Why Tweeting is for the Birds: The World is Way Too Much With Us

CCJ Traveling Curriculum [1] trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson [2] is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter and the author of two books: The Beast: A Journey Through Depression [3] and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression [4]. She blogs regularly here [5].

Q: What’s the difference between Twitter and debilitating, active psychosis?

A: Supposedly sane people actually sign up for Twitter.

At the risk – actually, the 100 percent probability – that I am going to sound like a media Luddite here, let me state unequivocally that I do not Twitter, do not follow Twitter, have no plans to Twitter and think that journalists who see Twitter as an essential reporting tool are in serious need of having their heads removed from a lower part of their anatomy. By this, I mean specifically (though not exclusively – far from it!) NBC’s David Gregory, who was quoted in Howard Kurtz’s Washington Post column [6] as saying that Twitter was important for journalists to use because “people like me have to reach people where THEY are instead of asking them.”

When I read this, I was stumped. Was Gregory saying that Twitter is a good place to find an audience? If so, trying to convey news to a Twitter audience seems about as likely to succeed as screaming instructions at a group of manic 6-year-olds. Why bother? But maybe he was saying that Twitter is a good place to tune in and catch up on rumors. There’s some truth to this – if merely chasing rumors constitutes your definition of “reporting” and if you can stand the never-ending stream of in-the-moment renderings such as “I’m thinking I have a headache … must resist.” Personally, I would rather clean the lint out of my navel.

If this sounds like I have worked up an unreasonable level of hostility toward an activity nobody is forcing me to engage in, I plead guilty. The reason is that Twitter, to me, has come to symbolize our narcissistic indifference to a vast population of people who get very little respect from society in general and nowhere near the media attention they deserve: the mentally ill.

Usually, folks who hear voices in their heads all day every day without the aid of Bluetooth or Internet access get a one-word description: schizophrenics. Never mind that this term is widely misused by laymen (no, it does not mean split personality) or that even the psychiatric community is gradually beginning to abandon the term or that identifying a person by the name of his illness plus a suffix is dehumanizing. Most people know, or think they do, what a schizophrenic is: one of those street people who walk around carrying plastic bags filled with stuff, muttering inscrutably. Those people are scary and dirty and smelly. We stay away.

In fact, the National Institute for Mental Health estimates that roughly 1.1 percent of the adult population – that’s 2.4 million people – suffer from schizophrenia (or, as it is sometimes called, schizo-affective disorder). That’s a lot of people, and an even greater number of their relatives, whose lives are also lived in the shadow of mental illness. The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill estimates that one in every five American families has been touched by mental illness. I’ve had personal experience with mental illness – nowhere near as horrifying as the battles many others have fought, but plenty bad enough.

More to the point, a close friend has spent the past 30 years of her life dealing with schizo-affective disorder, years in which a relentless voice pronounced judgment on her in cryptic sentences. Bad, bad, bad, the voice would say. Or, Condemnation is exact. Or, when things were at their worst: You should kill yourself. Today, the skin on Meghan’s forearms look like old crumpled up wax paper that has been carefully re-smoothed; the “wrinkles” are scars from her many suicide attempts and self-mutilations. I doubt if Meghan has ever heard of Twitter. In any event, she’s had enough babbling in her head to last several lifetimes.

Today, Meghan is doing just fine; she’s a remarkable person – I’d go so far as to say amazing – who has surmounted if not entirely conquered her illness. (You can visit her Web site at www.meghancaughey.com [7]). Today, she is a peer wellness coordinator in the Oregon mental health system and gets asked to speak to groups like the American Psychiatric Association. With any luck, I’ll see her in June when she comes to a conference in Washington. Even so, I think of her long struggle every time I see some article about Twitter – or whenever I see a group of people at a restaurant, as I did just the other day, eating across from each other, each tuned in to an iPod or an MP3 or a cell phone, each contained in his or her own hermetically sealed universe of sound and babble. Only people with no conception of what it’s like to be tortured by an auditory bombardment that goes on 24-7 would actually pay to have their skulls hammered.

I think also of a news story I saw 20 years ago pinned to the bulletin board of the newsroom at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The article was about a man who had almost succeeded in scalping himself with a steak knife in an effort, he explained, to remove the microchips “they” had implanted under his skin. Sooner or later, every reporter runs into a person who wears a tinfoil hat or who is convinced that the CIA has bugged his windshield wipers, so somebody had posted this item for everybody to laugh at. All I could think of was the amount of psychological pain it would take to motivate a person to try to peel the skin off his own head.

So does “tweeting” on Twitter make you insensitive to the mentally ill? Even I admit that’s a stretch. I would, however, suggest that our current omnipresent level of electronic connectedness offers those of us in the journalism biz an unprecedented opportunity to re-imagine, and in some sense enter, the world of serious mental illness. In some ways, it’s a lot like our own: It’s a world where sound is non-stop. But unlike our world, where you can at least walk away from the CNN-blaring television in the airport terminal, this world is one that offers no ready escape. It’s a world in which food tastes like burned garbage, where you might look in the mirror and see an ancient Babylonian rendering of a wild animal looking back. Hours are days and days pass in seconds in this world; from time to time, people stick needles in your arm and it is like an iron hand holding your head under water. Forget about the romantic descriptions of madness you may have read. Trust me: This is a world nobody wants to live in.

Think about that the next time you text, or tweet, or plug in those ear buds. Then get down on your knees and thank God or Buddha or whatever it is you pray to for the simple gift, which we exercise too seldom, of being able to turn the damned things off. And then, if you are so moved, plug yourself back in to your electronic interface and start researching story possibilities. Did you know, for instance, that some of the same wonder drugs that allow people with serious mental illness to function come with serious, life-shortening side effects? That, in effect, these drugs, as effective as they can be, sometimes force people to confront a cruel choice: psychosis or morbid obesity? Those stories, and many more, are out there. But I do not believe you will find them on Twitter.

Want to Twitter Tracy? Not gonna happen. Try her e-mail [8], or make her day by writing a letter on real paper using actual ink. We'll make sure she gets it.