>> I'm not a responder, but I work in a field with a higher-than-average psychological impact (information security, will Do It To You much the same way as some of the more obvious risk factors.) <<
I can see that quite clearly.
>> Most recently, I shook someone's sense of safety by accident in a casual chat about an interesting thing I found. <<
Yeah, I have accidentally flattened more than one medical professional by talking about the table plates. To me, it's a cool clue-by-four because I've known about the antibiotic-loss problem for decades. But to someone who's unfamiliar with it, it's like getting flayed. Oops. My safety awareness toward other people is often kaput when I'm in an office.
>> *sigh* You live in this stuff all day, and it's easy to forget that not everybody /does/ and that in a half-decent world, not everybody would even think about it.<<
Exactly.
>> This stuff? The things you post about EFA have gotten me to the point where I'm doing way better about handling other people's distress, and sometimes helping with my own. <<
I am so happy I could help!
>> Hm. I've been to two talks now about the state of mental health in infosec (both of which were the same guy, both of which were focused hard on telling the horror stories rather than what we can do about it).<<
By the way, what you do with horror stories is an incident analysis. Identify the worst problems. Look for patterns of repetition. Identify where and how to interrupt that pattern. Deploy solutions. Let people vent, sure, but as soon as you start seeing pattern problems, fix them. Teach people that talking about those problems isn't whining, it's data collection, and therefore constitutes doing something about the problem. You just have to make sure there's a listener with excellent pattern sense and the power to initiate problem-solving steps.
>> At the risk of pigeonholing myself into nontechnical topics, I think that's one of those niches that's being poorly served right now... <<
I'm sure it's poorly served, because EFA is poorly served in general, and it takes a huge amount of time to make advances. People are just starting to realize that PTSD is contagious and can come from nonphysical causes. Let me lay out some keys you may find useful in your specific situation ...
* The biggest cause of traumatic stress seems to be feeling helpless rather than specific details of the stressor itself. That is, someone who experiences lower threat level but higher helplessness may have a worse outcome than someone with higher threat but lower helplessness.
Therefore, the most crucial thing to do in an emergency is to minimize feelings of helplessness. Some people deal with stress by craving something constructive to do. Give them that if at all possible. Others need to have expectations removed to take the weight off them, and be reassured that things can be done to address the problem but not all of that needs to be done immediately while they're too upset to think straight.
Effective ways to help would include:
** Get some people at work trained in psychological first aid. First, one to support your stressed-out geeks. Second, put your customer support crew through a mass training program if you can afford it. Computer problems make users feel helpless; a company which can relieve that feeling should grab market share hand over fist if your goods/services are any use at all.
** As much as feasible, support user control of goods/services. Much stress and argument comes from computers being arcane and hard to control. If there's a simple toggle to change settings, and users control it, and it really does what it claims -- like being able to turn off your location if your relatives are harassing you -- that's a huge help. Nothing saves the day like customer support saying, "It's okay. There's an easy fix for that problem. Go to Screen A ... Menu Tab B ... and uncheck Box C. Now go to your Status screen and confirm the change. Got it? Good. Have a nice day."
** Make some lists of concrete things that staff and users can do to reduce helplessness. Maybe one for each group addressing everyday issues and emergency issues. So whenever someone wails, "What can I do?" hand them the appropriate list and make sure they've done everything on it. This helps the "I need to take practical steps" crowds.
* Have resources for preventing PTSD in an emergency. You're never going to quash all of it but you can lower the numbers.
** You're in a great place for one of the most promising treatments: play any sorting-stacking game such as Tetris. Given how cheap handheld devices are nowadays, it's worth your while to collect and emergency basket of them loaded with sorting-stacking games and relaxing games or meditative soothers. Like any other recording/replay device, the brain cannot simultaneously record and replay, nor can it simultaneously store a short-term memory and do a complex task of totally different topic. So if you make the brain focus on something else that demands attention, like Tetris, that undermines its ability to form traumatic memories. The particular nature of stacking-sorting games also puts the brain in filing mode, and since PTSD is fundamentally a filing error, that helps the brain put distressing events in proper sequence, reducing the chance of them becoming misplaced trauma triggers.
** When traumatized, some people need to talk while others need not to talk. Make sure your company does not have mandated debriefing sessions, which are implicated in making PTSD worse. Conversely, don't abandon them or pressure them to suppress trauma and act fine. Offer options and let people choose what feels helpful in the moment.
* Get ahead of the emergency.
** Teach general coping skills, problem-solving, distress tolerance, stress reduction, and emergency management techniques. You might want to do an informal survey, or a formal one if the company can afford it, to identify which areas need help the most and concentrate on fixing them first. "No emergency is so bad that panic can't make it a lot worse."
** Provide tools and resources to cope with stress. If you don't yet have a quiet room, make one out of a spare office, breakroom, or even a closet. Include books or posters of copings skills and a basket of geek fidgets. Also put a basket of fidgets everywhere people are likely to feel stress, such as waiting rooms. Use the budding results of best practices studies to place stress-reducing decor such as nature scenes, houseplants, and/or aquaria. But double-check local outcomes because some geeks are nature-averse or indifferent and might do better with scenes of floating cities or happy robots.
* Pile up some resources on chronic stress, traumatic stress, prevention of PTSD, and emotional first aid.
** Look for checklists. Examine each item in a checklist while thinking about your workplace. Is this appropriate for your needs? If not, cross it out. Then look at the shape of the remaining list. Does it cover all the steps needed in your workplace? If not, add missing items. Lather, rinse, repeat with remaining lists. Now look at the whole set of lists. Do they cover all the types of problems that distress geeks and users in your context? If not, note what is missing. You will need to make checklists for those. Now go to your supervisor with this information. You'll need to meet with coworkers individually and/or in a group meeting to get feedback on whether these lists are a good fit, and if not, how to tweak them. When folks feel it's ready to test, deploy the checklists in a small area, get more feedback, tweak, and redeploy in a larger area until you're satisfied with the results. Just treat it like any other problem that needs the engineering problem-solving loop routine, it'll work.
** Someone should have the responsibility of scanning the cutting edge of the above listed topics for new developments. Don't wait for other people to solve a problem you're having. They are slow as a party server at peak demand. Gank their discoveries, give credit to the source, and use that to advance your own developments.
I know how to skip ahead and make obvious changes to things that aren't obvious to most people, so if you need help on this topic, I can be a sounding board or can be hired to write nonfiction. While I'm not fully fluent in geekspeak, I am good enough to get close and then one of your technical writers/editors could polish it up to company standards.
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dancing_serpent
Thoughts
Date: 2018-08-24 08:21 pm (UTC)*bow, flourish* Happy to be of service.
>> I'm not a responder, but I work in a field with a higher-than-average psychological impact (information security, will Do It To You much the same way as some of the more obvious risk factors.) <<
I can see that quite clearly.
>> Most recently, I shook someone's sense of safety by accident in a casual chat about an interesting thing I found. <<
Yeah, I have accidentally flattened more than one medical professional by talking about the table plates. To me, it's a cool clue-by-four because I've known about the antibiotic-loss problem for decades. But to someone who's unfamiliar with it, it's like getting flayed. Oops. My safety awareness toward other people is often kaput when I'm in an office.
>> *sigh* You live in this stuff all day, and it's easy to forget that not everybody /does/ and that in a half-decent world, not everybody would even think about it.<<
Exactly.
>> This stuff? The things you post about EFA have gotten me to the point where I'm doing way better about handling other people's distress, and sometimes helping with my own. <<
I am so happy I could help!
>> Hm. I've been to two talks now about the state of mental health in infosec (both of which were the same guy, both of which were focused hard on telling the horror stories rather than what we can do about it).<<
By the way, what you do with horror stories is an incident analysis. Identify the worst problems. Look for patterns of repetition. Identify where and how to interrupt that pattern. Deploy solutions. Let people vent, sure, but as soon as you start seeing pattern problems, fix them. Teach people that talking about those problems isn't whining, it's data collection, and therefore constitutes doing something about the problem. You just have to make sure there's a listener with excellent pattern sense and the power to initiate problem-solving steps.
>> At the risk of pigeonholing myself into nontechnical topics, I think that's one of those niches that's being poorly served right now... <<
I'm sure it's poorly served, because EFA is poorly served in general, and it takes a huge amount of time to make advances. People are just starting to realize that PTSD is contagious and can come from nonphysical causes. Let me lay out some keys you may find useful in your specific situation ...
* The biggest cause of traumatic stress seems to be feeling helpless rather than specific details of the stressor itself. That is, someone who experiences lower threat level but higher helplessness may have a worse outcome than someone with higher threat but lower helplessness.
Therefore, the most crucial thing to do in an emergency is to minimize feelings of helplessness. Some people deal with stress by craving something constructive to do. Give them that if at all possible. Others need to have expectations removed to take the weight off them, and be reassured that things can be done to address the problem but not all of that needs to be done immediately while they're too upset to think straight.
Effective ways to help would include:
** Get some people at work trained in psychological first aid. First, one to support your stressed-out geeks. Second, put your customer support crew through a mass training program if you can afford it. Computer problems make users feel helpless; a company which can relieve that feeling should grab market share hand over fist if your goods/services are any use at all.
** As much as feasible, support user control of goods/services. Much stress and argument comes from computers being arcane and hard to control. If there's a simple toggle to change settings, and users control it, and it really does what it claims -- like being able to turn off your location if your relatives are harassing you -- that's a huge help. Nothing saves the day like customer support saying, "It's okay. There's an easy fix for that problem. Go to Screen A ... Menu Tab B ... and uncheck Box C. Now go to your Status screen and confirm the change. Got it? Good. Have a nice day."
** Make some lists of concrete things that staff and users can do to reduce helplessness. Maybe one for each group addressing everyday issues and emergency issues. So whenever someone wails, "What can I do?" hand them the appropriate list and make sure they've done everything on it. This helps the "I need to take practical steps" crowds.
* Have resources for preventing PTSD in an emergency. You're never going to quash all of it but you can lower the numbers.
** You're in a great place for one of the most promising treatments: play any sorting-stacking game such as Tetris. Given how cheap handheld devices are nowadays, it's worth your while to collect and emergency basket of them loaded with sorting-stacking games and relaxing games or meditative soothers. Like any other recording/replay device, the brain cannot simultaneously record and replay, nor can it simultaneously store a short-term memory and do a complex task of totally different topic. So if you make the brain focus on something else that demands attention, like Tetris, that undermines its ability to form traumatic memories. The particular nature of stacking-sorting games also puts the brain in filing mode, and since PTSD is fundamentally a filing error, that helps the brain put distressing events in proper sequence, reducing the chance of them becoming misplaced trauma triggers.
** When traumatized, some people need to talk while others need not to talk. Make sure your company does not have mandated debriefing sessions, which are implicated in making PTSD worse. Conversely, don't abandon them or pressure them to suppress trauma and act fine. Offer options and let people choose what feels helpful in the moment.
* Get ahead of the emergency.
** Teach general coping skills, problem-solving, distress tolerance, stress reduction, and emergency management techniques. You might want to do an informal survey, or a formal one if the company can afford it, to identify which areas need help the most and concentrate on fixing them first. "No emergency is so bad that panic can't make it a lot worse."
** Provide tools and resources to cope with stress. If you don't yet have a quiet room, make one out of a spare office, breakroom, or even a closet. Include books or posters of copings skills and a basket of geek fidgets. Also put a basket of fidgets everywhere people are likely to feel stress, such as waiting rooms. Use the budding results of best practices studies to place stress-reducing decor such as nature scenes, houseplants, and/or aquaria. But double-check local outcomes because some geeks are nature-averse or indifferent and might do better with scenes of floating cities or happy robots.
* Pile up some resources on chronic stress, traumatic stress, prevention of PTSD, and emotional first aid.
** Look for checklists. Examine each item in a checklist while thinking about your workplace. Is this appropriate for your needs? If not, cross it out. Then look at the shape of the remaining list. Does it cover all the steps needed in your workplace? If not, add missing items. Lather, rinse, repeat with remaining lists. Now look at the whole set of lists. Do they cover all the types of problems that distress geeks and users in your context? If not, note what is missing. You will need to make checklists for those. Now go to your supervisor with this information. You'll need to meet with coworkers individually and/or in a group meeting to get feedback on whether these lists are a good fit, and if not, how to tweak them. When folks feel it's ready to test, deploy the checklists in a small area, get more feedback, tweak, and redeploy in a larger area until you're satisfied with the results. Just treat it like any other problem that needs the engineering problem-solving loop routine, it'll work.
** Someone should have the responsibility of scanning the cutting edge of the above listed topics for new developments. Don't wait for other people to solve a problem you're having. They are slow as a party server at peak demand. Gank their discoveries, give credit to the source, and use that to advance your own developments.
I know how to skip ahead and make obvious changes to things that aren't obvious to most people, so if you need help on this topic, I can be a sounding board or can be hired to write nonfiction. While I'm not fully fluent in geekspeak, I am good enough to get close and then one of your technical writers/editors could polish it up to company standards.