Consciousness Invasion

TW: On PTSD And Nosy Algorithms

Every morning I wake up and brew a strong, dark espresso. I prep breakfast and scroll through emails. Sometimes I submit queries or pitch articles on various different topics. I’m an early bird often up by 4:30 am—perfect time to pitch outlets across the pond where my brash sense of humor is quite popular.

Before my coffee, I have a large glass of chia lime water. It’s refreshing and settles my stomach. I turn on my Groove Playlist and begin my HIIT session followed by my kettlebell routine. I hate the gym but do love working out. Some days I do an early morning yoga session via Instagram Live. Sometimes I lay about and sleep in until 7. But always at 8:30 am I swallow a small green and white pill to stabilize my mood along with a batch to vitamins and supplements to counter the effects of prescription RX leaching nutrients from my system.

I am open about my mental health because I believe it is important to talk about it. Taboos be gone! Monday morning—after a lengthy conversation with a friend the night before—my social media feed surprised me with an NYU Langone ad offering up to $400 compensation for a PTSD study. Sweet deal if you’re not a person addled with panic attacks but for some, including me, another reminder that our brain is wired in a way that is unpredictable.

I raged against the algorithm over on twitter—as what many extremely online people do when they are fed up but without any other options but to vent into the void. It should be illegal for pharmaceutical and research institutes to advertise the way they do (as well as all the legal firms that hound survivors for their stories to hitch to class action suits.) It’s triggering and re-traumatizes vulnerable individuals and for what? To develop more studies for meds that get pushed by salespeople that have no fucking idea what they are bribing doctors to act upon.

I spent three years on medications that made me drool, activated even stronger than regular panic attacks and erased large swaths of memory. I was misdiagnosed and my assigned psychiatrist decided that those meds were the best alternative rather than listen to my pleas for a different course of action. Everyone loves a story by an unreliable narrator until it happens to be someone you know irl. In that moment concern over weight gain became a dismissive, “do you want to be stable or do you just want to be skinny?” (my psych’s words verbatim.)

Thankfully, I am under different care and with a functioning regimen. The ads won’t stop though. Every day this week I have been met with a new and more intrusive offer.

And Mr. Algo hasn’t limited himself to just my mental health. All aspect of self are fair game in a realm that commodifies even our ailments.

Signing up for these platforms that portray themselves as beacons of interpersonal connections comes at a price of privacy. And we will be beholden to these tech oligarchs until our representatives catch up. So when will it be folks? When can we reclaim our circles of influence?