Category Archives: Journalism

Article: The Detox Myth

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Bad Medicine?
Published in The Sunday Business Post on January 2nd, 2011, by Alex Meehan

Overdone it a bit at Christmas and feel you need to cleanse yourself of toxins? Thinking of going on a detox diet in an effort to mitigate all that extra food and drink you indulged in during December?

You’re not alone. But before you pop along to your local chemist, supermarket or health food store and spend your hard-earned money on books, devices or supplements, consider this: there is almost no scientific basis for the concept of detoxing.

In fact, the term has no medical meaning outside the clinical treatment for drug addiction or poisoning.

Despite this, there is a thriving industry selling a willing public the idea that we live in a toxic world, and that day-to-day life is slowly poisoning us. The solution, claim detox proponents, is to eliminate dangerous toxins from our bodies. But just what are these toxins, and how is the idea of detoxing supposed to work?

The answer is not entirely clear. When the British charitable trust Sense about Science investigated the detox industry and contacted the manufacturers of a number of detox products, they found that no two companies could agree on a definition of what the word ‘detox’ actually meant. In addition, little or no evidence was produced that detox products on sale in pharmacies, supermarkets and health food stores were effective.

In the majority of cases, the producers and retailers contacted were forced to admit that they were effectively renaming the likes of cleaning and brushing products as ‘detox’ products. ‘‘The word ‘detox’ has no real meaning outside of the treatment of drug addiction or poisoning,” says Julia Wilson, communications officer with Sense About Science.

‘‘Yet companies and individuals now use it to promote everything from foot patches to hair straighteners, despite being unable to provide reliable evidence or consistent explanations of what the detox process is supposed to be.

‘‘When we contacted companies making these sorts of claims and asked them, firstly, what they meant by the term detox and, secondly, if they had any evidence to support their claims, none of them could do so and, in fact, no two companies had the same definition of what the term detox meant. Essentially, the term is meaningless.”

According to Wilson, companies which produce detox products are spreading misinformation about how the body works.

‘‘They do it mainly by promoting the idea that toxins build up in the body and you need to aid the removal of them in order to feel good. What concerns us is that this idea plays upon the public’s fears, and is used to sell products that nobody actually needs,” she says.

The appeal of detoxing your body, whether in the form of a crash diet, alternative health treatment or food supplement, is easy to understand. But according to medical experts, behind this industry and its products lies a fundamental misunderstanding of human physiology.

According to Dr Ben Goldacre, journalist and author of the book Bad Science, there is no evidence that making an extra effort to be healthy can undo the damage caused by a period of overindulgence. ‘‘The idea that you can do something useful to your health in five days of abstention is obviously ridiculous,” he says.

‘‘What we know about the impact of someone’s behaviour and decisions is that they impact on their health over the course of a lifetime. It’s important to look after your health for the next 50 years, not the next five days.

‘‘Doing it for the next five days isn’t just useless, it’s worse than that, because it lulls people into a false sense of security and makes them believe that they’ve done something good. But nobody has ever presented any sensible evidence to show that short-term detox diets do anything to offset bad diet or behaviour habits.”

Goldacre says that detox remedies tend to fall into three categories – cleansing products, food supplements and diets – all of which, he says, are ‘‘basically nonsense’’.

‘‘With food supplements, you usually find that they’re crammed full of antioxidants, but there have now been scientific trials in very large numbers – with over 150,000 people participating – where half of the people got antioxidant supplements and half didn’t. It turns out that, not only do antioxidant supplements do nothing, if anything they probably increase your risk of dying,” he says. ‘‘The antioxidant myth is exactly that, and it’s typical of the promises that people make about the ingredients in detox products.”

Goldacre is particularly scathing in his criticism of devices such as detox footbaths and patches. ‘‘You can buy footbaths that you put your feet into, and see the water turn brown. That’s not caused by toxins leaking out of your body, but by a metal electrode being placed in a saltwater bath. When a current is passed through the electrode it rusts. You can do exactly the same thing with a nine-volt battery and a nail in a cup of saltwater at home,” he says.

‘‘It’s a simple piece of theatre, but you find these baths in spas and beauty salons all over the place. It’s a similar story with the foot patches you see for sale. If you just spray some warm water on a foot pad and then stick it under a cup of tea to keep it nice and warm – like it would be if it was on the sole of your foot overnight – then the stuff in the footpad will go brown and sludgy in exactly the same way. It’s basically a teabag that contains some mashed-up plant material.

‘‘It all plays into this rather theatrical idea that unhealthy lifestyles which are bad for you somehow leave some kind of brown toxic residue inside your body that can be extruded using these magical machines. Non-specific toxic residue, of course – they’ll never tell you the names of any of them. It’s all just marketing guff.”

‘‘I couldn’t agree with Dr Goldacre more,” says Dr Daniel McCartney of the Irish Nutrition and Dietetics Institute.

‘‘These preparations are usually offered at premium prices that are unfortunately more reflective of the marketer’s audacity than of any benefits they might yield. They distract people from the same reliable, well-founded, scientific-based messages like consume your five-a-day, eat wholegrains when possible, don’t smoke, take some exercise and drink only in moderation.”

The problem, according to McCartney, is that it’s relatively hard to sell this message to the public, but comparatively easy to sell a magic pill or potion. ‘‘People are overwhelmed by misinformation in this area – it’s very poorly regulated, and often it’s the sensationalist headlines that get all the attention,” he says.

‘‘Consumer fatigue is a real issue and regulation could do a lot to help this. You hear a lot of baloney about wonder foods and extreme diets, but the truth is that, without regulation, the consumer can’t really have any confidence that what they’re being told is true.”

McCartney, who is also a lecturer in nutrition and dietetics at the Dublin Institute of Technology, says the key problem with detox products is that they promise a lot but don’t deliver.

‘‘There is so much fallacy in this area. People are looking for all sorts of magic solutions to their health problems – they want to feel more youthful or have more energy – and when it comes to how to achieve that, they don’t know what to believe. But in actual fact, when you get away from the hyperbole and misinformation, there’s quite a lot that we know about the science of nutrition,” he says.

‘‘When we look at specific components of diet and specific nutrients, there are reasonably valid reasons for saying that some foods can be better for us than others. Unfortunately, they’re very rarely the same ones that are touted in the product literature or magazine articles that we see most often.”

According to McCartney, at a fundamental level the damage that is caused to human body tissue by the wear and tear of day-to-day living is caused by chemicals called free radicals, and there are three main sources of these.

‘‘First, they are produced by every living cell in the body – in other words, every cell that uses oxygen produces free radicals as a by-product, in much the same way a car produces exhaust fumes as it burns petrol,” he says.

‘‘The second source is in our immune system. When our white blood cells deal with pathogens in the body, such as bacteria, viruses or fungi, they use these damaging free radicals to do the job for them. But when those cells of the immune system be come over-active, and there is an uncoordinated or overactive inflammatory response, the body produces too many free radicals. The excess spills out into the surrounding tissue, and this is what makes your throat feel sore when you have an infection. It’s not necessarily the streptococcus, but the immune response to it.”

The third and final source of free radicals, according to McCartney, is the environment around us and our personal habits. Key factors in the over-production of free radicals in the body are things like inhaling cigarette smoke, not taking enough exercise, gaining weight around the middle of the body and heavy alcohol consumption.

‘‘There are proven things you can do to make yourself healthier, but there’s no quick-fix solution. Going on a so-called ‘detox diet’ after a period of overindulgence doesn’t offset the damage you’ve done. It can actually cause more harm, and in fact some kinds of damage to your liver, brain and gut can never be undone. The best advice from a dietician’s point of view is to have a habitually healthy balanced diet where you’re not overindulging in things like alcohol,” he says.

So if you want to become healthier and take better care of your body, what’s the key?

‘‘At a basic level, drop the junk food, sugary foods and sweet fizzy drinks, as well as fatty foods and excessive alcohol. Have at least five servings of fruit and vegetables every day and make sure you eat good amounts of high-fibre starchy foods. Eat plenty of oily fish at least twice a week – mackerel is particularly good. Do some exercise, because if you keep your weight in control, that stops you producing damaging free radicals,” says McCartney.

‘‘Foods like refined sugars, which are found in cakes, biscuits and sweet drinks, all increase our production of free radicals. Likewise, trans-fats found in low-quality processed foods or margarines, and saturated fats that we largely get from red meat, should be avoided as they are associated with an increase in inflammatory markers that indicate higher rates of free radical production.

‘‘The fitter your body is, the better it can cope with threats to your health, particularly things like heart disease, kidney damage and vascular disease. If you’re covering those bases in your diet, then you’re really doing great.”

Ben Goldacre believes that the majority of people who purchase detox remedies know that they aren’t supported by scientific evidence, yet choose to buy them anyway.

The reasons are varied and complex. ‘‘I think people know that there’s something a bit dodgy about them, and I don’t think they’re necessarily being ripped off – they’re giving over their money quite willingly, and they know that these claims aren’t mainstream,” he says.

‘‘People sometimes make these purchases as part of a slightly misguided political stance. They feel they’re standing up to doctors and to mainstream society by spending some money on a magic pill or whatever. And that’s fine, because if people want to waste their money, then that’s their own personal decision.”

A much bigger problem, in Goldacre’s opinion, is the fact that many high-street pharmacists sell products for which there is no scientific evidence alongside proven drugs and medications.

‘‘I’m not surprised when a vitamin pill company or some wacky holistic alternative therapy shop presents the public with misleading claims about their products, and I think anyone who hands over their cash in those situations essentially deserves what they get. It’s a sort of voluntary, self-administered tax on scientific ignorance,” he says.

‘‘However, pharmacists have a very different set of responsibilities, and I think it’s sad to see pharmacists – who should be the scientist on the high street, and upon whom you should be able to rely to give you sensible, evidence-based advice – profiteering from this kind of thing.”

Goldacre believes selling these products devalues the good work that pharmacists do. ‘‘In the long run, I don’t think it does them any good. If pharmacists are selling magic sugar pills and homeopathic remedies and detox stuff, people will start to think that maybe they can’t be trusted when it comes to medical drugs as well,” he says.

‘‘That’s sad, because the public do need someone that they can go to who can give them sensible help and evidence-based advice.”

In a statement responding to Goldacre’s comments, the Irish Pharmacy Union told The Sunday Business Post that each individual pharmacist makes up their own mind on what products they choose to stock.

‘‘This is a decision for individual pharmacists to make. All products making medicinal claims must be authorised and licensed by the Irish Medicines Board,” says Gerard Howlin, head of policy and public affairs with the Irish Pharmacy Union.

However, there is an onus on pharmacists and other retailers to make sure that the products they sell perform as advertised.

‘‘Under Section 8 of our code of standards, which is the section that deals with the health and beauty industries, the basic principle is set forth that there should be substantiation of any claims a product makes,” says Frank Goodman, chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland.

‘‘If we ask for substantiation, it should be available. Also, and importantly, none of these products should be offering to cure anything that is in any way serious or which might require the services of a medical practitioner. Detox products that might offer to minimise the effects of drinking too much, for example, cannot be advertised in away that would encourage over-indulgence.”

Goldacre concedes that pharmacists are in a ‘‘slightly difficult’’ situation. ‘‘It’s sad to see them undermining themselves by selling these products, but most of them are small, independent businesspeople. However, we hope that they have a good deal of integrity and that we can rely on them to give us evidence-based advice while, at the same time, making money as small businesses.”

CLAIMS MADE ABOUT DETOXING

Claim 1: toxins build up in the body and need to be flushed/cleansed from it

The terms ‘toxic’ or ‘toxins’ are used to imply that a chemical is causing you harm. In reality, all chemicals can be toxic and it is the dose that is important – for example, one 400mg vitamin A tablet may be beneficial, but taking 20 at once could damage your liver.

Most chemicals do not accumulate in the body: they are removed by the liver and kidneys. Many detox products which claim to flush the body of chemicals contain diuretics, which increase the amount you urinate. This just removes water and some salt.

In extreme cases, diuretics can cause your salt levels to become depleted, causing cramping or, in the worst cases, a coma. You may achieve temporary weight loss by dehydration, as with a sauna, but this is only short term, as you will regain weight while you rehydrate.

Claim 2: your ‘eliminatory organs’ should be detoxified

The term ‘eliminatory organs’ as used by detox products refers to the liver, kidney and digestive system. These organs don’t need to be cleansed unless you have consumed a dangerous dose of a substance to the extent that they are overwhelmed, such as a drug overdose. In these cases, medical intervention is needed via stomach-pumping, blood transfusion or dialysis.

Claim 3: the product will help ‘neutralise nasty free-radicals’

Detox tonics and supplements often claim to contain high level of antioxidants to help neutralise free radicals in your body. Free radicals are made in the body and can cause cell and DNA damage, but they also play an important role in our immune system, protecting against bacteria and viruses. The body makes its own antioxidants, using the food in our normal diet. Additional antioxidants are removed by the kidneys.

Source: Sense About Science

THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT DETOX PRODUCTS

Shampoos, cleansers and moisturisers

These products bind to substances such as make-up on the skin’s surface, but will come off when you wash. They can’t help your body remove excess substances and are no better than other shampoos, cleansers or moisturisers – and may be more expensive.

Detox patches

Putting a detox patch on your skin may make the covered area sweat more. While very, very small levels of chemicals may be excreted in the sweat, it won’t have any discernible effect on the amount of chemicals in your body.

Detox tonics/supplements

Detox tonics can’t improve your liver or kidney function. Some of the herbs in them may be metabolised more quickly – for example, St John’s Wort – but this is because your body recognises them as a poison and attacks them. If you have too high a dose of some of these supplements, it can cause illness and even death. There is also a risk that they will affect how other substances are processed, such as the contraceptive pill or other medicines, so they don’t work as effectively.

Detox diets

Detox diets are often recommended after periods of excess, but the best diet you can have at any time is a normal, balanced one.

Source: Sense About Science

HOW VITAMIN PILLS COULD BE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH

A course of vitamin supplements is one of the first ports of call for people feeling rundown and suffering from fatigue, but consumers should be sceptical about the claims made for these products, according to independent British consumer watchdog Which?.

It recently conducted research into the claims made for many health supplements and found that many don’t stand up to scrutiny. At the same time, while visiting supermarkets, chemists and smaller health shops, the consumer body found high-strength products on sale containing vitamin B6 and betacarotene without recommended warnings that taking too much could be harmful.

An additional survey carried out by Which? of more than 1,200 people found that around a third of them didn’t realise that taking too much of some supplements could damage their health.

‘‘We’re concerned that people are being taken for a ride, needlessly paying a premium for many products on the basis of health claims that haven’t been backed up by scientific evidence,” says Peter Vicary-Smith, chief executive of Which?.

‘‘We want to see the European Commission release a list of accepted and rejected claims as soon as possible, so that consumers won’t continue to be bamboozled by health claims they can’t trust.

‘‘With many supplements also failing to carry voluntary warnings about high levels of vitamins and minerals you can overdose on, it’s also necessary that safe levels are agreed as soon as possible.”

Supplements claiming to aid in the maintenance of healthy bones and joints were singled out for criticism by Which?, with many based on ingredients like glucoasmine which have had the evidence to back them up rejected by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

The EFSA is the body responsible for analysing the scientific evidence behind health claims on all foods, including supplements. In around 80 per cent of the cases it has studied so far, it couldn’t identify a cause and effect relationship between the ingredient submitted and the purported health claim.

Article: Tearing up the script

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Tearing up the script
Published in The Sunday Business Post on December 19th, 2010, by Alex Meehan

Acting may be one of the most insecure professions of all, but even in a recession it seems there’s no shortage of people willing to follow their dream of treading the boards.

The Gaiety School of Acting is 25 years old next year, and with alumni like Colin Farrell, Stuart Townsend, Flora Montgomery and PJ Gallagher, it has fostered more than its fair share of talent.

With a record 540 people currently enrolled in courses at the school, it seems that the downturn hasn’t been bad for business.

‘‘We’ve been very surprised at the take-up of the courses this year,” says Clíona Dukes, marketing and part-time courses coordinator with the school.

‘‘We were expecting a bad year just like everyone else out there, but actually we’ve seen a huge uptake in our adult classes. It’s hard to say why – certainly, acting is unusual, in that you can dip your toe in the water while still having a full-time job doing something else. It takes work and effort, but that’s what our part time courses are about.”

Founded in 1986 by theatre director Joe Dowling in response to the lack of full-time actor training programmes in Ireland at that time, the Gaiety School of Acting trains people for work in theatre, film and television. It offers a variety of courses lasting from three to four weeks right up to two years, aimed at people of all ages.

‘‘Some want to dabble in acting in their spare time, or they sign up for a short course because they’re looking for a hobby or social activity,” says Dukes. ‘‘Sometimes they just want to meet new people, and I know a lot of people do it because it’s been suggested to them that it might boost their confidence or help their presentation skills in work.”

For people looking to turn an interest in the theatre, TV or film into a full career, however, the school also offers full-time intensive actor training.

‘‘Lots of those people treat the full-time courses as a stepping stone to a career in acting, and our actors have appeared in all of Ireland’s theatres, in film and on television nationally and internationally, and in theatres across Ireland and England,” says Dukes.

While a number of the school’s current students have enrolled after losing their jobs, others have given up their careers to try and break into acting. Among them is Paul Marron, who quit his job in IT to follow his dream.

‘‘Acting was something I’ve always wanted to do, even as a youngster,” he says. ‘‘But when I was about 17 I got carried along towards college, and ended up studying engineering and getting a proper job. I was good at engineering and liked it, but after a few years in the IT sector I knew that acting was an itch I’d just have to scratch.”

Marron is 28, and worked as a telecoms engineer for an IT company contracted to mobile phone company Meteor for five years before deciding to throw in the towel.

He’s now half way through the second year of a two-year, full-time professional acting course.

‘‘I’d been doing some amateur dramatics in my spare time and had some success with it at festivals – I won some awards – and I reckoned that if I didn’t go for it now, I never would. I did an audition for the Gaiety and, as soon as I was accepted, I handed in my notice,” he says. ‘‘Some people thought I was totally mad to throw in a perfectly good job, but others said, ‘Good on you, follow your dream’.

‘‘The way I looked at it, I’d had money and security in my last job, and that really made me realise that those things are not the be all and

end all of life. I’d prefer to have less cash and less security, but really enjoy what I do every day.

Acting isn’t the best paying job in the world, but it won’t feel like work.”

The two-year, full-time course costs €4,950 per year, while a one year part-time course which involves two classes per week, over three ten-week terms, costs €1,800 per year.

Marron saved up in order to afford to do the course, and is happy that his existing IT skills will help him earn a living while he gets established as a jobbing actor.

‘‘When I graduate, I may have to use both my telecoms background and my acting to keep things going, but hopefully if the acting is successful I can go with that,” he says. ‘‘I’d like to go wherever it takes me – the stage, TV, cinema, whatever. I love theatre, but would love to break into film as well.”

Another student at the school, Anne Doyle, had flirted with the stage during her college years, but it was only after a series of health scares and upheaval in her professional life that she gave serious thought to quitting her job as a consultant psychiatrist in order to pursue acting.

‘‘I worked with the National Health Service in the UK for about 20 years but unfortunately got a tumour, and then, five years later, a second one. My work situation also changed – the service I was working on was going to close down, and I’d been invited to work on a new one,” she says.

‘‘Initially I thought that was very exciting, but after the surgery to remove the second tumour I started to rethink things. I realised that while it would be a challenge, I felt I’d already made my contribution To medicine, and maybe it was time to look at something different.”

Doyle first got a taste for acting at university in Galway in the 1970s when she was a member of the NUIG drama society with Garry Hynes and Marie Mullen, who later went on to found the Druid theatre company with Mick Lally.

‘‘I’d had a really good experience with them at that time, so when I decided that I wasn’t going back to psychiatry, I thought I’d love to have another shot at drama. Initially I thought I might be too old, but I’m doing it anyway,” she says.

She has just finished the first term of her first year, and says the experience has been physically very challenging: ‘‘There’s a big physical component to the training; it was exhausting for the first few weeks, but I absolutely love it. I sometimes pinch myself to check I’m really here doing something I enjoy so much.

My only advice to someone else in my situation thinking of going for it is to make sure you’re physically prepared for it.”

She also advises anyone considering a similar path to simplify their life as much as possible.

‘‘There’s lots of homework to be done, and it’s a full-on commitment. You need to be able to dedicate yourself to it fully to get the most out of it.

For someone like me, who gives up a career, there’s no point in only half doing it.”

www.gaietyschool.com

Article: Equality of access to marriage, a conversation with Evan Wolfson

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A very civil defence
Published in The Sunday Business Post on December 5th, 2010, by Alex Meehan

Given that homosexuality was decriminalised here only in 1993, it might sound surprising to hear a leading US human rights lawyer state that Ireland is showing international leadership in the public acceptance of gay rights.

However, according to Evan Wolfson, the fact that civil partnership is set to be enacted into law here next year means that is exactly what is happening.

‘‘In Ireland, around 70 per cent of people are in favour of full and equal access to marriage, so it’s now up to the politicians to catch up with public opinion and make that law,” Wolfson says. ‘‘In the US, we also have politicians who need to catch up, but the difference is that it’s only been this year that we finally saw research showing a majority of American people supporting the freedom to marry.

That was an important milestone, and it shows we’re on the right path.”

Wolfson is founder and executive director of Freedom to Marry, a non-profit organisation in the US that advocates the legalisation of same-sex marriage.

Widely recognised as one of the most prominent public faces of gay marriage in the US, he has been named as one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine.

But while Wolfson, who was in Dublin as a guest of the lobby Group Marriage Equality, lauds the progress that has been made in Ireland so far, he believes there is much more to be done.

‘‘In some respects, Ireland is ahead of the US – you now have a law that acknowledges gay families and couples, and begins to provide some very important protections and responsibilities,” he says.

‘‘It’s far short of what those families need and deserve – which is the same protection and inclusion of marriage that other families have – but nevertheless it is a national acknowledgment of these families and the beginning of the provision of better protections and responsibilities.

We have nothing like that at all at a federal level in the US.”

Wolfson’s career has closely followed the breaking wave of public attitudes to homosexuality and civil rights in the US.

Born in New York, he grew up in Pittsburgh before attending Yale, doing a two-year stint in the Peace Corps in west Africa, and then returning to the US to study for a legal doctorate at Harvard.

But instead of opting for a high paying job as a private attorney, he sought out challenges in the public sector.

‘‘I’d always wanted to be in public service and had no particular in interest in earning lots of money,” he says. ‘‘For me, it was always much more about finding ways to make my love of history, law and politics come together to make a difference.”

He took a job as a public prosecutor in Kings County, Brooklyn, and at the same time began volunteering in his spare time for a small civil rights organisation, Lambda Legal, which was committed to seeking equal rights for gay people.

‘‘By day I worked in the appeals bureau,” Wolfson says. ‘‘When I asked about doing pro bono work for Lambda, it turned out this was the first time any assistant district attorney had ever asked to do any pro bono work, let alone on such a contentious issue. The office said I’d have to take that all the way up to the district attorney and let her decide.”

One unintentional side-effect was that Wolfson’s personal sexuality became widely known in his workplace.

‘‘It was a de facto ‘coming out’ to the entire office, and all the way up the hierarchy to the DA,” he says. ‘‘I wasn’t not out before – my employers knew I was gay because of the work I’d done before and what it said on my resume¤ , so I wasn’t hiding anything – but even so most people didn’t know. It was a political act that came from a personal commitment to doing something positive.”

He had first become interested in the politics of sexuality as a 21-yearold working with the Peace Corps in Togo, when he realised just how lucky he was as a gay man to have been born in the US.

‘‘I met people for the first time who, had they lived in a more welcoming, inclusive and respectful country, would have been openly gay,” he says. ‘‘But because they lived in a country where they didn’t have that vocabulary, let alone those kind of social choices, they ended up living lives that were not true to who they were.

‘‘I realised that what your society is like and what opportunities and freedoms you have can shape who you are in a very strong and profound way.”

When he came back from Africa to study law, he was further inspired to work for equality when he read the book which he says changed his life: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality by John Boswell.

‘‘It was a pioneering, groundbreaking book in which he traced the history of homosexuality through the millennia of western history, going back through the ancient world to roughly the 1300s,” Wolfson says. ‘‘Boswell showed that the way in which our society today treats homosexuality is not something set in stone through history.

‘‘In fact, it’s profoundly different to how the ancient world understood sexuality and how different periods in the medieval world treated it, and even how the Catholic Church has evolved over time in its attitudes to homosexuality.”

For the first time, Wolfson’s main interests in the area of politics and history came together with his own personal identity as a gay man.

‘‘It made me realise that being gay and how society treats gay people is not just a question of people’s personal and private life – it’s about what kind of society we have, and what our commitments to inclusion and respect are,” he says. ‘‘It also made me realise that if it had been different before, it could be different again, and we could change things.”

It wasn’t just in the area of gay rights that Wolfson found himself involved in high-profile legal cases. During his time as a prosecutor in Brooklyn, he also worked on challenging the marital rape exemption, a piece of law at one time common in all parts of the world which had inherited the British legal system.

‘‘A man could not be prosecuted for raping his wife because he was entitled to take what the law termed as ‘what belongs to him’,” he says.

‘‘This was part of the so-called traditional definition of marriage. I wound up as a prosecutor getting to challenge that law, writing a brief that ultimately went to the high court of New York and struck down that exemption.

‘‘This wasn’t 100 or even 50 years ago: this was in 1984.

That just shows you how long these so-called traditional definitions that we think of as being unacceptable prevailed in law.

The idea that women became the legal property of men when they married passed from religious tradition into secular law, and even as recently as the 1980s was being defended by religious voices who asserted that women should subordinate themselves to men.

‘‘The vast majority of people now feel it is a good thing that this law got changed; the world didn’t end, and society is better off as a result. It just shows you that sometimes, even attitudes thought to be set in stone can change.”

It is in this context that Wolfson wants people to reconsider their views on same-sex marriage. For a start, he wants them to realise that as far as he’s concerned, there is no religious element to the issue.

‘‘Firstly, we’re not fighting for gay marriage in Ireland or in the US – what we’re actually fighting for is an end to exclusion from marriage itself,” he says. ‘‘There is a difference.

‘‘Marriage in the US and here is a legal institution that is regulated by the government, that is created by the issuance of civil licences.

The government doesn’t issue communion licences or bar mitzvah licenses or whatever, but it does issue marriage licences, because marriage is a legal institution that brings with it a vast array of tangible and intangible consequences.

‘‘What we’re looking for is an end to the denial of marriage, whether in Ireland or elsewhere, to people who have made a commitment to each other and who want that commitment recognised in law.” Wolfson says he isn’t trying to tell ‘‘any church, temple, synagogue or mosque’’ who they should or shouldn’t marry.

‘‘But what we are saying is that no church, temple, synagogue or mosque should be dictating to the civil government who can get a marriage licence and enjoy the legal status that goes with that,” he says. ‘‘It’s not about telling any church what to do, it’s about telling the government that it should not be discriminating against some of its citizens.

‘‘When people bring up religion as a reason to oppose equal justice under the law, I ask them to really dig deep into their religious values and ask themselves what those values teach.

They teach respect for love and respect for commitment.

‘‘Ending the denial of marriage imposes nothing on anyone else, but it allows people who have made a commitment to each other to live lives that strengthens society and the world around them.”

http://www.freedomtomarry.org, http://www.marriageequality.ie

Article: Off the record . . .

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Off the record
Published in The Sunday Business Post on November 21st, 2010, by Alex Meehan

At a time when it’s hard for qualified and experienced people to find a job, the challenge faced by those with criminal records, without a permanent address or with no educational qualifications, is even greater.

But while most people in these situations face an uphill struggle to get work, there are schemes specifically designed to help them back into the labour force.

One of them is Linkage, which is operated by the Dublin-based non-profit group Business in the Community.

It was Linkage that helped John [not his real name], an ex-criminal with a history of substance abuse, back into work and education.

‘‘I was locked up several times for periods of time between six and 12 months. It’s been seven years since I’ve been in prison, but I’ve been through a traumatic period. I found it very hard to reintegrate into society,” he says.

‘‘I had many issues to resolve, mostly caused by addiction. The truth of it is that I was a mess for around 19 years with alcohol and drugs.

All my prison terms were drink-related, every one of them, and looking back on it, all were the result of stupid, unnecessary incidents.”

As a result of his criminal record, John faced huge difficulties when it came to finding a job. ‘‘I’d basically never held down a proper job before, other than stretches on building sites in Britain and here,” he says.

‘‘I wanted to make a fresh start, and through Linkage I was encouraged to re-engage with education.

I didn’t know what I ultimately wanted to do, other than that I wanted to work in an office. I got lucky, I suppose. I have a good personality and I’m good with people.

I started doing volunteer work, with meals on wheels programmes and with homeless shelters, and now I’m studying for an honours degree in social studies.”

For John, it was an opportunity that many in his position never get. ‘‘I’m getting closer to that job in an office, and I will get it,” he says. ‘‘I may experience discrimination and I know it will be hard, but nothing is going to stop me.”

The Linkage programme has been running for ten years and has had over 5,000 ex-offenders referred to it by the Probation Service.

Around 70 per cent of participants have been placed in training, employment or education. According to Tina Roche, chief executive of Business in the Community (BITC), ex-offenders face a lifetime of discrimination.

‘‘In Ireland, you’re allowed to discriminate against people who have a criminal record,” she says.

‘‘If you get a criminal record when you’re 18, you carry that for the rest of your life – there’s no expunging that record, and there are no spent sentences here like there are in other countries.

That’s a huge barrier for reformed criminals who want to get their life back together, and get on the straight and narrow. It makes it very hard for them to carry on their life the way that the state wants them to.”

According to Roche, the Linkage programme’s clients are likely to have experienced unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, as well as homelessness, family breakdown or stigmatisation because of public attitudes to offenders. ‘‘Most normal people look back and cringe at the mistakes they made when they were in their late teens or early 20s,but for some people those mistakes are with them for life,” she says.

‘‘The crimes committed at that age are often stupid rather than sinister – someone may have kicked a Garda car, or have drunk too much and got in a fight. Even the government now recognises that this is a silly barrier to reforming someone.

We believe that once someone is five years out of jail and has maintained a blemish-free record, their record should be expunged.

Some offences are more serious than others and probably should remain on the record, but there are lots that aren’t.” According to Roche, employers are sometimes initially reluctant to work with ex-offenders, but not always.

‘‘We are basically asking employers to give someone a second chance.

The issues they always want addressed are, ‘Does this person have the skills for the job and are they trustworthy’.

We tell them that, ironically, they’ll probably know more about this person before they give them a job than anyone else who works for them,” she says.

‘‘A lot of people with records may not have qualifications, but they’ve often got experience working as bricklayers or carpenters, or even working in shops.

They frequently have left school before their Junior Cert, but often have a base to build on to get them back to work. About 30 per cent have a Junior Cert and about 10 per cent have a Leaving Cert.”

The Linkage programme is one of a number of schemes operated by BITC designed to deepen the ties between the business community and the society around them. Others include the EPIC programme, aimed at creating employment for people from immigrant communities who don’t have sufficient English or whose qualifications aren’t recognised in Ireland, and the Ready for Work programme, which attempts to specifically address the challenges faced by the homeless in the workplace.

‘‘It’s extremely important that we put something back into the community which we serve,” says Jonathan Smith, head of Marks & Spencer Ireland, one of the companies which has participated in some of BITC’s schemes.

‘‘It’s about getting out into the community to help and inform people about the wider business context that we exist in, and to give them an opportunity to experience what retail is all about. It sounds corny but it is important, because the retail sector is one of the biggest employers in the country.”

Marks & Spencer has been involved with BITC since 2000, and has a particularly strong link with its Schools’ Business Partnership programme. ‘‘Through our association with BITC, four of our stores are actively partnered with local schools.

The teachers can bring their students in and show them how the operation works, and our teams also go out to spend time in the schools.

The project helps kids understand a bit more about how the retail world works,” says Smith.

Marks & Spencer has also facilitated work placements for people attempting to get established after becoming homeless.

‘‘We allow people to work with us for a period of time to get them used to the business world again,” says Smith.

‘‘Very often, we end up employing them on amore permanent basis. It’s a real win for them, and it also allows us to find really good members of staff.

Regardless of how people end up there, getting out of homelessness is extremely hard, but programmes like this can help people get a fresh start in life.”

http://www.bitc.ie

Book review: Fall of Giants, By Ken Follett

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Fall of Giants, By Ken Follett, Macmillan, €22.99
Published in The Sunday Business Post on October 24th, 2010, reviewed by Alex Meehan

Ken Follett is nothing if not an ambitious writer, and his latest novel, Fall of Giants, represents his boldest project to date.

A sprawling epic, Fall of Giants is the first part of Follett’s Century Trilogy, a retelling of the history of the 20th century through the eyes of five interrelated families in the US, Britain, Germany and Russia.

Ranging from 1911 to 1924, the book tells of the impact of the Russian revolution and the First World War on the people who were most affected by them, with the struggle for female suffrage and the inequities of the class system playing a slightly more minor role.

The story revolves around the lives of five families from different social backgrounds who are all affected by extreme social and political change.

It opens in a small Welsh mining town, with 13year-old Billy Williams setting off for his first day down the mines with his father, a rabble-rousing union man.

Billy’s sister, Ethel Williams, works as a maid in the nearby manor house Ty Gwyn in the service of Earl Fitzherbert, until a naive encounter with the earl leaves her pregnant and desperate.

Maud Fitzherbert, the Earl’s firebrand sister, has strong ideas about the role of women in society, and is keen to make her mark on politics.

However, much to her surprise, she falls in love with Walter Von Ulrich, the son of a German diplomat stationed in pre-war London.

During a society dinner at Ty Gwyn, a young American law student, Gus Dewar, is introduced to the Fitzherberts while on a European tour in advance of taking up a position in Woodrow Wilson’s government.

Meanwhile, in Tsarist Russia, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, two orphaned working-class brothers, find their lives change dramatically when one of them is forced to flee the country to escape the police, while the other gets drawn into the Bolshevik movement and the revolution.

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated in 1914, the members of all five of these disparate families are drawn into the conflict that becomes World War I.

By the time the war ends, all have been profoundly changed by their experiences.

The Fall of Giants is a big book in every sense of the word – it’s ambitious in scope and physically large in size, clocking in at a bricklike 850 pages and featuring a bewildering cast of over 120 characters. (Helpfully, a character guide at the front of the book reminds the reader who’s who.)

But despite its breadth, it is highly readable. Follett has managed to write an accessible and fascinating page turner that leaves the reader wanting more, at the same time as staying true to history.

He hammers home just how momentous a period his chosen 13-year stretch of history really was – it doesn’t need embellishing, just illustration.

He has his fictional characters freely interact with key historical figures, but manages to stay on the right side of historical accuracy by making sure no real-life movers or shakers act out of character or contrary to their true tendencies.

Seeing these events through the eyes of well-drawn and believable characters is an engaging history lesson, much more compelling than any documentary or textbook could be.

However, the book is not without fault, chief among them the inclusion of a number of gratuitous and incongruous sexual encounters.

It will be interesting to see if Follett can sustain the pace he’s set through to the second and third instalments of his Century Trilogy.

With Part Two set to deal with the Great Depression and World War Two, and Part Three the Cold War, he has created for himself the kind of literary challenge that would make most authors very nervous.

That he seems, so far, to be pulling it off is extremely impressive.

Article: Dealing with depression and mental illness

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This was published yesterday, as the main feature in the Sunday Business Post’s Agenda Magazine. It’s been posted online at the paper’s website, but for some reason, the panels and extra bits and bobs don’t seem to make it onto the website when the main site is updated, so I’ve included them here.

Recession depression
Published in The Sunday Business Post on October 18th, 2010, by Alex Meehan

Ever wondered what the most dangerous occupation in Ireland is? Bomb disposal expert perhaps? Or maybe a steeplejack? In fact, when it comes to your physical and mental health, being unemployed is by far the most hazardous occupation you can have.

With unemployment now standing at just under 14 per cent of the population, Ireland’s GPs are seeing a wave of mental health issues affecting their patients. Many of them are coping with serious depression and anxiety for the first time in their lives as a result of deteriorating economic circumstances.

“The preferred state for a healthy human being is to be active and working and to be socially active. This feeds into our ideas and beliefs and important questions such as ‘who am I?’ and ‘am I in control of my own life?’” says Martin Rogan, assistant national director of mental health for the HSE.

“Work is an essential component of a happy life, of getting the balance right. Ideally you’d spend around a third of your life, or half of your waking time, in some purposeful and constructive employment that allows you to provide for yourself and your family and ideally which makes some sort of contribution to society. These are very strong cultural needs that people throughout the world recognise. If you can’t fulfil these needs, then it’s almost as difficult as not being able to sleep or eat,” he says.

According to Aware, over 300,000 people in Ireland suffer from depression at any given time, and one in four people will experience it during their lifetime. Women are three to four times more likely than men to suffer from the illness and if left untreated, depression can be fatal as it can lead to suicide.

“There’s no doubt that the recession has impacted people’s health very significantly,” says Dr Abbie Lane, consultant psychiatrist and head of the Dublin County Stress Clinic at Saint John of God Hospital. “It’s led to episodes of depression in people who have never experienced anything like that before, and it’s certainly led to an increased rate of suicide as well.”

According to Lane, a key challenge for people coming to terms with a major life change such as losing their job lies in confronting their own self image.

“Many people have a tendency to equate their self worth with their job, and when that’s taken away from them they’re left wondering who they are. We’re seeing people who are depressed and anxious because they’ve lost their job, their financial security, maybe the loss of the future they’d been planning but now can’t afford,” she says.

“There is also a gender bias – this affects men worse than women. Men traditionally see themselves as providers and as the person who looks after the family, but in our society it can increasingly be the case that women can earn more or be the sole earners in a house.”

Lane believes personal make-up has a lot to do with how well someone adjusts to a new situation. “Men who find themselves unemployed can suffer an awful sense of loss and can experience shame and embarrassment. To be fair lots of men don’t feel this at all – it depends on the individual, their make-up and their circumstances — but it tends to effect men more than women,” she says.

“If someone proactively decides to be a stay-at-home dad or a house husband, then that’s a different thing to having that thrust upon them as a result of them becoming unemployed.”

Massive advances have been made in recent times in the diagnoses and treatment of depression, anxiety and other forms of mental illness in Ireland. However attitudes to people suffering from these conditions have not kept pace, and many sufferers are still reluctant to see their GP or even to recognise that what they are suffering from is in fact a mental illness.

So strong is the stigma that surrounds the idea of mental illness that it’s quite common for sufferers to reach breaking point before they will seek help.

“When you have a mental illness, you don’t look any different to the people around you even if you’re suffering inside. You may seem perfectly fine but the subjective experience can be very different,” says Martin Rogan of the HSE.

“Around 16 million incidents of primary care – in other words people visiting their GP — take place every year in Ireland, and of those, around 35 per cent relate to mental health. It’s an enormous invisible issue. It’s invisible for a number of reasons, mostly because of the massive stigma around it. It’s effectively an iceberg issue, in that only the tip is visible.”

According to Rogan, one of the reasons for the stigma that still surrounds mental illness is the historical manner in which it was treated.

“Our tradition of dealing with these problems in Ireland is rooted in the use of big institutions. In 1950, Ireland had the world record for institutionalising people. We basically took the British model, which was designed to help that country run an empire, and applied it here,” he says.

“In 1950, we had 22,000 people, or 0.5 per cent of the population, living in psychiatric hospitals. By the time I started my career in 1983 that number had come down to 12,000 and today, there are 1,200 beds in the system.”

The reason for such a sharp drop in the number of people in the care of the state is partly to do with advances in medicine and treatment, and partly with the way mental illness was defined in the 1950s.

“The old system was less discriminating – people with learning difficulties made up almost half of all people in these institutions and almost half of all admissions related to alcohol. They were often a way for society to deal with people who were vulnerable; it became a total solution to admit them. Instead of these people being given a service by the state, they were almost adopted by the service,” says Rogan.

“Famously, women coming out of Magdalene Laundries often ended up in them, and children emerging from orphanages and care situations sometimes graduated from industrial schools to their local psychiatric services.”

While many of these people should never have been in these institutions, for those with genuine mental illness, little could be done.

“We’ve become much more sophisticated since then and the technologies available to us to help people have dramatically improved, not just in terms of medication but also in terms of how we understand mental illness and what we can do for people,” says Rogan. “Things like cognitive behavioural therapy and other therapies have all made a huge difference to how we help people today. Not only are fewer people being admitted to care, they’re staying for much shorter periods of time and we’re getting much better outcomes.”

One of the major differences between how illnesses such as anxiety disorders and depression were dealt with in the past and today is the degree to which therapy is used to resolve the problem.

“In the past, anxiety used to be managed by substances called benzodiazepine, usually in the form of valium or sleeping pills, but they were all highly addictive. Nowadays we don’t use them, we use low doses of an anti-depressant in conjunction with therapy,” ” says Dr Abbie Lane.

“Therapy is really the key in anxiety disorders; the aim is to give people the tools to become their own therapist, to learn new coping skills, and that’s a huge part of the success of these treatments. Therapy can teach you how to live a lifestyle that increases your resilience and resistance to these types of illness, and also how to spot the early signs of the problem reoccurring.”

According to Lane, patients who are advised to see a therapist generally attend once a week for a few weeks, during which time the therapist will assess their situation, go through their thinking patterns and look into the issues that concern them.

“The therapist will also give them practical exercises, and that would go on for about six or eight sessions. Sometimes people need longer, but the majority of cases of stress related illness would respond to that form of therapy,” she says.

“Studies show that a certain number of people do need medication to effectively deal with their illness. People need medication if they have persistent anxiety throughout the day about everything around them, and are unable to shake it off. If they’re depressed, have low moods, loss of enjoyment in life and loss of motivation to do anything, or if their sleep is seriously affected, then medication can also be helpful.”

When medication is prescribed, it’s usually from a family of medicines known as SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

“These are not sedatives at all and tend to be very well tolerated by people. These drugs come with some side effects but they tend to be minimal and patients describe them as manageable. They’re also safe in overdose – the older ones were cardio toxic and could create serious heart problems if someone overdoes on them. The new ones are much safer,” says Lane.

SSRIs work by re-regulating the body’s own serotonin control system, which is implicated in anxiety and depression, increasing the person’s own serotonin levels rather than artificially introducing a new substance. Usually, an SSRI is prescribed for a period of around six months.

“Often people feel well after a month of taking them, and may feel like they don’t need to continue, but they actually do because the risk of relapse continues for around six months. Obviously, it needs to be discussed with a doctor and the dosage gradually withdrawn after six months,” says Lane.

She believes that many people who are suffering from depression for the first time don’t realise they have the condition. “Even if they do realise it, they may not know how to get help, or they may think they have a serious psychiatric illness and fear talking about it or seeking help because of the stigma that’s attached to it,” she says. “People are often afraid that their illness will affect their future employability, their insurance records, their ability to travel.”

Both Lane and Rogan point to alcohol as a major contributing factor to depressive episodes.

“People under stress or pressure may reach for alcohol because it’s freely available and doesn’t cost much. But it’s important to realise that while alcohol may release the initial feelings of stress, it also increases anxiety and depression. People who experience those feelings should approach alcohol with caution,” says Lane.

Martin Rogan believes Ireland has an “extraordinary” problem with alcohol abuse.

“Over 40 per cent of people who kill themselves in this country have consumed alcohol, yet alcohol abuse is an issue that we just refuse to recognise,” he says. “It has a depressing effect and disinhibits people from doing things they might not otherwise contemplate. Many times, people turn to alcohol to self-medicate, when it would be much healthier to see a therapist to get some new perspective.”

According to Rogan, Ireland is actually a relatively good place to suffer from a mental illness, relative to the rest of the world.

“We have a very well developed and skilled workforce in this area in terms of primary care, and in terms of our mental health services. But even before people access these services, Ireland is a good place to live in terms of general quality of life,” he says. “As a nation we have undergone major change in our economic circumstances in recent years, but if you compare living here with living in the US or in many other European countries, particularly if you are depending on a public health service, we compare very well.”

“Your likelihood of developing depression is reduced if you have good quality housing, have a good prospect of work, live in a clean environment, have a good diet – your likelihood of developing depression are reduced. Quality of life is overall pretty good here,” he says.

But Rogan concedes that as the country moves into an era of austerity and cuts, there will be greater challenges facing those attempting to treat mental illnesses here. “In 1966, mental health services had 23 per cent of the national health budget. By 1984 that had fallen to 12 per cent, and by the time the Vision for Change document was published in January 2006, it had shrunk to 7.6 per cent of the health spend,” he says.

“That document set a target of 8.4 per cent for spending in this area, but according to the World Health Organisation, to have an adequate service around 12 per cent of your spend should be going on mental health. This means that we have to be extremely focused and super efficient in getting the most out of the money we have.”

PANEL: Are you depressed or just a bit down?

Occasionally feeling depressed is a normal part of everyday life but when does feeling down become a problem that requires a trip to the doctor?

“If something bad happens to you, it’s normal to become unsettled and to develop some anxieties and sleep disturbance. We call that acute stress reaction or an adjustment reaction, the person needs to get their bearings and adjust to what has happened,” says Dr Abbie Lane, consultant psychiatrist and head of the Dublin County Stress Clinic at Saint John of God Hospital.

“This typically happens if you lose someone close to you, but you can get the same symptoms with other bad news – if you lose your life savings, or are let go from your job.”

According to Lane, mild depression can turn into something more worrying if there is a pervasive low mood that lasts for more than two weeks, and that nothing will lift.

“If the person won the lotto in the morning they’d still feel the same, they wouldn’t be interested or motivated by it and basically wouldn’t enjoy it. At the same time, it’s also of concern if the intensity of the symptoms starts to interfere with how a person leads their life, with their function in work, with their family or socially. If those things are happening then it’s something that needs an intervention.”

“This is particularly true if someone decides life isn’t worth living and they’d be better off dead, that’s very serious,” she says.

According to Aware, depression has eight main symptoms and if a person experiences five or more of them, lasting for a period of two weeks or more, they should speak to a GP or mental health professional. The symptoms are:

* Feeling sad, anxious or bored
* Low energy, feeling tired or fatigued
* Under- or over-sleeping, or waking frequently during the night
* Poor concentration, thinking slowed down
* Loss of interest in hobbies, family or social life
* Low self-esteem and feelings of guilt
* Aches and pains with no physical basis, e.g. chest/head/tummy pain associated with anxiety or stress
* Loss of interest in living, thinking about death, suicidal thoughts.

PANEL: ‘Jennifer’ – My experience

“I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder around two years ago, but I’ve probably had it for most of my life.  A very troubling summer in 2008 brought the matter to a head. I’d been in denial for a long time, telling myself it was everyone else who had a problem, not me.

It got to the point where I was suicidally depressed, wasn’t able to get out of bed or get dressed – basically I was very down and I realised I couldn’t rationalise the situation any longer. I had to get help because there was obviously something wrong and I wasn’t able to fix it myself.

“Bipolar disorder has a big impact on the people around you – it was difficult for my family to see me so depressed, and it was obviously difficult for my friends who bore the brunt of my moods both when I was depressed and manic. I picked a lot of irrational fights that would spiral out of control and lead to me storming off. It’s not easy and they put up with an awful lot.

“Making the doctor’s appointment was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Saying out loud to a doctor ‘I think I’m depressed’ and then going home to tell my parents I had been prescribed anti-depressants was very hard. It was like I was acknowledging that there was something really broken about me. I was afraid people would shun me and think I was a weirdo, or someone who wasn’t capable of maintaining a normal life, but the truth is that actually I’m pretty successful — I have a good job, a great family and a great group of friends, I do really well for myself.”

“I embarked on the path with my doctor of trying to get the right medication, which wasn’t fun, and a year of weekly cognitive behavioural therapy, which involved talking and a lot of practical exercises to help me deal with the anxiety issues that go along with a manic phase and the issues that appear when I’m depressed.

“For me, my disorder manifests in mood swings. If your base mood is zero, then the average person experiences mood swings of between plus and minus five on that scale. For someone with bipolar, it can be between minus 20 and plus 20 – in other words there are real extremes of emotion. These extremes can be totally unrelated to what’s going on around them.

“Being down looks a lot like depression and is easily seen by the people around you. Mania, on the other hand, isn’t so widely recognised. You can be in a euphoric mood that can go up to and include psychotic episodes. I’ve never been that bad, but I have been in a frame of mind where I’ve made completely irrational, life endangering decisions.

“At the time they seemed totally normal and rational. My perspective was totally skewed – I’ve had days when I was supremely confident and I’ve believed myself to be almost omnipotent. I was untouchable in work and was going to make a fortune with my side business and no one could convince me otherwise.

“Since being diagnosed, I’ve been trying to get the right balance of medication to help balance my moods but not cripple me with side effects. The therapy side of treatment has involved lots of self-development; basically I realised I needed to come to terms with my condition. I have quite a few followers on Twitter and recently I started to publicly tell people I have this condition.

“Like it or not, I have a disorder and I couldn’t continue to ignore it. The truth is that in our society it would be easier for me to come out and say I’m gay than it would be to say I’m mentally ill.  Suffering from a mental illness is still a huge taboo. If you say your mentally ill, people instantly think in terms of insane asylums or movies like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

“Yes there are people who need to be hospitalised, but just because you’re mentally ill doesn’t mean you need that. Most people don’t. I thought that the more I ignored it and the more that I pretended that it had to be a secret, the more I was reinforcing the idea that it should be a secret. It made it something to be ashamed of, but the simple fact of the matter is that I have nothing to be ashamed of.

“The reaction from people has been great – my friends and family have been very understanding –  and a lot of my friends had been suggesting to me I needed help for a long time before I started to listen. I haven’t come across a negative response, although I am cognisant of the fact that maybe people have changed their opinion of me and just won’t say that to me directly.

“I’m sure there were people who saw my tweets and wrote me off there and then. Part of the reason for going public was that through exposure to me people would realise I’m actually normal.”

PANEL: Young people and depression

While stress and depression are widely understood amongst the adult population, there remains concern in the mental healthcare profession about attitudes to these issues amongst teenagers and young people.

The incidence of suicide is generally down, but suicide is still among the ten most common causes of death in Ireland and the principal cause of death in young adults, having increased four-fold in the past twenty years.

“As a society we tend not to take young people’s feelings seriously. When young people are growing up, there’s a lot going on in their lives. They’re developing physically, they’re maturing and they have very mixed-up feelings regarding who and what they are within society,” said Michele Kerrigan, chief executive officer of the mental health organisation Grow.

“Sometimes we can attribute all their problems down to just growing up, and in the process miss the signs that there is something deeper happening. They need a helping hand to get them over that hump. It’s like everything else — if you get help early, the recovery process is much quicker.  As people get deeper into depression, it becomes much harder to pull them out of it. It can be done, and people do it, but it’s much more difficult.”

According to Kerrigan, there are warning signs that parents can look out for to help them tell the difference between the normal ups and downs of adolescence and more serious signs of mental disturbance and illness.

“When you see someone withdrawing totally from their friends, then that’s a serious sign. Young people love to be around their friends so when they start pulling back from them and not wanting to go out, that’s usually a sign that something is wrong in their lives. Alongside this, it’s also important to look out for changes to sleeping and eating cycles – these indicate that something is on their mind,” she says.

“The internet is something else to keep an eye on. Through sites like Facebook and Bebo, kids can have other sets of friendships, whether real or not, and parents need to be careful about that. Teenagers can communicate in one way with their parents and family at home, and have a very different way of communicating online. They can in effect be two different people.”

Kerrigan points out that teenagers today are growing up in a world that takes technology for granted in a way that is usually alien to their parents.

“It’s a different way of communicating and because it’s not face to face it can be very harsh – it’s communication stripped of nuance and context. You’d be amazed, but people really do bare their souls on Facebook and Twitter, whereas if they were talking face to face with someone they’d probably be a bit more guarded.”

“In person, you can observe the other person’s body language, the tone of their voice and the look on their face, but all that nuance is lost on a computer screen. People feel free to say whatever they want without worrying if they are offending someone because they don’t see the reaction in person. That interaction can be pretty harsh for anyone, let alone teenagers.”

While bullying and abusive behaviour has always been a problem with younger people, the explosion in the use of technology amongst this age group has created new forms of bullying.

“Bullying is a huge issue for people, it can really affect their mental health and how they deal with other people. They can become very withdrawn and it can affect how they communicate with others, often right through school and into their adult and working lives. There are often sad stories in the media about young people who commit suicide as a result of bullying and harassment,” says Kerrigan.

“It’s really important to teach kids to have a base level of respect for their friends and other people. This is how they know how far they can go without pushing people too far. Somewhere in the middle of all this technology we’ve lost that piece of the puzzle.”

Grow recently launched a free book with the HSE aimed at reducing the stigma associated with mental health issues and suicidal thoughts in young people, entitled ‘You Can Do It – But You Can’t Do It Alone.’ Targeted at young people aged between 18 and 35 years, it’s available either on-line at http://www.grow.ie or in print from the HSE’s Health Promotion Unit at http://www.healthpromotion.ie

Good enough to publish is good enough to pay for

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I work as a freelance journalist, and have done, on and off, since 1996. This is actually pretty unusual – in journalism in Ireland, freelancing is typically seen as something you do as a means to landing a staff job with a newspaper.

For me however, that has never really been a goal – I freelance because it’s a great way to have a lot of say over how you use your time, who you work for and basically to get maximum control over your work life balance. However, because the newspaper market is small (and contracting, but that’s another blog entry) most full time long term freelances know each other – particularly when they specialise in a niche. Recently, a journalism student inquired in an online media forum about how to break into journalism in Ireland.

As a rule, I don’t really participate in online forums. I just don’t have the time these days, and ultimately find them to be unsatisfying — rarely is anything achieved or resolved, so it’s usually a better use of my time to steer clear of them. Anyway, I got drawn into this conversation because the question is one which everyone starting out has asked at some point. In addition, someone claiming to be a working journalist advised the original poster that they should expect to work for free for some time until they get established. I appreciate that things are tough out there, and it’s hard for new people to get a foot in the door, but I do believe that if a story is good enough to print, then it’s good enough to be paid for.

The idea that people should have to work for free is slightly sinister to me.

That said, I will say that quality is a factor here – if you don’t have experience, then the odds are that your copy is going to need work before it can be printed. Good editors will do this for new people maybe once or twice if, and only if, the story is worth it – but you don’t want to wear out precious goodwill that way if you’re trying to get established.

Freelancing is a business like lots of others – the trick is to come up with good ideas and then identify the media outlet that the idea would best suit. Then pitch it properly, having made sure that the outlet in question hasn’t recently published the same idea – in other words know the market you’re selling to. Time your pitch so that it doesn’t arrive just as the commissioning editor is having a melt down on deadline day – and if it’s a good idea they may bite.

They might ask to see examples of your work, and if you have good tight copy, send it in, but that’s never really happened with me. Normally, they just commission the piece – the trick then is write your story and make sure it’s extremely clean. Know the house style of the outlet your writing it for, and make sure your copy needs minimal work. Also make sure it fits the brief of the commission.

If you’ve done all that, then you deserve to be paid. If you’re easy to work with, deliver on time and have good ideas, you’ll get lots of work. If your copy is sloppy, not to brief, badly researched, late and you’re difficult to deal with, you won’t.

I’m happy to concede that things may be harder now than they were when I got my start, but people used to say the same things to me back then too.

I do remember wondering how the hell anyone made a living out of this game when I was struggling to get one or two features published a month – I literally wasn’t making enough money to pay my rent, let alone eat anything. The reason was I was pitching for work to the same national papers everyone else was – there was a lot of competition for column inches.

So one piece of advice I’d give to people starting out is to identify a niche and attack your goal in a roundabout way through that niche. Not everyone can have big features published every day in a national paper, but you also don’t need that. There are many trade journals and specialty magazines that aren’t having their doors beaten down by newcomers and while the pay won’t be great, you probably will get work if you make it your business to find out what they publish and how to pitch to them.

It may sound like awful work – who wants to write for a veterinarian magazine or for an industry trade mag? – but what you need to build up is a steady core income. Once you have that, you can afford to pitch for more prestigious outlets because you won’t be depending on them. If you get one or two a month, then that’s fine. Your goal is to build your reputation with the commissioning editors you know. Over time, you can develop your reputation and slowly phase out work you’re not that interested in for work you are.

Article: Can happiness buy you money?

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This is a long piece, ostensibly aimed at a business audience, but there are some pretty interesting ideas in it.

Workers Paradise: Can happiness buy you money
Published in The Sunday Business Post on September 12th, 2010, by Alex Meehan

By the time you have finished reading this article, you will be just a little bit closer to the start of another working week.

But what kind of a working week awaits you?

Does it involve dragging yourself out of bed to face another five days of unfulfilling grind before the weekend comes, and you can start to enjoy life again?

Or do you enjoy Monday morning and doing a job that makes you really happy for a company that really values you?

You may find the notion of the second scenario far-fetched, or at least a bit naive.

After all, how many of us can plausibly hope to be truly happy at work? All companies want happy customers and clients, but how many of them actively try to have happy employees?

In fact, an increasing number of employers are trying to do just that, spurred on by evidence that happy staff actually make a difference to a company’s bottom line. While money can’t bring you happiness, it seems that – at least for some companies – happiness can bring you money.

For technology entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, keeping employees content is a crucial part of building any successful business. Hsieh is something of a legend in technology circles. In 1999, at the age of 24, he sold Link Exchange to Microsoft for $265 million before moving on to become chief executive of the internet clothing giant Zappos.

He grew the company from a turnover of almost zero in 1999 to sales of over $1 billion in 2009, and went on to sell it to Amazon.com for $1.2 billion last November.

Zappos is famous for the lengths it will go to in order to keep its customers happy.

It offers free, ultra-fast shipping, and will take returns back for any reason, paying the cost of postage in full. Its customer service staff have an unusual degree of autonomy, and everyone in the company, from call centre staff right up to senior management, is required to do a four-week course in customer service and then spend two weeks answering calls in a call centre.

Most notably, the company is known for paying a $2,000 bonus to new employees who want to quit after their first week in the job.

The reason is simple – if they’re not happy in their job, they won’t create happiness around them in the workplace.

And delivering happiness is what Hsieh thinks doing business is all about.

Last month his new book, Delivering Happiness, shot straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of publication.

Its message is that happy employees create profitable companies, and that, when it comes to competing for staff, contracts and customers, company culture is the single biggest differentiator between rival firms.

‘‘In 2007, I started getting interested in learning more about the science of happiness,” Hsieh says.

‘‘I started out my business life chasing profits, but then I figured out that money alone isn’t enough to bring me or anyone else true happiness.

So I started to think about the things in life I was passionate about and that other employees here were passionate about. I started to think about how to make customers happy and how to make employees happy – and in today’s world, that turns out to be really good for business.

The best businesses are those that can combine profits, passion and purpose.”

Hsieh’s research led him to the conclusion that true happiness is about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (or the number and depth of relationships with other people), and vision (or meaning).

‘‘Tome, happiness has been about discovering that it’s less about what’s external to us, and more about what’s internal to us. It can be a difficult idea for business people to get their heads around, because the pay-off of focusing on happiness is two to three years down the line.

Many companies tend to focus on what will maximise profits for the current quarter or year,” he says.

Hsieh’s message may sound revolutionary, but for some companies, the philosophy of creating a corporate culture first, and then generating profits as a result, is already well established.

The Great Place to Work Institute publishes an annual table of companies endorsed by their own employees, and it has been consistently shown that those companies where employee satisfaction levels are high do better than rivals that are less concerned with company culture.

‘‘No matter how you want to crunch the numbers, or what time period you want to measure performance over, the companies listed as great places to work outperform their competition by a factor of three or four to one,” says Bob Lee, chief executive officer of the Great Place to Work Institute of Ireland.

Lee believes that companies without a corporate culture focused on employee happiness often misunderstand what’s involved.

‘‘They think a great place to work is one that looks like fun – where the company has a nice office building, or there’s a pool table in the recreation room, or something like that.

But those things only exist as a consequence of the respect that the organisation has for its employees.

They’re not what makes a great place to work,” he says. The Great Place to Work list started life as a book published in 1984 by San Francisco-based industrial relations journalist Robert Levering.

Approached by a publisher and asked to produce a record of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

Levering initially turned the commission down, as he genuinely felt that there weren’t 100 good companies worth writing about.

The publisher persisted, so Levering set out to research the subject exhaustively and took three years to put together his book, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller.

Three years later, he updated the first edition, and this time, a throwaway claim he made in it attracted the attention of Fortune magazine.

Levering said that these top 100 companies would be good companies to invest in, because they all seemed to enjoy superior stock market performance.

Fortune was sceptical of the claim. In its view, any cash spent on employee satisfaction was wasted, and rightfully should be given back to shareholders so they could decide what to do with it themselves.

The magazine commissioned investment house Frank Russell to look into Levering’s analysis, and was surprised by the results – the companies listed by Levering as great places to work outperformed their competition by a factor of up to four to one.

The magazine has published the US version of the list every year since.

So just what makes a great place to work if it’s not the standard perks and benefits?

According to Bob Lee, the answer lies in culture and crucially, in the degree to which trust is present in the workplace.

‘‘From an employee perspective, you should be able to trust the people you work for, have pride in what you do and enjoy the people that you work with.

Trust, pride and camaraderie are really important, but far and away the most important factor of those three is trust,” he says.

‘‘Measuring trust is difficult, but there are three sub-elements.

The first is: do you find the people you work for credible – do you believe in them and do you believe them?

Respect is the second factor – the extent to which you feel respected by the company.

That’s to do with work/life balance, what kind of working hours you have, are there flexible working hours and so on.

The third element is fairness.”

According to Lee, simply having policies and procedures on paper that should make for a great workplace isn’t enough.

‘‘It isn’t what you do, it’s the spirit with which it’s done and the motivation that make the difference,” he says. ‘‘There are lots of organisations that appear to have the same or better perks and benefits on paper as some of the companies on our list, but there is a completely different culture, and culture is the one thing that really sets them apart.”

Research suggests that there are many advantages for companies that aim to create great workplaces, not least of which is that in tough times, employees at such companies are more likely to be sympathetic to the plight of their management.

‘‘Because of the levels of trust between management and staff, when the downturn hit those companies were able to adapt to the new realities of the marketplace much faster.

The level of trust that had been built up was and is a resource that these firms can call on.

Whether they are letting staff go, reducing their hours, lowering wages or looking for people to change their work patterns, in a high-trust environment that happens more easily than it otherwise would, because it’s appreciated that it doesn’t happen thoughtlessly,” says Lee.

‘‘In fact, many of the best companies to work for are now in post-recession phases.

They’ve made their changes, reduced their costs, weathered the worst of it and are now recruiting again or ramping up their staff hours again.

In many lower-trust environments, things are far from that point, and in some organisations, they haven’t even had the arguments yet.”

Traditionally happiness has been seen as a vague quality, so individual and personal as to be impossible to quantify or measure.

Once seen as solely the preserve of philosophers and mystics, science increasingly has more to say about happiness, as brain function becomes more and more understood. One of the things science has discovered is that the things people often think will make them happy rarely do.

‘‘There have been studies on lottery winners that compare their happiness levels right before winning the lottery with their happiness levels a year later.

The studies generally find that a person’s happiness levels revert back to whatever it was before,” says Tony Hsieh. ‘‘I find this incredibly interesting. It shows that, for most people,  achieving their goal in life, whatever it is, will not actually bring them sustained happiness.

And yet, many people have spent their entire lives pursuing what they thought would make them happy.”

But is it really possible for everyone to be happy in their working life?

Not everyone can enjoy an intellectually stimulating career, studded with personal challenge and opportunities for creative expression.

Can people with so called dead-end jobs really expect to find happiness in the workplace? According to occupational psychologist Lynne Forrest of the Well At Work Centre in Dublin, the answer is yes.

‘‘The level of the job doesn’t matter, it’s more a case of the person/environment fit,” she says.

‘‘Is the person in the right job in order to satisfy their personal needs? Some people will be fulfilled by one type of work environment, while another person might find the same environment intolerable.”

Bob Lee agrees, pointing out that some of the best places to work are actually minimum wage employers which offer relatively few perks and benefits.

‘‘It isn’t the perks and benefits that make them great places to work.

For example, McDonald’s figures highly on our list at number five, and is genuinely world-class in terms of attitudes to culture. It’s an organisation that measures everything – how long a burger sits in a tray, how long its fries are cooked for.

Everything about the organisation that can be measured is measured,” he says.

‘‘Its approach to human resources is not accidental, it’s mutually beneficial.

They recognise that to get the best people to come and work for them they need to have a magnetic appeal, so they play to their strengths.

They don’t try to compete with Microsoft for employees – they are an entry-level and a post-career employer, and effectively they are employing the management workers of tomorrow.”

According to Forrest, having the right fit to your environment is a huge factor in determining how much stress and, crucially, what kind of stress, the average person experiences in their working lives.

‘‘When the demands placed upon a person exceed their ability to cope, the result is stress. Stress can be moderated by levels of control, and also moderated by levels of support,” she says.

‘‘In the workplace, stress is much more manageable if you have a degree of autonomy and if there are appropriate levels of communication.

Being told ‘well done, great job’ when an employee completes a significantly difficult assignment goes a long way to influencing how they see future assignments.” Forrest believes that stress in itself isn’t a bad thing, but it’s important that it’s the right kind of stress.

‘‘There probably isn’t a workplace in Ireland that hasn’t been affected by the recession.

There is competition for scarce resources and it’s gotten more intense.

People are being asked to work harder and there is an underlying threat that their employer may still let them go or the company may go under anyway.

That’s inherently stressful,” she says.

‘‘That said, some kinds of stress are motivating and are good for you.

This is known as eustress, and is the sort of stress we have some control over.

Bad stress is the kind where we have no control and find ourselves in a situation where we feel out of our depth, but eustress can be invigorating and offer a huge sense of challenge.”

With the economy still suffering, a key question for companies keen to adopt the strategies outlined by Lee, Hsieh and other proponents of high-trust workplaces is at what point does this approach yield results – can it work for small companies, or is it solely the preserve of large multinationals with deep pockets?

‘‘It doesn’t have to cost a cent, and it’s something that SMEs actually need to do more than multinationals,” says Bob Lee.

‘‘A multinational with a strong product can probably go farther with lower levels of trust than an equivalent SME could, but you don’t need a huge number of employees or a dedicated human resources department to make it work for you.

‘‘Essentially, it’s not about what you do, it’s how you do it.

For example, if a new colleague starts work and you know you’re going to be dependent on them, and them on you, it doesn’t cost you anything except an investment of your time and a commitment to develop a relationship with them.

‘‘You don’t even have to go to lunch with them. It’s about remembering the little things – small things build trust, and conversely trust can be broken over small things.”

However, Lee believes that many indigenous Irish companies still have away to go before they fully embrace the concept – the majority of the firms which make the Great Place to Work Institute’s annual list are multinationals, rather than locally founded firms.

‘‘We work with far more multinationals than we do with indigenous companies here, and that’s due to a combination of factors, some of which are cultural.

We know that there are many Irish organisations that have high trust cultures, but are quite small with between 20 and 100 employees.

The people running these businesses are people of integrity who are committed to treating people decently,” said Lee.

‘‘But they are modest about putting themselves forward for recognition.

Multinationals have no problem accepting recognition when it comes – it’s part of their culture – but smaller companies locally have proved to be more difficult to engage with.

‘‘We’re making progress, but we’d love to see more Irish companies take part.”

PANEL: Great Places to Work and Best Workplaces in Ireland 2010

Large companies (over 250 employees)

1                  Microsoft

2                  Telefonica O2 Ireland

3                  PepsiCo Ireland

4                  EMC Ireland

5                  McDonald’s Restaurants of Ireland

6                  Unicare Pharmacy

7                  Diageo Ireland

8                  Quintiles Ireland Limited

9                  Topaz Energy Ltd

10               Medtronic

Small to medium companies (50 to 250 employees)

1                  Euro Car Parks

2                  Abbott Ireland, Commercial

3                  Mars Ireland

4                  Jones Lang LaSalle Ltd.

5                  Bright Horizons Family Solutions

6                  Merck Sharp & Dohme (Human Health) Ireland Ltd

7                  CB Richard Ellis Ireland

8                  Investec Ireland

9                  FCM Travel Solutions

10               Nationwide Controlled Parking Systems ltd.

PANEL: Euro Car Parks

Top of the list of great Irish SMEs to work for, Euro Car Parks is an example of a company with the kind of flat corporate structure that creates happy employees. According to chief executive David Cullen, his organisation’s popularity with its own staff is due to a lack of formality in the workplace and a sense of family.

“I’m a big believer that if people feel respected and appreciated, they’ll work harder and go the extra mile without being asked. Happy staff are absolutely essential, they are the key to what we do. There are other companies that provide the same service we do, but basically we’re better at it. The reason is that our staff understand what we’re doing and they’re not treated like children — they get paid more and they enjoy the job,” he says .

“There’s an idea that working in a car park is a minimum wage job, but our starting salary is the same as a teacher, and a manager with us gets €50,000 a year. We’ve challenged the industry with that approach, because our competitors all mostly offer minimum wage.”

The challenge which led Cullen to engage fully with his employees was how to handle the geographical spread of the company. Only seven of its 250 staff are located at head office – the rest are geographically distributed across the 32 counties.

“I really communicate with the staff, and we don’t have any secrets. If we’re having a bad year, I tell the staff we’re having a bad year. It’s a challenge, but it’s important and it does have an effect on the business. I’m not a totalitarian, issuing orders in complete ignorance of the effect it has on people and their lives,” he said.

It’s tempting to see employee-centric happiness as something which takes from the company, rather than contributes to the bottom line, but Cullen points out that employee loyalty can help in a recession. “We were quite profitable last year and the year before, and so didn’t actually have to take pay cuts, but I asked the staff if they’d do it anyway,” he said.

“I thought it made commercial sense, because I knew our clients were going to ask us to reduce our rates. It made sense to head the issue off at the pass in order to minimise the damage. I sent a letter out to staff, telling them what I had in mind and asking anyone with a problem to ring me and we’d talk it out. When the phone started ringing off the hook I thought I’d get a thick ear, but everyone who called me was happy to make that sacrifice for the good of the organisation.”

Cullen believes the success of Euro Car Parks is heavily dependent on the quality of service members of the public receive from his staff. Because of this, having happy staff is crucial. “Some of our larger customers have told us that our competitors are cheaper to do business with, but they stick with us because they want to offer a high quality of service. That’s a competitive advantage that can only come from staff satisfaction,” he says.

“A friend once made the point to me that anytime you mess with an employee, you also affect a family standing behind them. I developed the mentality that we’d run the organisation as if it was a big family business, and it’s now grown to involve 250 families.”

PANEL: Microsoft

Large multinationals are well known for offering enviable perks to their employees as part of their overall pay packages, but according to Joe Ffrench, head of human resources for Microsoft, that’s not enough to create happy employees.

“You have to offer a competitive package and make sure people are well rewarded in terms of pay and benefits, but ultimately that’s not the main thing people come for, and it certainly isn’t the thing they stay for,” says Ffrench.

“There are companies out there that pay more than us; we’re one of the best payers in our sector, but we’re not (itals)the(itals) best. But in terms of the overall package on offer we’re considered more attractive. The reason is our culture and environment — the benefits of working with us extend past the contents of our employee’s bank accounts.”

Microsoft consistently appears in the top ten list of companies to work for in Ireland, securing the top spot for the last two years in a row. The company employs 1,100 people in Ireland and enjoys a high retention rate among its staff. Ffrench believes that the reason for this is that it makes an effort to involve people in all aspects of the company, right from the start of their employment.

“We have people here doing everything from sales and marketing to development to human resources, and they all bring a unique perspective and skill set into the work environment. The kind of culture we have is designed to recognise and value that every individual brings something unique. The next question is how do we harness that collective brain power?”

“A lot of it comes down to valuing and empowering people, how we give people responsibility early in their career and how we support them to deliver on that responsibility. We have a very open and informal culture, where people are encouraged to take the initiative if they have an idea or think they can make an improvement. It’s about empowering people to influence the company itself.”

Some employers may find the idea of consulting with their staff before making a decision hard to stomach, but Ffrench insists that there is hard logic and sound reasoning behind the culture of corporate empowerment.

“I’ve read all the HR literature and know all the arguments about this stuff – it can sound fluffy and vague, but if you talk to business leaders and ask them what is critical to creating sustainable business success in the long term, the answer you consistently get is that it’s about the type of people you bring in. And the only way you’re going to attract the best staff and keep them in the long term is making sure they feel valued,” he says.

Ffrench is also convinced that you don’t need to have Microsoft-sized budgets to harness the power of a fully involved workforce.

“People want to do interesting work, and see that their work makes an impact. If you can provide an opportunity for people to do that, whether in a five man operation, or in a 1,200 man operation, that’s a great starting point,” he says.

“It can genuinely be as simple as treating people with respect, understanding what’s happening with them and understanding where they want to go in their career, and then providing the support and development to help them achieve that career plan for themselves. That doesn’t necessarily take money.”

Q&A with Tony Hsieh, CEO , ZAPPOS

1 – If happier employees result in happier customers and hence more successful companies, why isn’t employee happiness a more prioritised quality in the workplace?

I think it’s because the payoff is generally 2-3 years down the line.

2 – Does you think the recession is going to set this concept back? In other words, will companies become so focused on surviving that issues like employee happiness will get pushed aside in the face of more immediate problems?

Regardless of whether there’s a recession or not, the companies that perform the best in the long-term are the ones that are able to balance the short-term, medium-term, and long-term needs of the company. Yes, there will be companies that are focused solely on survival. This just means that there’s more opportunity for companies that are willing and able to think longer-term.

3 – For companies who are under financial pressure but who want to improve  their levels of employee happiness, what advice could you give them on cost neutral ways to change their company culture?

Making eye contact and saying hi in a genuine way when passing other employees in the hallways doesn’t cost anything. Truly caring about the lives of the people that report to you doesn’t cost anything.

4 – Do you think, in certain sectors, this idea will simply never catch on?  Are there sectors where macho and dictatorial management styles are so  deeply ingrained that things simply won’t change?

Possibly in industries where there’s a monopoly.

5 – In the book, you talk about the importance of establishing trust between employees and management. Looking back was it difficult for you psychologically to have that level of trust in your employees? A lot of small business owners find it very difficult to relinquish control of any part of their company — was this the case for you in the early days with LinkExchange and Zappos? Any advice on how to get over that?

Trust in someone being able to technically get a job done is tough. You have to invest a lot in training and mentoring the employee, and usually it takes longer to do so than just doing it yourself.

Trust in someone’s intentions is much easier. I just assume by default that people have good intentions, and I’m right 99% of the time.