Infosec Women & Mental Health
By: Sarah Kent
Tags: Cybersecurity, Infosec, Mental Health, Women In Tech

Content Warning: The following article covers depression, self-harm, and abuse. Some use of strong language may be inappropriate for a wider audience. Names and details have been changed out of respect for privacy.

On a Friday morning in Las Vegas at DEF CON, the world’s largest information security conference, Jo, an acquaintance I’d met at a previous DEF CON, emerged from a muddle of masked hackers and asked me if I’d heard about Helen. I expected her to tell me that Helen was at DEF CON for the first time, that Helen was about to upend the industry with a talk she’d prepared, or that Helen remained at home, mopping up an incident for a customer, but says hello. Instead, Jo told me Helen had committed suicide a few weeks earlier.

Survivor’s Remorse

I met Helen in Dallas several years ago. Celebrating our acceptance into the SANS Institute’s Women’s Academy, we bonded over dinner the week of our bootcamp for Global Information Assurance Certification: Security Essentials (GSEC). Most people take one SANS course and attempt to pass the certification exam in a six-month period. We pledged to pass three in that time. Even though Helen was reserved, she revealed the difficulty she had endured as a female aerospace engineer in her past career. She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask. After 20+ years working in the male-dominated field of information technology, I didn’t have to. I hoped it would be better for us in information security.

I stayed in touch with Helen, chatting online about our courses, music, and work. Since we lived a couple of hours apart, we met up to hang out and work on CTFs. She had a wickedly sharp sense of humor yet seemed to keep her most pointed observations to herself. I got the impression her inner dialogue was a stream of clever, impish commentary, endlessly amusing, and I wanted to know more. But Helen was private. Too private. And soon after we graduated from the SANS Academy, she moved across the country to San Francisco, CA.

I made a few attempts to contact her, but we never reconnected in real life or in real time again. Helen didn’t share her phone number with anyone because of privacy concerns she said, and I presumed that she was thriving, making friends with like-minded people in a city renowned for its culture and tech. A glance at her LinkedIn profile highlighted how she had accelerated to the top of her specialty, attaining several promotions in less than two years. Admittedly, my own feelings of inadequacy got in the way, and I thought Helen had moved up and moved on. I was happy for her though, and I felt fortunate to be an acquaintance. Someday, I told myself, I’d fly to San Francisco, buy her lunch, and perhaps learn more about my enigmatic friend.

Even when we know someone is about to pass away, the loss is surreal. It is more acute with suicide. Grief’s five stages flooded my being as I tried to grasp the finality of Helen’s decision. I continue to grieve that the information security community will never know of her brilliance, how much she had to offer. She didn’t boast or attempt to convince anyone of her genius; she just was.

I have so many unanswered questions and so much survivor’s guilt, but I am not angry with Helen. Scant details I knew about her drug use, rough upbringing, and work-from-home isolation, brought into focus how Helen had not been thriving. She was drowning. Now, her reticence makes more sense to me, as I reflect on what I learned about her after she was gone. Perhaps we had more in common than I realized. I confess that a dark recess in my heart, a place I rarely give voice to, understands why she would choose suicide. At times, I’ve charted those mazes as well.

Women’s Response to Trauma

Many of us have lost our way in labyrinthine corridors of melancholy, constructed of unyielding surfaces and razor edges. Our mind’s machinations eviscerate our spirit, so it’s no surprise we act out in deviant ways, seeking catharsis and escape through self-harm. As teens, we’re labeled cutters, druggies, or sluts. Some of us become adept at hiding it, heeding our parents’ warning that society will judge us harshly, particularly because we are women, rather than helping us acknowledge what is it — a cry for help. As adults, we grapple with depression and anxiety, addiction and disease, while negotiating a culture that exalts pernicious ideals of masculinity.

There is a time and place to recount stories of abuse, neglect, and despair, psychological injuries known as trauma, but it can be a perilous journey if we allow our stories to consume us and define how we relate to others. With the help of skilled therapists and sympathetic friends, many of us attempt to make sense of our experiences and find strength in them. Eventually, with time and self-inquiry, we recognize that our parents and their parents passed down their traumas to us. Some of us can forgive our family members, acknowledging they did the best they could with the resources allotted to them. This isn’t always the case. Some abuses are unconscionable.

As we become adults, striving to bring about the vision of feminists before us, we negotiate a spectrum of unconscious bias, institutionalized discrimination, and downright misogyny that wears us down. It’s exhausting. Many of us feel muted, that our voices don’t matter. Some of us, like my generation of Gen Xers and older, may realize that not only have we become inured to it; at times we subconsciously embody misogynistic ideas that hold back our colleagues, protégés, and ourselves. Sexism is another form of trauma we harbor, along with adverse childhood memories and the generations of trauma we carry.

Steps toward Resilience

Funding and education help reduce childhood trauma and policies can address overt sexism, but the core issue is more fundamental. It is not a money problem, a human flaw, nor a patriarchal institution. Ultimately, it’s a societal issue that starts at birth, is reinforced throughout one’s life, and pervades our culture.

While we cannot change overnight, we can gradually develop resilience in ourselves that will ripple throughout our communities. First, let’s acknowledge that we’ve suffered trauma and acted out in pain. We need to stop overlooking it. Suffering, like death, is inevitable, but we humans have a unique consciousness, and we have the power to transform ourselves and shape how we move through the world. A step toward recognizing one’s trauma is taking the CDC’s 10-question Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) quiz. While it doesn’t directly assess issues regarding race, gender, or poverty, it can help us understand how our past may affect our risk of health issues.

Understanding our ACEs scores and the related risk of chronic health issues may be a wake-up call. Oftentimes we downplay the role past trauma plays in our lives, and coming to terms with it is a step toward self-care. Self-care is a form of compassion, and we must show ourselves compassion before we can extend it to others. Observers may blame us for mental and physical health issues, dismissing our setbacks as a weakness of character. If we tune out the critics, and make friends with our inner critic, then we can celebrate the adversity we’ve overcome and the victories we’ve achieved. But it takes times and effort.

Building a network of supportive loved ones and colleagues is key, and cultivating meaningful connections helps us develop purpose, an intrinsic safeguard against isolation. Ironically, many women feel more detached than ever, even though we inhabit multiple social media platforms. Working from home, a luxury coveted by tech workers, now an expected perk, has contributed to a shared desolation we experience, especially in COVID times. We must recognize the limitations of social media and reach out to one another in person, if possible, and in real time, when not. We humans are wired for real human connection.

Fostering real human connection may be tricky, especially for the highly intelligent women drawn to the field of information security. We often prefer to work alone because we’re more productive when we focus on deep work. In large social gatherings, we may not relate to others and feel like we’re stuck in an echo chamber. Some of us find that we’re anxious around a lot of people, yet we’re predisposed to ruminate if left alone too long. I suspect that it’s even more complicated for neurodiverse women. To address this paradox of intelligence, needing solitary time while still bonding with our fellow humans, we ought to experiment with finding an optimal balance of authentic connection, letting it ebb and flow when adversities arise.

Adversities will come up, and we won’t be able to think our way through them. Let’s check on each other in real life and forge strong, supportive networks we can rely on whether we’re in crisis or when we’re okay. Showing up for each other, establishing a cadence of dialogue, requires accountability as well as courage, because we must expose our vulnerability to ask for emotional support. Texts and DMs are a start; in-person meetups, video calls, and phone calls are better. Attend to friends who live alone. Perhaps these connections will prevent another loss in our small infosec community.

References

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean

Prevention strategies should be focused on encouraging protective factors such as positive coping strategies, a strong personal belief, and strong interpersonal relationships WHO (2014). Preventing Suicide: A Global Imperative. Available online at: https://www.who.int/mental_health/suicide-prevention/world_report_2014/en/ [Ref list]

Several recent studies found that women who experienced childhood adversity are more likely to have their first child early or outside of marriage and face a higher risk of cancer than men. Lower-income women are particularly vulnerable to health issues related to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). And of all ACEs, child abuse may affect adult health more directly than any other. https://www.prb.org/resources/childhood-trauma-has-lifelong-health-consequences-for-women/

Over the past 45 years, the suicide rate has risen by 60% and has been established as the second cause of death among the 15 and 29 year age, with 50 non-fatal suicide attempts for each suicide. Risk factors linked to interpersonal relationships and the community include war and disaster, discrimination, abuse, violence and conflicts, perception of isolation, and stresses of acculturation (displaced people or indigenous persons), while risks at the individual level include chronic pain, mental disorders, poor financial situation, family history of suicide, previous non-fatal suicide attempts, and the harmful abuse of alcohol. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6284019/

Nearly 1 in 5 women have experienced completed or attempted rape during their lifetime compared to nearly 1 in 38 men. 1 in 3 female rape victims experienced it for the first time between 11–17 years and old. About 1 in 4 male rape victims reported that it occurred before age 10. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nisvs/2015NISVSdatabrief.html

https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/why-most-intelligent-people-love-spending-time-alone.html