 10 million e-resident citizens by 2025, almost eight times the number of Estonia’s population of 1.3 million, according to the program’s director, Kaspar Korjus. He wants to create what he calls a “trust economy” for businesspeople around the globe — and a well-lit antithesis to the Dark Web, the digital hell infested with drug and arms dealers, pedophiles and criminals. “We want to be the Switzerland of the digital world,” Korjus says. Estonian Chief Technology Officer Taavi Kotka is more ambitious — we are becoming “the Matrix,” he tells me without smiling.

Given its inconvenient geography, Estonia has always struggled to find physical residents. E-residency creates a platform for a new kind of citizenship, Kotkus says. Not only is Estonia running a government in the cloud, it is also trying to create a country in the cloud: a 21st-century distributed community of people united by networked services rather than by geography.

Practically everything and everyone in Estonia is connected to the Internet: As measured in 2017, 91.4 percent of its citizens are Internet users; 87.9 percent of households have computers; 86.7 percent of Estonians have access to broadband; and 88.4 percent use it regularly. In neighboring Latvia, by contrast, 76 percent of its citizens are Internet users, while in Russia, Estonia’s former colonial ruler, that number is just 71 percent.

The country is planning a national test for digital competency in five areas, including the correct use of netiquette.

The education system has played an important role in this phenomenon. By the late 1990s, a government-backed investment fund was paying for Internet access for all schools, and teaching computer programming skills to kids as young as seven. “It’s like literacy,” one software engineer told me, describing how these skills are viewed in schools. The Estonian educational system has been redesigned to make people more responsible citizens. Schools have obligatory programs in “digital competence.” The country is even planning a national test for digital competency in five areas, including the correct use of netiquette. Education is “two steps ahead of the labor market,” says Kristel Rillo, who runs e-services at the Ministry of Education; he says that kids are turning out to be “two steps ahead of middle-aged workers in learning how to become digital citizens.”

But the most intriguing step in Estonia’s digital development is taking place outside the classroom. The key to its revolution is an identity card system that puts digital identity and trust at the heart of a new social contract. The mandatory electronic ID card, used by more than 95 percent of Estonians, gives everyone a secure online identity and offers a platform for digital citizenship featuring more than 4,000 online services, including voting, paying taxes and online storage of health and police records.

This online ID system is an attempt to “redefine the nature of the country” by getting rid of bureaucracy and reinventing government as a service. So says Andres Kütt, the chief architect of the Estonian Information System Authority. Kütt, a recent MIT graduate and former Skype employee, aims to integrate everyone’s data into a single, easy-to-navigate portal. Estonia wants to smash bureaucratic silos and distribute power down to the citizens so that government comes to them rather than their having to go to the government.

“The old model is broken,” Kütt says. “We are changing the concept of citizenship. This technology creates trust. It’s transparent. All agencies can access this data, but citizens have the right to know if their data has been accessed. In the old world, citizens were dependent on government; in Estonia, we are trying to make government dependent on citizens.”

In Estonia, citizens are empowered to watch the operations of government, and although the government can look at their data, it must notify them when it does so.

The ID system is supposed to be the reverse of Orwell’s Big Brother. In Estonia, citizens are empowered to watch the operations of government, and although the government can look at their data, it must notify them when it does so. Kütt gives me an anecdote of how the system works. He’d driven to a lecture in Tallinn to demonstrate the ID system. When he looked at his data, he saw that a police officer had accessed his information 30 minutes earlier. Following up in his online records, he found that an unmarked police car had followed his car because his license plate was dirty. The police accessed his records, checked his driver’s license, and decided not to stop him. The point of this story, according to Kütt, is to stress the accountability of government in this system. Nothing can be done secretly — the transparency is designed to protect individual rights and compound the trust between citizens and their government.

The most important aspect of the ID system is the creation of trust.Everyone I spoke to in Estonia, from startup entrepreneurs to policy makers to technologists to government ministers, agreed with Kütt on this point. Estonian trust in government is, in fact, much higher than the EU average. A 2014 studyfound that 51 percent of Estonians trust their government, in contrast with the EU average of 29 percent.

There are extremely significant potential consequences of the Estonian government’s entry into the data business. One result might be a new rivalry between sovereign governments and Silicon Valley’s private superpowers. “Governments are realizing that they’re losing the digital identities of their citizens to American companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. And they are waking up to the realization that they have a responsibility to protect the privacy of these citizens,” says Linnar Viik, another architect of the ID card and a serial tech entrepreneur dubbed by the press “Estonia’s Mr. Internet.”

Personal data is what’s made these private superpowers so wealthy and powerful. Although the ID system doesn’t stop Estonians from using Facebook or Google, the database is designed as a rival ecosystem, a secure public alternative designed to benefit citizens rather than corporations. One of today’s great challenges is to reinvent the relevance of government in the new digital world, and that’s where the longer-term significance of the ID system may lie, according to Viik. “The government’s role is to protect the privacy of its citizens,” he says. “It’s an extension of public infrastructure, the 21st-century version of the welfare state.”

To some readers, particularly those who cherish their privacy, this ID system and its radical transparency might sound dystopian. But one of the unavoidable consequences of the digital revolution is the massive explosion of personal data on the network. Like it or not, this data is only going to grow exponentially with smart homes, smart cars, smart cities and all the other smart objects driving the Internet of things. We don’t have a choice about any of this. But we do have a choice about the amount of transparency we demand of the governments or corporations that have access to our personal data.

The country’s revolution remains a work in progress, and many ordinary Estonians remain indifferent to a lot of these digital abstractions.

Does this country without borders offer a preview of our 21st-century fate?Stuff may happen there first. Will it happen everywhere else next? Perhaps. The Estonian model comes with three important caveats.

First, it’s important to remember the country’s ahistorical exceptionalism. Like other startup nations such as Israel, Estonia has reinvented itself because of its good fortune in being able to stand outside history. Just as Israel began in 1948 without any legacy institutions or traditions, so the post-1991 Estonian digital revolution occurred because a new generation of technologically literate policy makers and politicians filled the vacuum created by the retreating Soviet bureaucracy.

Second, there is the distinctively unexceptional nature of the Estonian economy. Estonia is a relatively underdeveloped place, especially in comparison with postindustrial economies like the United States or Germany. A tech megabillionaire could buy Estonia outright if he wanted. Its per-capita GDP of around $17,600 is ranked 42nd in the world (above middle-rank economies like Russia and Turkey but a third of Singapore’s $52,900), and the average monthly wage, after taxes, of its workforce of 675,000 is under 1,000 euros. Reports of Estonia as the next Silicon Valley are, to be polite, slightly exaggerated.

The third caveat is separating its appearance from its reality. All the policy makers and legislators with whom I spoke have, in the best Silicon Valley fashion, drunk the Kool-Aid and loudly proclaim the triumph of their “country in a cloud.” But the truth is less triumphant. The revolution remains a work in progress, and many ordinary Estonians remain indifferent to a lot of these digital abstractions.

Nonetheless, Estonia matters because the government is prioritizing what Ilves calls “data integrity.” This prim-sounding issue will surely come to dominate conversations about 21st-century politics. What the republic on the northwestern edge of Russia can do is offer an alternate model of a transparent, open and fair political system, one that is the antithesis of the monstrous purveyor of untruth that’s emerging on its eastern border. One that prioritizes trust and is built upon the integrity of data. One, above all, that makes all of us accountable for our online behavior.

Watch Andrew Keen’s talks from TEDxBerlin and TEDxDanubia:

Moving Forward

Sorry to bother you, but do you say “sorry” too much? What to say instead IDEAS.TED.COM

March 25, 2019 Looking for the Light3 Comments

IDEAS.TED.COM

Mar 11, 2019 / Daniella Balarezo

Jenice Kim

When we needlessly apologize, we end up making ourselves small and diminish what we’re trying to express, says sociologist Maja Jovanovic.

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community. To see all the posts, go here.

Think about all the times you use the word “sorry” in a typical day. There are the necessary “sorry”s — when you bump into someone, when you need to cancel plans with a friend. But what about the unnecessary “sorry”s? The “sorry, this may be an obvious idea” at a meeting, the “sorry to cause trouble” when rescheduling a haircut, the “sorry, there’s a spill in the dairy aisle” at the supermarket.

Canadian sociologist Maja Jovanovic believes the “sorry”s we sprinkle through our days hurt us. They make us appear smaller and more timid than we really are, and they can undercut our confidence.

Jovanovic, who teaches at McMaster University and Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario, became interested in this topic when she attended a conference four years ago. The four women on a panel were, she says, “experts in their chosen fields. Among them, they had published hundreds of academic articles, dozens of books. All they had to do was introduce themselves. The first woman takes a microphone and she goes, ‘I don’t know what I could possibly add to this discussion’ … The second woman takes the microphone and says, ‘Oh my gosh, I thought they sent the email to the wrong person. I’m just so humbled to be here.’” The third and fourth women did the same thing.

During the 25 panels at that week-long conference, recalls Jovanovic, “not once did I hear a man take that microphone and discount his accomplishments or minimize his experience. Yet every single time a woman took a microphone, an apologetic tone was sure to follow.” She adds, “I found it enraging; I also found it heartbreaking.”

Jovanovic found the outside world not so different: “Apologies have become our habitual way of communicating,” she says. Since then, she’s collected needless apologies from her colleagues and students. One stand-out? “My research assistant said ‘Sorry’ to the pizza delivery guy for his being late to her house,” says Jovanovic. “She said, ‘Oh my gosh, we live in a new subdevelopment. I’m so sorry. Did you have trouble finding this place?’”

We can eliminate the “sorry”s from our sentences — and still be considerate. “The next time you bump into someone,” Jovanovic says, “you could say, ‘Go ahead,’ ‘After you’ or ‘Pardon me.’” Similarly, during a meeting, Jovanovic says, “instead of saying, ‘Sorry to interrupt you,’ why not try ‘How about,’ ‘I have an idea,’ ‘I’d like to add’ or ‘Why don’t we try this?’” The idea is to be polite while not minimizing yourself.

The “sorry”s that fill our written interactions also need to be noticed — and banished. For emails, Jovanovic says, “There’s a Google Chrome plug-in called ‘just not sorry’ that will alert you to all the needless apologies.” With texts, she points out, “Every single one of us has responded to a text you got when you weren’t able to respond right away. What did you say? ‘Sorry.’” She says, “Don’t apologize — say, ‘I was working,’ ‘I was reading,’ ‘I was driving, ‘I was trying to put on Spanx.’ Whatever it is, it’s all good. You don’t have to apologize.”

And, in some of the instances when we’d typically throw in a “sorry,” we could just use the two magic words: “thank you.”

Jovanovic tells of the moment when she realized the effectiveness of gratitude. She says, “Four of us were at a restaurant for a work meeting, and we’re waiting for number five to arrive … I put my sociological cap on, and I thought, ‘What would he say? How many apologies will he give?’ I could barely stand the anticipation. He arrives at the restaurant, and you know what he says? ‘Hey, thanks for waiting.’ … The rest of us said, “Yeah, you’re welcome,” and we all just opened our menus and ordered. Life went on, and everything was fine.”

Another time when “thank you” can work better than “sorry”? When you’re with a friend and you realize you’ve been doing all the talking. Jovanovic says, “instead of saying, ‘Sorry for complaining’ or ‘Sorry for venting,’ you could just say, ‘Thank you for listening,’ ‘Thank you for being there’ or ‘Thank you for being my friend.’”

Besides removing them from our own communications, we should tell other people when they’re overdoing their “sorry”s, suggests Jovanovic.You can start with your family and friends — and if you’d like, go beyond them. She says, “I have been interrupting these apologies for three years now. I’ll do it everywhere. I’ll do it in the parking lot, I’ll do it to total strangers at the grocery store, in line somewhere. One hundred percent of the time when I interrupt another woman and I say, ‘Why did you just say ‘sorry’ for that?’ she’ll say to me, ‘I don’t know.’”

Watch her TEDxTrinityBellwoodsWomen talk here:

Travel

Hermitage Museum St. Petersburg Russia

March 25, 2019March 25, 2019 Looking for the Light14 Comments

I hope you enjoy a small piece of this grand museum, The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia

Moving Forward

Lynn Nanos Guest Post: Revolving Door of the Mental Health System — Kitt O’Malley

March 23, 2019 Looking for the Light5 Comments

Thank you, Lynn Nanos, LICSW, author of Breakdown: A Clinician’s Experience in a Broken System of Emergency Psychiatry, for this guest post. As a mobile emergency psychiatric social worker in Massachusetts, I evaluate many patients who have learned that getting psychiatrically hospitalized is more likely when they don’t take their medication and attend psychotherapy sessions. […]

via Lynn Nanos Guest Post: Revolving Door of the Mental Health System — Kitt O’Malley

Celebrate Life · Fun

What does your Thinking Cap look like?

March 22, 2019March 22, 2019 Looking for the Light6 Comments

Stacy Chapman at http://www.fightingwithfibro.com asked me this question but did not show her hat in return. I would like to see what your thinking cap looks like. We all need a laugh! Melinda

Fun

Last piece of mail you received #SoSC

March 22, 2019 Looking for the Light6 Comments

The last piece of mail is the same as all the mail I get, a sales flyer. Yesterday was for a plumber…..we could use one since my shower drain keeps clogging. That’s what’s happens when your losing loads of hair. The other piece of mail thou not addressed to me was this month’s Wood Worker magazine. It’s not my thing but I do love pointing out all the projects he could do for me. That would require getting off the computer. Maybe the next piece of mail will spark action.

Melinda

Join us for the fun and sharing good media stories

For more on the Stream of Consciousness Saturday, visit Linda Hill’s blog. Here’s the link:

https://lindaghill.com

Here are the rules for SoCS:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” “Begin with the word ‘The’,” or simply a single word to get your started.

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours. Your link will show up in my comments for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top. NOTE: Pingbacks only work from WordPress sites. If you’re self-hosted or are participating from another host, such as Blogger, please leave a link to your post in the comments below.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. As a suggestion, tag your post “SoCS” and/or “#SoCS” for more exposure and more views.

8. Have fun!

Men & Womens Health

Lyme Progress #8 Fibromyalgia

March 22, 2019 Looking for the Light9 Comments

I’ve written 76 WordPress post on Chronic Lyme, rarely acknowledging the other Chronic Illnesses I have. When I started treatment for Lyme someone said to me, just wait you’ll get all types of other illnesses. I thought I was dying, having IV Therapy treatment seven days a week, Sunday bandage change, and do it all over again.

I flew to D.C. every month for three years to see my Lyme Literate Doctor. After a few months, I could barely walk, the airport was the worst. The medicine protocol would change every month to prevent me from getting resistant to antibiotics.

I received a progress report after each trip, included was the concerns, actions needed, or illnesses to deal with. I felt like death, everything felt the same, there was no way to know what Fibromyalgia felt like because of the chronic pain I felt already didn’t change when diagnosed.

I’ve continued to lump my Chronic Illnesses together, not sure if denial or it didn’t matter, all I felt has unrelenting chronic pain. I haven’t had a Lyme flare up in several months and now I feel Fibromyalgia pain. It’s damn sure chronic but not every day, all day, the worst.

My husband has been a great caregiver since the beginning but he doesn’t know what I feel. He copes with the things I can’t do now. Tries to make me feel better when I’m full of guilt. I get tired of feeling pain and more guilty of telling my husband.

WordPress has brought so many great people into my life that have experienced my trauma’s, Mental Illness, Dementia, Chronic Lyme, Fibromyalgia, and daily neuropathy. Thank you for writing, I learn from you every day. Thank you for reading, maybe I’ve helped someone along the way.

Melinda