Showing posts with label suicide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label suicide. Show all posts
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Monday 19 June 2017
Life and death in Apple’s forbidden city - Shame on you Steve Jobs
Brian Merchant in The Guardian
The sprawling factory compound, all grey dormitories and weather-beaten warehouses, blends seamlessly into the outskirts of the Shenzhen megalopolis. Foxconn’s enormous Longhua plant is a major manufacturer of Apple products. It might be the best-known factory in the world; it might also might be among the most secretive and sealed-off. Security guards man each of the entry points. Employees can’t get in without swiping an ID card; drivers entering with delivery trucks are subject to fingerprint scans. A Reuters journalist was once dragged out of a car and beaten for taking photos from outside the factory walls. The warning signs outside – “This factory area is legally established with state approval. Unauthorised trespassing is prohibited. Offenders will be sent to police for prosecution!” – are more aggressive than those outside many Chinese military compounds.
But it turns out that there’s a secret way into the heart of the infamous operation: use the bathroom. I couldn’t believe it. Thanks to a simple twist of fate and some clever perseverance by my fixer, I’d found myself deep inside so-called Foxconn City.
It’s printed on the back of every iPhone: “Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China”. US law dictates that products manufactured in China must be labelled as such and Apple’s inclusion of the phrase renders the statement uniquely illustrative of one of the planet’s starkest economic divides – the cutting edge is conceived and designed in Silicon Valley, but it is assembled by hand in China.
The vast majority of plants that produce the iPhone’s component parts and carry out the device’s final assembly are based here, in the People’s Republic, where low labour costs and a massive, highly skilled workforce have made the nation the ideal place to manufacture iPhones (and just about every other gadget). The country’s vast, unprecedented production capabilities – the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that as of 2009 there were 99 million factory workers in China – have helped the nation become the world’s second largest economy. And since the first iPhone shipped, the company doing the lion’s share of the manufacturing is the Taiwanese Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, Ltd, better known by its trade name, Foxconn.
Foxconn is the single largest employer in mainland China; there are 1.3 million people on its payroll. Worldwide, among corporations, only Walmart and McDonald’s employ more. As many people work for Foxconn as live in Estonia.
An employee directs jobseekers to queue up at the Foxconn recruitment centre in Shenzhen. Photograph: David Johnson/Reuters
Today, the iPhone is made at a number of different factories around China, but for years, as it became the bestselling product in the world, it was largely assembled at Foxconn’s 1.4 square-mile flagship plant, just outside Shenzhen. The sprawling factory was once home to an estimated 450,000 workers. Today, that number is believed to be smaller, but it remains one of the biggest such operations in the world. If you know of Foxconn, there’s a good chance it’s because you’ve heard of the suicides. In 2010, Longhua assembly-line workers began killing themselves. Worker after worker threw themselves off the towering dorm buildings, sometimes in broad daylight, in tragic displays of desperation – and in protest at the work conditions inside. There were 18 reported suicide attempts that year alone and 14 confirmed deaths. Twenty more workers were talked down by Foxconn officials.
The epidemic caused a media sensation – suicides and sweatshop conditions in the House of iPhone. Suicide notes and survivors told of immense stress, long workdays and harsh managers who were prone to humiliate workers for mistakes, of unfair fines and unkept promises of benefits.
The corporate response spurred further unease: Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou, had large nets installed outside many of the buildings to catch falling bodies. The company hired counsellors and workers were made to sign pledges stating they would not attempt to kill themselves.
Steve Jobs, for his part, declared: “We’re all over that” when asked about the spate of deaths and he pointed out that the rate of suicides at Foxconn was within the national average. Critics pounced on the comment as callous, though he wasn’t technically wrong. Foxconn Longhua was so massive that it could be its own nation-state, and the suicide rate was comparable to its host country’s. The difference is that Foxconn City is a nation-state governed entirely by a corporation and one that happened to be producing one of the most profitable products on the planet.
If the boss finds any problems, they don’t scold you then. They scold you later, in front of everyone, at a meeting
A cab driver lets us out in front of the factory; boxy blue letters spell out Foxconn next to the entrance. The security guards eye us, half bored, half suspicious. My fixer, a journalist from Shanghai whom I’ll call Wang Yang, and I decide to walk the premises first and talk to workers, to see if there might be a way to get inside.
The first people we stop turn out to be a pair of former Foxconn workers.
“It’s not a good place for human beings,” says one of the young men, who goes by the name Xu. He’d worked in Longhua for about a year, until a couple of months ago, and he says the conditions inside are as bad as ever. “There is no improvement since the media coverage,” Xu says. The work is very high pressure and he and his colleagues regularly logged 12-hour shifts. Management is both aggressive and duplicitous, publicly scolding workers for being too slow and making them promises they don’t keep, he says. His friend, who worked at the factory for two years and chooses to stay anonymous, says he was promised double pay for overtime hours but got only regular pay. They paint a bleak picture of a high-pressure working environment where exploitation is routine and where depression and suicide have become normalised.
“It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying,” Xu says. “Every year people kill themselves. They take it as a normal thing.”
Over several visits to different iPhone assembly factories in Shenzhen and Shanghai, we interviewed dozens of workers like these. Let’s be honest: to get a truly representative sample of life at an iPhone factory would require a massive canvassing effort and the systematic and clandestine interviewing of thousands of employees. So take this for what it is: efforts to talk to often skittish, often wary and often bored workers who were coming out of the factory gates, taking a lunch break or congregating after their shifts.
A Foxconn employee in a dormitory at Longhua. The rooms are currently said to sleep eight. Photograph: Wang Yishu / Imaginechina/Camera Press
The vision of life inside an iPhone factory that emerged was varied. Some found the work tolerable; others were scathing in their criticisms; some had experienced the despair Foxconn was known for; still others had taken a job just to try to find a girlfriend. Most knew of the reports of poor conditions before joining, but they either needed the work or it didn’t bother them. Almost everywhere, people said the workforce was young and turnover was high. “Most employees last only a year,” was a common refrain. Perhaps that’s because the pace of work is widely agreed to be relentless, and the management culture is often described as cruel.
Since the iPhone is such a compact, complex machine, putting one together correctly requires sprawling assembly lines of hundreds of people who build, inspect, test and package each device. One worker said 1,700 iPhones passed through her hands every day; she was in charge of wiping a special polish on the display. That works out at about three screens a minute for 12 hours a day.
More meticulous work, like fastening chip boards and assembling back covers, was slower; these workers have a minute apiece for each iPhone. That’s still 600 to 700 iPhones a day. Failing to meet a quota or making a mistake can draw public condemnation from superiors. Workers are often expected to stay silent and may draw rebukes from their bosses for asking to use the restroom.
Xu and his friend were both walk-on recruits, though not necessarily willing ones. “They call Foxconn a fox trap,” he says. “Because it tricks a lot of people.” He says Foxconn promised them free housing but then forced them to pay exorbitantly high bills for electricity and water. The current dorms sleep eight to a room and he says they used to be 12 to a room. But Foxconn would shirk social insurance and be late or fail to pay bonuses. And many workers sign contracts that subtract a hefty penalty from their pay if they quit before a three-month introductory period.
The body-catching nets are still there. They look a bit like tarps that have blown off the things they’re meant to cover
On top of that, the work is gruelling. “You have to have mental management,” says Xu, otherwise you can get scolded by bosses in front of your peers. Instead of discussing performance privately or face to face on the line, managers would stockpile complaints until later. “When the boss comes down to inspect the work,” Xu’s friend says, “if they find any problems, they won’t scold you then. They will scold you in front of everyone in a meeting later.”
“It’s insulting and humiliating to people all the time,” his friend says. “Punish someone to make an example for everyone else. It’s systematic,” he adds. In certain cases, if a manager decides that a worker has made an especially costly mistake, the worker has to prepare a formal apology. “They must read a promise letter aloud – ‘I won’t make this mistake again’– to everyone.”
This culture of high-stress work, anxiety and humiliation contributes to widespread depression. Xu says there was another suicide a few months ago. He saw it himself. The man was a student who worked on the iPhone assembly line. “Somebody I knew, somebody I saw around the cafeteria,” he says. After being publicly scolded by a manager, he got into a quarrel. Company officials called the police, though the worker hadn’t been violent, just angry.
“He took it very personally,” Xu says, “and he couldn’t get through it.” Three days later, he jumped out of a ninth-storey window.
So why didn’t the incident get any media coverage? I ask. Xu and his friend look at each other and shrug. “Here someone dies, one day later the whole thing doesn’t exist,” his friend says. “You forget about it.”
Employees have lunch in a vast refectory at the Foxconn Longhua plant. Photograph: Wang Yishu/Imaginechina/Camera Press
‘We look at everything at these companies,” Steve Jobs said after news of the suicides broke. “Foxconn is not a sweatshop. It’s a factory – but my gosh, they have restaurants and movie theatres… but it’s a factory. But they’ve had some suicides and attempted suicides – and they have 400,000 people there. The rate is under what the US rate is, but it’s still troubling.” Apple CEO, Tim Cook, visited Longhua in 2011 and reportedly met suicide-prevention experts and top management to discuss the epidemic.
In 2012, 150 workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump. They were promised improvements and talked down by management; they had, essentially, wielded the threat of killing themselves as a bargaining tool. In 2016, a smaller group did it again. Just a month before we spoke, Xu says, seven or eight workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump unless they were paid the wages they were due, which had apparently been withheld. Eventually, Xu says, Foxconn agreed to pay the wages and the workers were talked down.
When I ask Xu about Apple and the iPhone, his response is swift: “We don’t blame Apple. We blame Foxconn.” When I ask the men if they would consider working at Foxconn again if the conditions improved, the response is equally blunt. “You can’t change anything,” Xu says. “It will never change.”
Wang and I set off for the main worker entrance. We wind around the perimeter, which stretches on and on – we have no idea this is barely a fraction of the factory at this point.
After walking along the perimeter for 20 minutes or so, we come to another entrance, another security checkpoint. That’s when it hits me. I have to use the bathroom. Desperately. And that gives me an idea.
There’s a bathroom in there, just a few hundred feet down a stairwell by the security point. I see the universal stick-man signage and I gesture to it. This checkpoint is much smaller, much more informal. There’s only one guard, a young man who looks bored. Wang asks something a little pleadingly in Chinese. The guard slowly shakes his head no, looks at me. The strain on my face is very, very real. She asks again – he falters for a second, then another no.
We’ll be right back, she insists, and now we’re clearly making him uncomfortable. Mostly me. He doesn’t want to deal with this. Come right back, he says. Of course, we don’t.
To my knowledge, no American journalist has been inside a Foxconn plant without permission and a tour guide, without a carefully curated visit to selected parts of the factory to demonstrate how OK things really are.
Maybe the most striking thing, beyond its size – it would take us nearly an hour to briskly walk across Longhua – is how radically different one end is from the other. It’s like a gentrified city in that regard. On the outskirts, let’s call them, there are spilt chemicals, rusting facilities and poorly overseen industrial labour. The closer you get to the city centre – remember, this is a factory – the more the quality of life, or at least the amenities and the infrastructure, improves.
‘Not a good place for human beings’: Foxconn Longhua. Photograph: Brian Merchant
As we get deeper in, surrounded by more and more people, it feels like we’re getting noticed less. The barrage of stares mutates into disinterested glances. My working theory: the plant is so vast, security so tight, that if we are inside just walking around, we must have been allowed to do so. That or nobody really gives a shit. We start trying to make our way to the G2 factory block, where we’ve been told iPhones are made. After leaving “downtown”, we begin seeing towering, monolithic factory blocks – C16, E7 and so on, many surrounded by crowds of workers.
I worry about getting too cavalier and remind myself not to push it; we’ve been inside Foxconn for almost an hour now. The crowds have been thinning out the farther away from the centre we get. Then there it is: G2. It’s identical to the factory blocks that cluster around it, that threaten to fade into the background of the smoggy static sky.
G2 looks deserted, though. A row of impossibly rusted lockers runs outside the building. No one’s around. The door is open, so we go in. To the left, there’s an entry to a massive, darkened space; we’re heading for that when someone calls out. A floor manager has just come down the stairs and he asks us what we’re doing. My translator stammers something about a meeting and the man looks confused; then he shows us the computer monitoring system he uses to oversee production on the floor. There’s no shift right now, he says, but this is how they watch.
No sign of iPhones, though. We keep walking. Outside G3, teetering stacks of black gadgets wrapped in plastic sit in front of what looks like another loading zone. A couple of workers on smartphones drift by us. We get close enough to see the gadgets through the plastic and, nope, not iPhones either. They look like Apple TVs, minus the company logo. There are probably thousands stacked here, awaiting the next step in the assembly line.
If this is indeed where iPhones and Apple TVs are made, it’s a fairly aggressively shitty place to spend long days, unless you have a penchant for damp concrete and rust. The blocks keep coming, so we keep walking. Longhua starts to feel like the dull middle of a dystopian novel, where the dread sustains but the plot doesn’t.
We could keep going, but to our left, we see what look like large housing complexes, probably the dormitories, complete with cagelike fences built out over the roof and the windows, and so we head in that direction. The closer we get to the dorms, the thicker the crowds get and the more lanyards and black glasses and faded jeans and sneakers we see. College-age kids are gathered, smoking cigarettes, crowded around picnic tables, sitting on kerbs.
And, yes, the body-catching nets are still there. Limp and sagging, they give the impression of tarps that have half blown off the things they’re supposed to cover. I think of Xu, who said: “The nets are pointless. If somebody wants to commit suicide, they will do it.”
We are drawing stares again – away from the factories, maybe folks have more time and reason to indulge their curiosity. In any case, we’ve been inside Foxconn for an hour. I have no idea if the guard put out an alert when we didn’t come back from the bathroom or if anyone is looking for us or what. The sense that it’s probably best not to push it prevails, even though we haven’t made it on to a working assembly line.
A protester dressed as a factory worker outside an Apple retail outlet in Hong Kong, May 2011. Photograph: Antony Dickson/AFP/Getty Images
We head back the way we came. Before long, we find an exit. It’s pushing evening as we join a river of thousands and, heads down, shuffle through the security checkpoint. Nobody says a word. Getting out of the haunting megafactory is a relief, but the mood sticks. No, there were no child labourers with bleeding hands pleading at the windows. There were a number of things that would surely violate the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration code – unprotected construction workers, open chemical spillage, decaying, rusted structures, and so on – but there are probably a lot of things at US factories that would violate OSHA code too. Apple may well be right when it argues that these facilities are nicer than others out there. Foxconn was not our stereotypical conception of a sweatshop. But there was a different kind of ugliness. For whatever reason – the rules imposing silence on the factory floors, its pervasive reputation for tragedy or the general feeling of unpleasantness the environment itself imparts – Longhua felt heavy, even oppressively subdued.
When I look back at the photos I snapped, I can’t find one that has someone smiling in it. It does not seem like a surprise that people subjected to long hours, repetitive work and harsh management might develop psychological issues. That unease is palpable – it’s worked into the environment itself. As Xu said: “It’s not a good place for human beings.”
The sprawling factory compound, all grey dormitories and weather-beaten warehouses, blends seamlessly into the outskirts of the Shenzhen megalopolis. Foxconn’s enormous Longhua plant is a major manufacturer of Apple products. It might be the best-known factory in the world; it might also might be among the most secretive and sealed-off. Security guards man each of the entry points. Employees can’t get in without swiping an ID card; drivers entering with delivery trucks are subject to fingerprint scans. A Reuters journalist was once dragged out of a car and beaten for taking photos from outside the factory walls. The warning signs outside – “This factory area is legally established with state approval. Unauthorised trespassing is prohibited. Offenders will be sent to police for prosecution!” – are more aggressive than those outside many Chinese military compounds.
But it turns out that there’s a secret way into the heart of the infamous operation: use the bathroom. I couldn’t believe it. Thanks to a simple twist of fate and some clever perseverance by my fixer, I’d found myself deep inside so-called Foxconn City.
It’s printed on the back of every iPhone: “Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China”. US law dictates that products manufactured in China must be labelled as such and Apple’s inclusion of the phrase renders the statement uniquely illustrative of one of the planet’s starkest economic divides – the cutting edge is conceived and designed in Silicon Valley, but it is assembled by hand in China.
The vast majority of plants that produce the iPhone’s component parts and carry out the device’s final assembly are based here, in the People’s Republic, where low labour costs and a massive, highly skilled workforce have made the nation the ideal place to manufacture iPhones (and just about every other gadget). The country’s vast, unprecedented production capabilities – the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that as of 2009 there were 99 million factory workers in China – have helped the nation become the world’s second largest economy. And since the first iPhone shipped, the company doing the lion’s share of the manufacturing is the Taiwanese Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, Ltd, better known by its trade name, Foxconn.
Foxconn is the single largest employer in mainland China; there are 1.3 million people on its payroll. Worldwide, among corporations, only Walmart and McDonald’s employ more. As many people work for Foxconn as live in Estonia.
An employee directs jobseekers to queue up at the Foxconn recruitment centre in Shenzhen. Photograph: David Johnson/Reuters
Today, the iPhone is made at a number of different factories around China, but for years, as it became the bestselling product in the world, it was largely assembled at Foxconn’s 1.4 square-mile flagship plant, just outside Shenzhen. The sprawling factory was once home to an estimated 450,000 workers. Today, that number is believed to be smaller, but it remains one of the biggest such operations in the world. If you know of Foxconn, there’s a good chance it’s because you’ve heard of the suicides. In 2010, Longhua assembly-line workers began killing themselves. Worker after worker threw themselves off the towering dorm buildings, sometimes in broad daylight, in tragic displays of desperation – and in protest at the work conditions inside. There were 18 reported suicide attempts that year alone and 14 confirmed deaths. Twenty more workers were talked down by Foxconn officials.
The epidemic caused a media sensation – suicides and sweatshop conditions in the House of iPhone. Suicide notes and survivors told of immense stress, long workdays and harsh managers who were prone to humiliate workers for mistakes, of unfair fines and unkept promises of benefits.
The corporate response spurred further unease: Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou, had large nets installed outside many of the buildings to catch falling bodies. The company hired counsellors and workers were made to sign pledges stating they would not attempt to kill themselves.
Steve Jobs, for his part, declared: “We’re all over that” when asked about the spate of deaths and he pointed out that the rate of suicides at Foxconn was within the national average. Critics pounced on the comment as callous, though he wasn’t technically wrong. Foxconn Longhua was so massive that it could be its own nation-state, and the suicide rate was comparable to its host country’s. The difference is that Foxconn City is a nation-state governed entirely by a corporation and one that happened to be producing one of the most profitable products on the planet.
If the boss finds any problems, they don’t scold you then. They scold you later, in front of everyone, at a meeting
A cab driver lets us out in front of the factory; boxy blue letters spell out Foxconn next to the entrance. The security guards eye us, half bored, half suspicious. My fixer, a journalist from Shanghai whom I’ll call Wang Yang, and I decide to walk the premises first and talk to workers, to see if there might be a way to get inside.
The first people we stop turn out to be a pair of former Foxconn workers.
“It’s not a good place for human beings,” says one of the young men, who goes by the name Xu. He’d worked in Longhua for about a year, until a couple of months ago, and he says the conditions inside are as bad as ever. “There is no improvement since the media coverage,” Xu says. The work is very high pressure and he and his colleagues regularly logged 12-hour shifts. Management is both aggressive and duplicitous, publicly scolding workers for being too slow and making them promises they don’t keep, he says. His friend, who worked at the factory for two years and chooses to stay anonymous, says he was promised double pay for overtime hours but got only regular pay. They paint a bleak picture of a high-pressure working environment where exploitation is routine and where depression and suicide have become normalised.
“It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying,” Xu says. “Every year people kill themselves. They take it as a normal thing.”
Over several visits to different iPhone assembly factories in Shenzhen and Shanghai, we interviewed dozens of workers like these. Let’s be honest: to get a truly representative sample of life at an iPhone factory would require a massive canvassing effort and the systematic and clandestine interviewing of thousands of employees. So take this for what it is: efforts to talk to often skittish, often wary and often bored workers who were coming out of the factory gates, taking a lunch break or congregating after their shifts.
A Foxconn employee in a dormitory at Longhua. The rooms are currently said to sleep eight. Photograph: Wang Yishu / Imaginechina/Camera Press
The vision of life inside an iPhone factory that emerged was varied. Some found the work tolerable; others were scathing in their criticisms; some had experienced the despair Foxconn was known for; still others had taken a job just to try to find a girlfriend. Most knew of the reports of poor conditions before joining, but they either needed the work or it didn’t bother them. Almost everywhere, people said the workforce was young and turnover was high. “Most employees last only a year,” was a common refrain. Perhaps that’s because the pace of work is widely agreed to be relentless, and the management culture is often described as cruel.
Since the iPhone is such a compact, complex machine, putting one together correctly requires sprawling assembly lines of hundreds of people who build, inspect, test and package each device. One worker said 1,700 iPhones passed through her hands every day; she was in charge of wiping a special polish on the display. That works out at about three screens a minute for 12 hours a day.
More meticulous work, like fastening chip boards and assembling back covers, was slower; these workers have a minute apiece for each iPhone. That’s still 600 to 700 iPhones a day. Failing to meet a quota or making a mistake can draw public condemnation from superiors. Workers are often expected to stay silent and may draw rebukes from their bosses for asking to use the restroom.
Xu and his friend were both walk-on recruits, though not necessarily willing ones. “They call Foxconn a fox trap,” he says. “Because it tricks a lot of people.” He says Foxconn promised them free housing but then forced them to pay exorbitantly high bills for electricity and water. The current dorms sleep eight to a room and he says they used to be 12 to a room. But Foxconn would shirk social insurance and be late or fail to pay bonuses. And many workers sign contracts that subtract a hefty penalty from their pay if they quit before a three-month introductory period.
The body-catching nets are still there. They look a bit like tarps that have blown off the things they’re meant to cover
On top of that, the work is gruelling. “You have to have mental management,” says Xu, otherwise you can get scolded by bosses in front of your peers. Instead of discussing performance privately or face to face on the line, managers would stockpile complaints until later. “When the boss comes down to inspect the work,” Xu’s friend says, “if they find any problems, they won’t scold you then. They will scold you in front of everyone in a meeting later.”
“It’s insulting and humiliating to people all the time,” his friend says. “Punish someone to make an example for everyone else. It’s systematic,” he adds. In certain cases, if a manager decides that a worker has made an especially costly mistake, the worker has to prepare a formal apology. “They must read a promise letter aloud – ‘I won’t make this mistake again’– to everyone.”
This culture of high-stress work, anxiety and humiliation contributes to widespread depression. Xu says there was another suicide a few months ago. He saw it himself. The man was a student who worked on the iPhone assembly line. “Somebody I knew, somebody I saw around the cafeteria,” he says. After being publicly scolded by a manager, he got into a quarrel. Company officials called the police, though the worker hadn’t been violent, just angry.
“He took it very personally,” Xu says, “and he couldn’t get through it.” Three days later, he jumped out of a ninth-storey window.
So why didn’t the incident get any media coverage? I ask. Xu and his friend look at each other and shrug. “Here someone dies, one day later the whole thing doesn’t exist,” his friend says. “You forget about it.”
Employees have lunch in a vast refectory at the Foxconn Longhua plant. Photograph: Wang Yishu/Imaginechina/Camera Press
‘We look at everything at these companies,” Steve Jobs said after news of the suicides broke. “Foxconn is not a sweatshop. It’s a factory – but my gosh, they have restaurants and movie theatres… but it’s a factory. But they’ve had some suicides and attempted suicides – and they have 400,000 people there. The rate is under what the US rate is, but it’s still troubling.” Apple CEO, Tim Cook, visited Longhua in 2011 and reportedly met suicide-prevention experts and top management to discuss the epidemic.
In 2012, 150 workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump. They were promised improvements and talked down by management; they had, essentially, wielded the threat of killing themselves as a bargaining tool. In 2016, a smaller group did it again. Just a month before we spoke, Xu says, seven or eight workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump unless they were paid the wages they were due, which had apparently been withheld. Eventually, Xu says, Foxconn agreed to pay the wages and the workers were talked down.
When I ask Xu about Apple and the iPhone, his response is swift: “We don’t blame Apple. We blame Foxconn.” When I ask the men if they would consider working at Foxconn again if the conditions improved, the response is equally blunt. “You can’t change anything,” Xu says. “It will never change.”
Wang and I set off for the main worker entrance. We wind around the perimeter, which stretches on and on – we have no idea this is barely a fraction of the factory at this point.
After walking along the perimeter for 20 minutes or so, we come to another entrance, another security checkpoint. That’s when it hits me. I have to use the bathroom. Desperately. And that gives me an idea.
There’s a bathroom in there, just a few hundred feet down a stairwell by the security point. I see the universal stick-man signage and I gesture to it. This checkpoint is much smaller, much more informal. There’s only one guard, a young man who looks bored. Wang asks something a little pleadingly in Chinese. The guard slowly shakes his head no, looks at me. The strain on my face is very, very real. She asks again – he falters for a second, then another no.
We’ll be right back, she insists, and now we’re clearly making him uncomfortable. Mostly me. He doesn’t want to deal with this. Come right back, he says. Of course, we don’t.
To my knowledge, no American journalist has been inside a Foxconn plant without permission and a tour guide, without a carefully curated visit to selected parts of the factory to demonstrate how OK things really are.
Maybe the most striking thing, beyond its size – it would take us nearly an hour to briskly walk across Longhua – is how radically different one end is from the other. It’s like a gentrified city in that regard. On the outskirts, let’s call them, there are spilt chemicals, rusting facilities and poorly overseen industrial labour. The closer you get to the city centre – remember, this is a factory – the more the quality of life, or at least the amenities and the infrastructure, improves.
‘Not a good place for human beings’: Foxconn Longhua. Photograph: Brian Merchant
As we get deeper in, surrounded by more and more people, it feels like we’re getting noticed less. The barrage of stares mutates into disinterested glances. My working theory: the plant is so vast, security so tight, that if we are inside just walking around, we must have been allowed to do so. That or nobody really gives a shit. We start trying to make our way to the G2 factory block, where we’ve been told iPhones are made. After leaving “downtown”, we begin seeing towering, monolithic factory blocks – C16, E7 and so on, many surrounded by crowds of workers.
I worry about getting too cavalier and remind myself not to push it; we’ve been inside Foxconn for almost an hour now. The crowds have been thinning out the farther away from the centre we get. Then there it is: G2. It’s identical to the factory blocks that cluster around it, that threaten to fade into the background of the smoggy static sky.
G2 looks deserted, though. A row of impossibly rusted lockers runs outside the building. No one’s around. The door is open, so we go in. To the left, there’s an entry to a massive, darkened space; we’re heading for that when someone calls out. A floor manager has just come down the stairs and he asks us what we’re doing. My translator stammers something about a meeting and the man looks confused; then he shows us the computer monitoring system he uses to oversee production on the floor. There’s no shift right now, he says, but this is how they watch.
No sign of iPhones, though. We keep walking. Outside G3, teetering stacks of black gadgets wrapped in plastic sit in front of what looks like another loading zone. A couple of workers on smartphones drift by us. We get close enough to see the gadgets through the plastic and, nope, not iPhones either. They look like Apple TVs, minus the company logo. There are probably thousands stacked here, awaiting the next step in the assembly line.
If this is indeed where iPhones and Apple TVs are made, it’s a fairly aggressively shitty place to spend long days, unless you have a penchant for damp concrete and rust. The blocks keep coming, so we keep walking. Longhua starts to feel like the dull middle of a dystopian novel, where the dread sustains but the plot doesn’t.
We could keep going, but to our left, we see what look like large housing complexes, probably the dormitories, complete with cagelike fences built out over the roof and the windows, and so we head in that direction. The closer we get to the dorms, the thicker the crowds get and the more lanyards and black glasses and faded jeans and sneakers we see. College-age kids are gathered, smoking cigarettes, crowded around picnic tables, sitting on kerbs.
And, yes, the body-catching nets are still there. Limp and sagging, they give the impression of tarps that have half blown off the things they’re supposed to cover. I think of Xu, who said: “The nets are pointless. If somebody wants to commit suicide, they will do it.”
We are drawing stares again – away from the factories, maybe folks have more time and reason to indulge their curiosity. In any case, we’ve been inside Foxconn for an hour. I have no idea if the guard put out an alert when we didn’t come back from the bathroom or if anyone is looking for us or what. The sense that it’s probably best not to push it prevails, even though we haven’t made it on to a working assembly line.
A protester dressed as a factory worker outside an Apple retail outlet in Hong Kong, May 2011. Photograph: Antony Dickson/AFP/Getty Images
We head back the way we came. Before long, we find an exit. It’s pushing evening as we join a river of thousands and, heads down, shuffle through the security checkpoint. Nobody says a word. Getting out of the haunting megafactory is a relief, but the mood sticks. No, there were no child labourers with bleeding hands pleading at the windows. There were a number of things that would surely violate the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration code – unprotected construction workers, open chemical spillage, decaying, rusted structures, and so on – but there are probably a lot of things at US factories that would violate OSHA code too. Apple may well be right when it argues that these facilities are nicer than others out there. Foxconn was not our stereotypical conception of a sweatshop. But there was a different kind of ugliness. For whatever reason – the rules imposing silence on the factory floors, its pervasive reputation for tragedy or the general feeling of unpleasantness the environment itself imparts – Longhua felt heavy, even oppressively subdued.
When I look back at the photos I snapped, I can’t find one that has someone smiling in it. It does not seem like a surprise that people subjected to long hours, repetitive work and harsh management might develop psychological issues. That unease is palpable – it’s worked into the environment itself. As Xu said: “It’s not a good place for human beings.”
Tuesday 20 September 2016
Your new iPhone’s features include oppression, inequality – and vast profit
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
Human battery hens make Apple’s devices in China. The company, which has a bigger cash pile than the US government, symbolises a broken economic system
Illustration by Andrzej KrauzeSoon enough, we will see the first obituaries for openness, free trade and globalisation. When those writers ponder how wealthy countries turned towards the politics of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, they should devote a large chapter to Apple. Because the world’s richest company is a textbook example of how the promises made after the fall of the Berlin Wall have been made a mockery of.
Whatever marvels have been shoved into the new iPhones, the devices serve to increase the gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us, bilk countries of rightful tax revenues, and oppress Chinese workers even while depriving Americans of high-paying jobs. Arrogant towards critics and governments, glutted with cash and yet plainly out of ideas, Apple is elegant shorthand for a redundant economic system.
None of this is how we’re meant to think of Apple, the multinational that is both on your side yet restlessly questing ahead. While launching the iPhone 7 this month, its marketing chief, Phil Schiller, explained why this model came without a earphone socket: “It really comes down to one word: courage. The courage to move on, do something new, that betters all of us.” Such patchouli-scented Californian dipshittery was lapped up by the 7,000-strong crowd and lightly mocked by the press – but it also helps to obscure some of the less tolerable aspect of the iPhone business model, such as the conditions in which it is made.
If you own an iPhone it was assembled by workers at one of three firms in China: Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron. The biggest and most famous, Foxconn, came to international prominence in 2010 when an estimated 18 of its employees tried to kill themselves. At least 14 workers died. The company’s response was to put up suicide nets, to catch people trying to jump to their death. That year, staff at Foxconn’s Longhua factory made 137,000 iPhones a day, or around 90 a minute.
One of those attempted suicides, a 17-year-old called Tian Yu, flung herself from the fourth floor of a factory dormitory and ended up paralysed from the waist down. Speaking later to academic researchers, she described her working conditions in remarkable testimony that I then covered for the Guardian. She was essentially a human battery hen, working over 12 hours a day, six days a week, swapped between day and night shifts and kept in an eight-person dorm room.
After the scandals of 2010, Apple vowed to improve conditions for its Chinese workers. It has since published a number of glossy brochures extolling its commitments to them. Yet there is no evidence that the Californian firm has given back a single penny of its gigantic profit margins to its contractors to ensure better treatment of the people who actually make its products.
Over the past year, the US-based NGO China Labor Watch has published a series ofinvestigations into Pegatron, another iPhone assembler. It sent a researcher on to the assembly line, interviewed dozens of Pegatron staff and analysed hundreds of pay stubs. Among its findings are that staff still work 12 hours a day, six days a week – one and a half hours of that unpaid. They are forced to do overtime, claims the NGO, and provided with illegally low levels of safety training.
The researcher was working on one iPhone motherboard every 3.75 seconds, standing up for the entirety of his 10.5-hour shift. Such is the punishment endured at Apple’s contractors to make a living wage, apparently.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Tim Cook with dancer Maddie Ziegler. The Apple CEO ‘rejects a €13bn tax bill from the EU as ‘political crap’’. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
The Shanghai local government has raised the minimum wage over the past year; Pegatron has responded by cutting subsidies on things such as medical insurance so that the effective hourly pay for its staff has fallen.
When questioned about these reports, Pegatron provided a statement that read in part: “We work hard to make sure every Pegatron facility provides a healthy work environment and allegations suggesting otherwise are simply not true … We have taken effective measures … to ensure employees do not work more than 60 hours per week and six days per week.”
At another of Apple’s major contractors, Wistron, a Danish human-rights NGO last year found extensive evidence of forced student labour. Teenagers doing degrees in accountancy or business management were sent for months to an assembly line at Wistron. This is a serious violation of International Labour Organisationconvention, yet investigators for Danwatch found evidence that thousands of students were doing the same work and backbreaking hours there as the adults – but costing less.
The teenagers told Danwatch that they were working against their will. “We are all depressed,” one 19-year-old girl said. “But we have no choice, because the school told us that if we refused, we would not get our diploma.” Despite several requests for comment, Wistron did not respond.
That investigation was not at a factory making iPhones, but Apple confirmed that Wistron and Pegatron were two of their major assemblers in China. While it did not wish to say anything on the record, Apple’s press officers pointed me to the audits it had commissioned into its supplier factories. Yet the inspections are almost conveniently skimpy.
Look at the report Apple commissioned into Foxconn in 2012, after those suicide attempts. Foxconn is the largest private employer in China, with around 400,000 workers at the Longhua factory alone. Yet the report for Apple, complementary to an investigation already being carried out by the Fair Labor Association, admits to looking at just three of those plants for three days apiece. Jenny Chan, one of the foremost scholars of Chinese labour abuses and co-author of the forthcomingDying for an iPhone, calls it “parachute auditing – a way to allow ‘business as usual’ to carry on”. A very profitable way, as it happens. While iPhone workers for Pegatron saw their hourly pay drop to just $1.60 an hour, Apple remained the most profitable big company in America, pulling in over $47bn in profit in 2015 alone.
What does this add up to? At $231bn, Apple has a bigger cash pile than the US government, but apparently won’t spend even a sliver on improving conditions for those who actually make its money. Nor will it make those iPhones in America, which would create jobs and still leave it as the most profitable smartphone in the world.
It would rather accrue more profits, to go to those who hold Apple stock – such as company boss Tim Cook, whose hoard of company shares is worth $785m. Friends of Cook point to his philanthropy, but while he’s happy to spend on pet projects, he rejects a €13bn tax bill from the EU as “political crap” – whileboasting about how he won’t bring Apple’s billions back to the US “until there’s a fair rate … It doesn’t go that the more you pay, the more patriotic you are.” The tech oligarch seems to think he knows better than 300 million Americans what tax rates their elected government should set.
When the historians of globalisation ask why it died, they will surely find that companies such as Apple form a large part of the answer. Faced with a binary choice between an economic model that lavishly rewarded a few and a populism that makes lavish promises to many, between Cook on the one hand and Farage on the other, the voters went for the one who at least didn’t bang on about “courage”.
Wednesday 20 April 2016
Only a dream can end a nightmare
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
INDIA may be waking up from its unwarranted nightmare. A call has gone out from the head of its most impoverished and second-most populous province to cobble an anti-Hindutva alliance to foil a fascist takeover. The conditions look ripe. The economy is not shining.
There are many explanations. One is the piranha-like tycoons spawned by a neo-liberal ruling clique. In the rest of the world, neo-liberalism is being questioned. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have lent voice to a global movement in India too. When university campuses reverberated with socialist slogans recently, the government moved swiftly to muzzle them. It contrived and slapped sedition charges on some of the most inspiring student leaders the country has seen.
Another explanation for the economic mess lies in straightforward loot. The mercantile capitalists embraced by Gandhi as the ‘trustees’ of free India have literally walked away with mega tons of people’s money. They have shown the banks a clean pair of heels. The Supreme Court is furious and wants names named. The national security adviser has stepped in with a more riveting agenda. He wants the courts to focus on national security instead; in other words to hang and jail more people, more swiftly.
To compound the nation’s woes, drought has arrived and monsoons are not due for at least two more scorching months. Much of the suffering this entails is predictably man-made. Millions are being kept parched so that the water tanker mafia, among other connected crony entrepreneurs, prospers.
Jack Nicholson as a sleuth investigated the great water heist in the formative days of California. That was in Polanski’s Chinatown when the snoopy hero nearly got his nose fed to the villain’s goldfish. A few good Indian journalists, led by Sreenivasan Jain and P. Sainath, are showing the red flag from parched swathes. Himanshu Thakkar, India’s respected expert on water management, is warning against its plunder in the heart of drought land, on lush golf courses.
The revered cow, essence of India’s refurbished nationhood, is in trouble. Many will perish by hunger, others by choking on plastic bags they scrounge in the absence of fodder. (The incidence of pedigree dogs being abandoned has increased, an indication that the urban middle class is feeling the pinch.)
An inordinately high number of farmers may be unable to stand up to the grim prospects. Some have committed suicide. Many more look just as vulnerable and could face starvation. The water minister says there is neither any need nor a way to prepare for a drought. A farmer’s two kindergarten children were on TV, sent off to Mumbai to find work and food.
Meanwhile, more illicit money has been found abroad. The Panama Papers could be only the tip of the iceberg. A two-year-old promise by the prime minister that he would put Indian Rs1.5 million from a separate tranche of retrieved money in everyone’s account has lapsed. His alter ego and party chief has described the promise as poll-year comment, not to be taken literally.
People are cursing their luck. The government is cursing the people. A faulty flyover being constructed in Kolkata has collapsed. The prime minister, in his election outfit, called it God’s curse on the ruling party of West Bengal. Then there was another man-made tragedy, in a temple in Kerala this time. Did we see someone biting his reckless tongue?
Being clumsy with rural folk has usually incurred a cost. Indian history is littered with episodes of peasant revolts. Drought and exploitation were and are at the source. The Patidar Movement of capitalist farmers in Gujarat is spinning out of control. The Jats are another prosperous agrarian community. They were used cynically against Muslims in western Uttar Pradesh. The ploy worked and it catapulted Modi in the general election. Now, faced with broken populist promises (which probably were not meant to be taken literally) the Jats are bracing for a showdown.
Remember that the Sikh peasants rose against the mighty Mughal empire and have refused to be subdued till today. When the state under Indira Gandhi sent the army against them, Sikh peasant-soldiers deserted the military in large numbers. The Indian Express report on Monday told a similar story from Haryana. Jat “policemen deserted their posts, sided with protesters,” said the front page lead story. The number of police deserters belonging to the Jat community was in the hundreds, the newspaper said, quoting unnamed highly placed sources privy to an official report being prepared on the flare-up.
History repeats itself, and that’s not a hollow cliché. With food scarcity in 1832 in Maharashtra, which is also the venue of India’s worst drought today, food riots spread against the moneylenders many of whose ilk form the current ruling elite. As for drought, peasants have historically attacked grain traders for practising witchcraft whereby they could stop rain. All this is recorded history.
We therefore need to take very seriously what Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar says for he is nothing if not a brilliant peasant leader. A day after becoming party chief last week, he demanded the “largest possible unity” against the BJP by bringing Congress, the Left and regional parties on one platform before the 2019 general elections.
There are crucial elections under way in four or five states. The BJP has little to no chance in West Bengal, Kerala or Tamil Nadu. If at all it makes headway it should be in Assam. But this could not be a reason for anyone to rest on his or her laurels. India is in ferment, and its people cannot afford to be caught napping yet again.
INDIA may be waking up from its unwarranted nightmare. A call has gone out from the head of its most impoverished and second-most populous province to cobble an anti-Hindutva alliance to foil a fascist takeover. The conditions look ripe. The economy is not shining.
There are many explanations. One is the piranha-like tycoons spawned by a neo-liberal ruling clique. In the rest of the world, neo-liberalism is being questioned. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have lent voice to a global movement in India too. When university campuses reverberated with socialist slogans recently, the government moved swiftly to muzzle them. It contrived and slapped sedition charges on some of the most inspiring student leaders the country has seen.
Another explanation for the economic mess lies in straightforward loot. The mercantile capitalists embraced by Gandhi as the ‘trustees’ of free India have literally walked away with mega tons of people’s money. They have shown the banks a clean pair of heels. The Supreme Court is furious and wants names named. The national security adviser has stepped in with a more riveting agenda. He wants the courts to focus on national security instead; in other words to hang and jail more people, more swiftly.
To compound the nation’s woes, drought has arrived and monsoons are not due for at least two more scorching months. Much of the suffering this entails is predictably man-made. Millions are being kept parched so that the water tanker mafia, among other connected crony entrepreneurs, prospers.
Jack Nicholson as a sleuth investigated the great water heist in the formative days of California. That was in Polanski’s Chinatown when the snoopy hero nearly got his nose fed to the villain’s goldfish. A few good Indian journalists, led by Sreenivasan Jain and P. Sainath, are showing the red flag from parched swathes. Himanshu Thakkar, India’s respected expert on water management, is warning against its plunder in the heart of drought land, on lush golf courses.
The revered cow, essence of India’s refurbished nationhood, is in trouble. Many will perish by hunger, others by choking on plastic bags they scrounge in the absence of fodder. (The incidence of pedigree dogs being abandoned has increased, an indication that the urban middle class is feeling the pinch.)
An inordinately high number of farmers may be unable to stand up to the grim prospects. Some have committed suicide. Many more look just as vulnerable and could face starvation. The water minister says there is neither any need nor a way to prepare for a drought. A farmer’s two kindergarten children were on TV, sent off to Mumbai to find work and food.
Meanwhile, more illicit money has been found abroad. The Panama Papers could be only the tip of the iceberg. A two-year-old promise by the prime minister that he would put Indian Rs1.5 million from a separate tranche of retrieved money in everyone’s account has lapsed. His alter ego and party chief has described the promise as poll-year comment, not to be taken literally.
People are cursing their luck. The government is cursing the people. A faulty flyover being constructed in Kolkata has collapsed. The prime minister, in his election outfit, called it God’s curse on the ruling party of West Bengal. Then there was another man-made tragedy, in a temple in Kerala this time. Did we see someone biting his reckless tongue?
Being clumsy with rural folk has usually incurred a cost. Indian history is littered with episodes of peasant revolts. Drought and exploitation were and are at the source. The Patidar Movement of capitalist farmers in Gujarat is spinning out of control. The Jats are another prosperous agrarian community. They were used cynically against Muslims in western Uttar Pradesh. The ploy worked and it catapulted Modi in the general election. Now, faced with broken populist promises (which probably were not meant to be taken literally) the Jats are bracing for a showdown.
Remember that the Sikh peasants rose against the mighty Mughal empire and have refused to be subdued till today. When the state under Indira Gandhi sent the army against them, Sikh peasant-soldiers deserted the military in large numbers. The Indian Express report on Monday told a similar story from Haryana. Jat “policemen deserted their posts, sided with protesters,” said the front page lead story. The number of police deserters belonging to the Jat community was in the hundreds, the newspaper said, quoting unnamed highly placed sources privy to an official report being prepared on the flare-up.
History repeats itself, and that’s not a hollow cliché. With food scarcity in 1832 in Maharashtra, which is also the venue of India’s worst drought today, food riots spread against the moneylenders many of whose ilk form the current ruling elite. As for drought, peasants have historically attacked grain traders for practising witchcraft whereby they could stop rain. All this is recorded history.
We therefore need to take very seriously what Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar says for he is nothing if not a brilliant peasant leader. A day after becoming party chief last week, he demanded the “largest possible unity” against the BJP by bringing Congress, the Left and regional parties on one platform before the 2019 general elections.
There are crucial elections under way in four or five states. The BJP has little to no chance in West Bengal, Kerala or Tamil Nadu. If at all it makes headway it should be in Assam. But this could not be a reason for anyone to rest on his or her laurels. India is in ferment, and its people cannot afford to be caught napping yet again.
Tuesday 5 January 2016
By the end of my first year as a doctor, I was ready to kill myself
An Anonymous junior doctor in The Guardian
On my morning drives to the hospital, the tears fell like rain. The prospect of the next 14 hours – 8am to 10pm with not a second’s respite from the nurses’ bleeps, or the overwhelming needs of too many sick patients – was almost too much to bear. But on the late-night trips back home, I’d feel nothing at all. Deadbeat, punch-drunk, it was utter indifference that nearly killed me. Every night, on an empty dual carriageway, I had to fight with myself to keep my hands on the steering wheel. The temptation to let go – of the wheel, the patients, my miserable life – was almost irresistible. Then I’d never have to haul myself through another unfeasible day at the hospital.
By the time I neared the end of my first year as a doctor, I’d chosen the spot where I intended to kill myself. I’d bought everything I needed to do it. All my youthful enthusiasm for healing, big dreams of saving lives and of making a difference, had soured and I felt an astronomic emptiness. Made monumentally selfish by depression, I’d ceased even to care what my husband would think of me, or that my little boy would grow up without his mother.
Doctor suicide is the medical profession’s grubby little secret. Female doctors aretwice as likely as the general population to take our own lives. A US study shows our suicide rate appears higher than that of other professional groups, with young doctors at the beginning of their training being particularly vulnerable. As I wrestled silently with the urge to kill myself, another house officer in my trust went right on and did it. To me, that monstrous waste of young life seemed entirely logical. The constant, haunting fear of hurting my patients, coupled with relentless rotas at work, had rendered me incapable of reason.
Though we know large numbers of doctors kill themselves, what is less clear are the reasons why, when dedicated to preserving human life, some doctors silently plot their own deaths. A 2006 study at the University of Pennsylvania identified that during their first year as doctors, young physicians experienced skyrocketing rates of burnout, with symptoms of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced sense of personal accomplishment soaring from 4% to 55%.
For me, the explanation ran deeper. I was entrenched in a hospital system that brutalised young doctors. Working on my hospital’s surgical emergency unit, there were simply too few of us to cope with the daily onslaught of patients. Officially eight or 10-hour days ran routinely into 13, 14 or 15 hours as we house officers worked at fever pitch to provide what was, at best, a mediocre service for our patients. Run ragged, we fought to keep our patients safe, but their numbers outstripped ours 20 or 30 to one, and the efforts this took were superhuman. The nurses knew, the consultants knew, even the hospital management knew, yet no one seemed to give a damn.
It wasn’t just exhaustion that drove me into depression. Plenty of jobs are busy. But there is something uniquely traumatic about being responsible for patients’ lives, while being crushed under a workload so punitive it gives neither the time nor space for safe assessment of those patients. Days were bad enough, but nights on call were terrifying. I remember running from the bed of one patient, still haemorrhaging blood from her surgical wound, to another whose heart rate had plummeted to 20, perilously close to a cardiac arrest. Two stricken patients, but only one doctor, wracked with the knowledge that if something went wrong, the guilt would be hers alone.
I was lucky. I was pushed by the colleague in whom I finally confided into seeking professional help. It took anti-depressants, therapy and a narrowly-avoided psychiatric inpatient admission to bring me back to the land of the living.
Now, on the cusp of junior doctors’ first national strike in 40 years, I’m astounded the health secretary persists in ignoring unanimous condemnation of his new contract from juniors and medical leaders alike. If he gets his way, Jeremy Hunt will make it easier for hospitals to abuse their juniors, by stripping away the safeguards that stop hospitals overworking us, fining those that do. Under his new contract, our hours will become even longer, even more antisocial – at a time when we simply have nothing more to give. And as we are pushed to treat more and more patients, faster and faster, fatigue and psychological distress will dull our competence: your lives will be less safe in our hands. And our own? Take it from someone who’s been there. Watch the suicide rate climb.
On my morning drives to the hospital, the tears fell like rain. The prospect of the next 14 hours – 8am to 10pm with not a second’s respite from the nurses’ bleeps, or the overwhelming needs of too many sick patients – was almost too much to bear. But on the late-night trips back home, I’d feel nothing at all. Deadbeat, punch-drunk, it was utter indifference that nearly killed me. Every night, on an empty dual carriageway, I had to fight with myself to keep my hands on the steering wheel. The temptation to let go – of the wheel, the patients, my miserable life – was almost irresistible. Then I’d never have to haul myself through another unfeasible day at the hospital.
By the time I neared the end of my first year as a doctor, I’d chosen the spot where I intended to kill myself. I’d bought everything I needed to do it. All my youthful enthusiasm for healing, big dreams of saving lives and of making a difference, had soured and I felt an astronomic emptiness. Made monumentally selfish by depression, I’d ceased even to care what my husband would think of me, or that my little boy would grow up without his mother.
Doctor suicide is the medical profession’s grubby little secret. Female doctors aretwice as likely as the general population to take our own lives. A US study shows our suicide rate appears higher than that of other professional groups, with young doctors at the beginning of their training being particularly vulnerable. As I wrestled silently with the urge to kill myself, another house officer in my trust went right on and did it. To me, that monstrous waste of young life seemed entirely logical. The constant, haunting fear of hurting my patients, coupled with relentless rotas at work, had rendered me incapable of reason.
Though we know large numbers of doctors kill themselves, what is less clear are the reasons why, when dedicated to preserving human life, some doctors silently plot their own deaths. A 2006 study at the University of Pennsylvania identified that during their first year as doctors, young physicians experienced skyrocketing rates of burnout, with symptoms of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced sense of personal accomplishment soaring from 4% to 55%.
For me, the explanation ran deeper. I was entrenched in a hospital system that brutalised young doctors. Working on my hospital’s surgical emergency unit, there were simply too few of us to cope with the daily onslaught of patients. Officially eight or 10-hour days ran routinely into 13, 14 or 15 hours as we house officers worked at fever pitch to provide what was, at best, a mediocre service for our patients. Run ragged, we fought to keep our patients safe, but their numbers outstripped ours 20 or 30 to one, and the efforts this took were superhuman. The nurses knew, the consultants knew, even the hospital management knew, yet no one seemed to give a damn.
It wasn’t just exhaustion that drove me into depression. Plenty of jobs are busy. But there is something uniquely traumatic about being responsible for patients’ lives, while being crushed under a workload so punitive it gives neither the time nor space for safe assessment of those patients. Days were bad enough, but nights on call were terrifying. I remember running from the bed of one patient, still haemorrhaging blood from her surgical wound, to another whose heart rate had plummeted to 20, perilously close to a cardiac arrest. Two stricken patients, but only one doctor, wracked with the knowledge that if something went wrong, the guilt would be hers alone.
I was lucky. I was pushed by the colleague in whom I finally confided into seeking professional help. It took anti-depressants, therapy and a narrowly-avoided psychiatric inpatient admission to bring me back to the land of the living.
Now, on the cusp of junior doctors’ first national strike in 40 years, I’m astounded the health secretary persists in ignoring unanimous condemnation of his new contract from juniors and medical leaders alike. If he gets his way, Jeremy Hunt will make it easier for hospitals to abuse their juniors, by stripping away the safeguards that stop hospitals overworking us, fining those that do. Under his new contract, our hours will become even longer, even more antisocial – at a time when we simply have nothing more to give. And as we are pushed to treat more and more patients, faster and faster, fatigue and psychological distress will dull our competence: your lives will be less safe in our hands. And our own? Take it from someone who’s been there. Watch the suicide rate climb.
Sunday 8 February 2015
Depression, suicide and the fragility of the strong, silent male
Yvonne Roberts in The Guardian
On Thursday, the bruised and tearful face of former footballer and chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Clarke Carlisle, 35, appeared on the front page of the Sun. He was released from psychiatric hospital two weeks ago. In a clip on the paper’s website, he appears so raw and vulnerable that to watch it provokes thoughts of a modern-day version of Bedlam with us as Hogarthian gawpers treating the mentally fragile as entertainment.
The paper’s headline read: “I leapt in front of a lorry hoping to die.” Carlisle, a father of three, has suffered from depression for 18 months. He explained that the end of his career, the curtailment of his contract as a TV sports pundit and a struggle with alcohol led to financial problems. He felt the lack of “a sense of worth and value in life”.
He said strangers would comment: “Didn’t you used to be Clarke Carlisle?”, as if, once off the television screen and football pitch, he had passed into no-man’s-land. Throwing himself in front of a lorry became the “perfect answer”. Carlisle survived, unlike 12 men who will kill themselves today, as 12 do every day, in England and Wales.
Just before his death, the psychiatrist Anthony Clare wrote a thoughtful book, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. He concluded with a plea to men to place “a greater value on love, family and personal relationships and less on power, possessions and achievement… to find meaning and fulfilment”.
Except that redefining what it means to be a man in contemporary society isn’t a job for men alone. It’s a dynamic process of cultural and social change that repeatedly judders to a halt. And it will continue to be impeded for a variety of reasons (better the stereotype you know) and as long as some women hold fast to a hierarchy of need.
This is the kind of thinking that says: if male fragility is addressed, women’s requirements are marginalised. Men can hog resources, but the two requirements are interlocked. Until male violence can be defused, for instance, the refugees will continue to overflow.
In the main, support for Carlisle’s honesty has been strong, as it has been for Nick Baber, 48, chief operating officer at KPMG, who last week said he would pretend he had flu during severe depression. He has called for more senior executives to speak out. But then what? As Dr Margaret McCartney explains in The Patient Paradox, the severely depressed are too ill to make plans to end their life. When a patient is beginning to recover, suicide becomes an option, particularly if they are male. Thoreau wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Talk to parents from Papyrus, the charity that campaigns to prevent young suicide, and again and again they say they had no idea that their sons were depressed, let alone suicidal. Their sons, they felt, had so much to live for.
According to the charity, Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm), men account for more than three-quarters of all suicides in England and Wales, 4,590 deaths – the single biggest cause of death among males under 50. Three out of four had no contact with mental health professionals. As the Men’s Health Forum constantly points out, men are reluctant to go their GP and fail to identify their own symptoms of depression. When Carlisle’s wife, Gemma, was diagnosed with postnatal depression, he advised her to “get a grip”; then he took Goldberg’s depression test and recognised his own symptoms. They include lack of energy, sadness, negativity and self-destructiveness. A survey by Calm revealed that 69% of men said they preferred to deal with problems themselves, 56% didn’t want to burden others. “The traditional strong silent response to adversity is increasingly failing to protect men from themselves,” said Jane Powell, Calm’s chief executive.
Last year, the charity issued a much-needed four-point charter to encourage change for the better. It includes a shift in thinking about the needs of males in schools, work and public services and a fuller range of expression of masculinity in the media and advertising. Too often, still, while depression in women is wrongly viewed as an inevitable part of being female, it’s precisely this alleged association with female fragility that underscores the notion that the male sufferer is less of a man; he has a weakness, not an illness best kept secret. So, as the suicide rate has risen, the taboos and social “norms” stay in place.
Change, however, is possible. Last month, a new policy on suicide prevention was launched, the Stop Suicide pledge. It is based on the work of Dr Ed Coffey in Detroit that enrols as many members of the public as possible with the aim of ending the stigma and the secrecy. In four years, the suicide rate dropped 75%.
The UK “zero suicide” pilots ask the whole community to look out for each other, recognise warning signs and offer help, not exclusion. The pledge, with a badge, is, “I’d ask”. (Although what you ask is trickier. “Is everything OK?” is bound to get a positive response in a well-trained man.)
The New Economics Foundation says the five foundation stones of wellbeing are: connect, be active, take notice, keep learning and give. The female sphere, even when it involves working 10 hours a day as well as mothering and acting as a carer, has all those aspects woven into it (and paradoxically at extremes can be the cause of female depression and breakdown). The male stereotypes of protector, provider, toughie and top dog shoves wellbeing well down the list.
Kurt Cobain, desperately in need of help for years, in his poignant suicide note to Boddah, his imaginary childhood friend, quoted a Neil Young song: “… better to burn out than fade away…” The tragedy for too many men is that society doesn’t yet allow them to let down their guard so they can value and enjoy the infinity of choices that lie between those two extremes.
Sunday 1 February 2015
Thursday 30 October 2014
Tuesday 26 November 2013
INDIA'S NUCLEAR SCIENTISTS KEEP DYING MYSTERIOUSLY
(Photo via)
Indian nuclear scientists haven't had an easy time of it over the past decade. Not only has the scientific community been plagued by "suicides," unexplained deaths, and sabotage, but those incidents have gone mostly underreported in the country—diluting public interest and leaving the cases quickly cast off by police.
Last month, two high-ranking engineers—KK Josh and Abhish Shivam—on India's first nuclear-powered submarine were found on railway tracks by workers. They were pulled from the line before a train could crush them, but were already dead. No marks were found on the bodies, so it was clear they hadn't been hit by a moving train, and reports allege they were poisoned elsewhere before being placed on the tracks to make the deaths look either accidental or like a suicide. The media and the Ministry of Defence, however, described the incident as a routine accident and didn't investigate any further.
This is the latest in a long list of suspicious deaths. When nuclear scientist Lokanathan Mahalingam's body turned up in June of 2009, it was palmed off as a suicide and largely ignored by the Indian media. However, Pakistani outlets, perhaps unsurprisingly, given relations between the two countries, kept the story going, noting how quick authorities were to label the death a suicide considering no note was left.
Five years earlier, in the same forest where Mahalingham's body was eventually discovered, an armed group with sophisticated weaponry allegedly tried to abduct an official from India's Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC). He, however, managed to escape. Another NPC employee, Ravi Mule, had been murdered weeks before, with police failing to "make any headway" into his case and effectively leaving his family to investigate the crime. A couple of years later, in April of 2011, when the body of former scientist Uma Rao was found, investigators ruled the death as suicide, but family members contested the verdict, saying there had been no signs that Rao was suicidal.
Trombay, the site of India's first atomic reactor. (Photo via)
This seems to be a recurring theme with deaths in the community. Madhav Nalapat, one of the few journalists in India giving the cases any real attention, has been in close contact with the families of the recently deceased scientists left on the train tracks. "There was absolutely no kind of depression or any family problems that would lead to suicide," he told me over the phone.
If the deaths of those in the community aren't classed as suicide, they're generally labeled as "unexplained." A good example is the case of M Iyer, who was found with internal haemorrhaging to his skull—possibly the result of a "kinky experiment," according to a police officer. After a preliminary look-in, the police couldn't work out how Iyer had suffered internal injuries while not displaying any cuts or bruises, and investigations fizzled out.
This label is essentially admission of defeat on the police force's part. Once the "unexplained" rubber stamp has been approved, government bodies don't tend to task the authorities with investigating further. This may be a necessity due to the stark lack of evidence available at the scene of the deaths—a feature that some suggest could indicate the work of professional killers—but if this is the case, why not bring in better trained detectives to investigate the cases? A spate of deaths in the nuclear scientific community would create a media storm and highly publicised police investigation in other countries, so why not India?
This inertia has led to great public dissatisfaction with the Indian police. "[The police] say it's an unsolved murder, that's all. Why doesn't it go higher? Perhaps to a specialist investigations unit?" Madhav asked. "These people were working on the submarine program, creating a reactor, and have either 'committed suicide' or been murdered. It's astonishing that this hasn't been seen as suspicious."
Perhaps, I suggested, this series of deaths is just the latest chapter in a long campaign aiming to derail India's nuclear and technological capabilities. Madhav agreed, "There is a clear pattern of this type of activity going on," he said.
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INS Sindhurakshak (Photo via)
The explosions that sunk INS Sindhurakshak – a submarine docked in Mumbai – in August of this year could have been deliberate, according to unnamed intelligence sources. And some have alleged that the CIA was behind the sabotage of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
Of course, the deaths have caused fear and tension among those currently working on India's various nuclear projects. "[Whistleblowers] are getting scared of being involved in the nuclear industry in India," Madhav relayed to me. Their "families are getting very nervous about this" and "many of them leave for foreign countries and get other jobs."
There are parallels here with the numerous attacks on the Iranian nuclear scientist community. Five people associated with the country's nuclear programme have been targeted in the same way: men on motorcycles sticking magnetic bombs on to their cars and detonating them as they drive off. However, the Iranian government are incredibly vocal in condemning these acts—blaming the US and Israel—and at least give the appearance that they are actively investigating.
The same cannot be said for the Indian government. "India is not making any noise about the whole thing," Madhav explained. "People have just accepted the police version, [which describes these incidents] as normal kinds of death."
If the deaths do, in fact, turn out to be premeditated murders, deciding who's responsible is pure speculation at this point. Two authors have alleged that the US have dabbled in sabotaging the country's technological efforts in the past; China is in a constant soft-power battle with India; and the volatile relationship with Pakistan makes the country a prime suspect. "It could be any of them," Madhav said.
But the most pressing issue isn't who might be behind the murders, but that the Indian government's apathy is potentially putting their high-value staff at even greater risk. Currently, these scientists, who are crucial to the development of India's nuclear programes, whether for energy or security, have "absolutely no protection at all. Nothing, zero," Madhav told me. "Which is amazing for people who are in a such a sensitive program."
Wednesday 11 September 2013
The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship
No one said building a company was easy. But it's time to be honest about how brutal it really is--and the price so many founders secretly pay.
By all counts and measures, Bradley Smith is an unequivocal business success. He's CEO of Rescue One Financial, an Irvine, California-based financial services company that had sales of nearly $32 million last year. Smith's company has grown some 1,400 percent in the last three years, landing it at No. 310 on this year's Inc. 500. So you might never guess that just five years ago, Smith was on the brink of financial ruin--and mental collapse.
Back in 2008, Smith was working long hours counseling nervous clients about getting out of debt. But his calm demeanor masked a secret: He shared their fears. Like them, Smith was sinking deeper and deeper into debt. He had driven himself far into the red starting--of all things--a debt-settlement company. "I was hearing how depressed and strung out my clients were, but in the back of my mind I was thinking to myself, I've got twice as much debt as you do," Smith recalls.
He had cashed in his 401(k) and maxed out a $60,000 line of credit. He had sold the Rolex he bought with his first-ever paycheck during an earlier career as a stockbroker. And he had humbled himself before his father--the man who raised him on maxims such as "money doesn't grow on trees" and "never do business with family"--by asking for $10,000, which he received at 5 percent interest after signing a promissory note.
Smith projected optimism to his co-founders and 10 employees, but his nerves were shot. "My wife and I would share a bottle of $5 wine for dinner and just kind of look at each other," Smith says. "We knew we were close to the edge." Then the pressure got worse: The couple learned they were expecting their first child. "There were sleepless nights, staring at the ceiling," Smith recalls. "I'd wake up at 4 in the morning with my mind racing, thinking about this and that, not being able to shut it off, wondering, When is this thing going to turn?" After eight months of constant anxiety, Smith's company finally began making money.
Successful entrepreneurs achieve hero status in our culture. We idolize the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Elon Musks. And we celebrate the blazingly fast growth of the Inc. 500 companies. But many of those entrepreneurs, like Smith, harbor secret demons: Before they made it big, they struggled through moments of near-debilitating anxiety and despair--times when it seemed everything might crumble.
"It's like a man riding a lion. People think, 'This guy's brave.' And he's thinking, 'How the hell did I get on a lion, and how do I keep from getting eaten?"
Until recently, admitting such sentiments was taboo. Rather than showing vulnerability, business leaders have practiced what social psychiatrists call impression management--also known as "fake it till you make it." Toby Thomas, CEO of EnSite Solutions (No. 188 on the Inc. 500), explains the phenomenon with his favorite analogy: a man riding a lion. "People look at him and think, This guy's really got it together! He's brave!" says Thomas. "And the man riding the lion is thinking, How the hell did I get on a lion, and how do I keep from getting eaten?"
Not everyone who walks through darkness makes it out. In January, well-known founder Jody Sherman, 47, of the e-commerce site Ecomom took his own life. His death shook the start-up community. It also reignited a discussion about entrepreneurship and mental health that began two years earlier after the suicide of Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the 22-year-old co-founder of Diaspora, a social networking site.
Lately, more entrepreneurs have begun speaking out about their internal struggles in an attempt to combat the stigma on depression and anxiety that makes it hard for sufferers to seek help. In a deeply personal post called "When Death Feels Like a Good Option," Ben Huh, the CEO of the Cheezburger Network humor websites, wrote about his suicidal thoughts following a failed start-up in 2001. Sean Percival, a former MySpace vice president and co-founder of the children's clothing start-up Wittlebee, penned a piece called "When It's Not All Good, Ask for Help" on his website. "I was to the edge and back a few times this past year with my business and own depression," he wrote. "If you're about to lose it, please contact me."
Brad Feld, a managing director of the Foundry Group, started blogging in October about his latest episode of depression. The problem wasn't new--the prominent venture capitalist had struggled with mood disorders throughout his adult life--and he didn't expect much of a response. But then came the emails. Hundreds of them. Many were from entrepreneurs who had also wrestled with anxiety and despair. (For more of Feld's thoughts on depression, see his column, "Surviving the Dark Nights of the Soul," in Inc.'s July/August issue.)"If you saw the list of names, it would surprise you a great deal," says Feld. "They are very successful people, very visible, very charismatic-;yet they've struggled with this silently. There's a sense that they can't talk about it, that it's a weakness or a shame or something. They feel like they're hiding, which makes the whole thing worse."
If you run a business, that probably all sounds familiar. It's a stressful job that can create emotional turbulence. For starters, there's the high risk of failure. Three out of four venture-backed start-ups fail, according to research by Shikhar Ghosh, a Harvard Business School lecturer. Ghosh also found that more than 95 percent of start-ups fall short of their initial projections.
Entrepreneurs often juggle many roles and face countless setbacks--lost customers, disputes with partners, increased competition, staffing problems--all while struggling to make payroll. "There are traumatic events all the way along the line," says psychiatrist and former entrepreneur Michael A. Freeman, who is researching mental health and entrepreneurship.
Complicating matters, new entrepreneurs often make themselves less resilient by neglecting their health. They eat too much or too little. They don't get enough sleep. They fail to exercise. "You can get into a start-up mode, where you push yourself and abuse your body," Freeman says. "That can trigger mood vulnerability."
So it should come as little surprise that entrepreneurs experience more anxiety than employees. In the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, 34 percent of entrepreneurs--4 percentage points more than other workers--reported they were worried. And 45 percent of entrepreneurs said they were stressed, 3 percentage points more than other workers.
But it may be more than a stressful job that pushes some founders over the edge. According to researchers, many entrepreneurs share innate character traits that make them more vulnerable to mood swings. "People who are on the energetic, motivated, and creative side are both more likely to be entrepreneurial and more likely to have strong emotional states," says Freeman. Those states may include depression, despair, hopelessness, worthlessness, loss of motivation, and suicidal thinking.
Call it the downside of being up. The same passionate dispositions that drive founders heedlessly toward success can sometimes consume them. Business owners are "vulnerable to the dark side of obsession," suggest researchers from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. They conducted interviews with founders for a study about entrepreneurial passion. The researchers found that many subjects displayed signs of clinical obsession, including strong feelings of distress and anxiety, which have "the potential to lead to impaired functioning," they wrote in a paper published in the Entrepreneurship Research Journal in April.
Reinforcing that message is John Gartner, a practicing psychologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. In his book The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America, Gartner argues that an often-overlooked temperament--hypomania--may be responsible for some entrepreneurs' strengths as well as their flaws.
A milder version of mania, hypomania often occurs in the relatives of manic-depressives and affects an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of Americans. "If you're manic, you think you're Jesus," says Gartner. "If you're hypomanic, you think you're God's gift to technology investing. We're talking about different levels of grandiosity but the same symptoms."
Gartner theorizes that there are so many hypomanics--and so many entrepreneurs--in the U.S. because our country's national character rose on waves of immigration. "We're a self-selected population," he says. "Immigrants have unusual ambition, energy, drive, and risk tolerance, which lets them take a chance on moving for a better opportunity. These are biologically based temperament traits. If you seed an entire continent with them, you're going to get a nation of entrepreneurs."
Though driven and innovative, hypomanics are at much higher risk for depression than the general population, notes Gartner. Failure can spark these depressive episodes, of course, but so can anything that slows a hypomanic's momentum. "They're like border collies--they have to run," says Gartner. "If you keep them inside, they chew up the furniture. They go crazy; they just pace around. That's what hypomanics do. They need to be busy, active, overworking."
"Entrepreneurs have struggled silently. There's a sense that they can't talk about it, that it's a weakness."
No matter what your psychological makeup, big setbacks in your business can knock you flat. Even experienced entrepreneurs have had the rug pulled out from under them. Mark Woeppel launched Pinnacle Strategies, a management consulting firm, in 1992. In 2009, his phone stopped ringing.
Caught in the global financial crisis, his customers were suddenly more concerned with survival than with boosting their output. Sales plummeted 75 percent. Woeppel laid off his half-dozen employees. Before long, he had exhausted his assets: cars, jewelry, anything that could go. His supply of confidence was dwindling, too. "As CEO, you have this self-image--you're the master of the universe," he says. "Then all of a sudden, you are not."
Woeppel stopped leaving his house. Anxious and low on self-esteem, he started eating too much--and put on 50 pounds. Sometimes he sought temporary relief in an old addiction: playing the guitar. Locked in a room, he practiced solos by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Chet Atkins. "It was something I could do just for the love of doing it," he recalls. "Then there was nothing but me, the guitar, and the peace."
Through it all, he kept working to develop new services. He just hoped his company would hang on long enough to sell them. In 2010, customers started to return. Pinnacle scored its biggest-ever contract, with an aerospace manufacturer, on the basis of a white paper Woeppel had written during the downturn. Last year, Pinnacle's revenue hit $7 million. Sales are up more than 5,000 percent since 2009, earning the company a spot at No. 57 on this year's Inc. 500.
Woeppel says he's more resilient now, tempered by tough times. "I used to be like, 'My work is me,' " he says. "Then you fail. And you find out that your kids still love you. Your wife still loves you. Your dog still loves you."
But for many entrepreneurs, the battle wounds never fully heal. That was the case for John Pope, CEO of WellDog, a Laramie, Wyoming-based energy technology firm. On Dec. 11, 2002, Pope had exactly $8.42 in the bank. He was 90 days late on his car payment. He was 75 days behind on the mortgage. The IRS had filed a lien against him. His home phone, cell phone, and cable TV had all been turned off. In less than a week, the natural-gas company was scheduled to suspend service to the house he shared with his wife and daughters. Then there would be no heat. His company was expecting a wire transfer from the oil company Shell, a strategic investor, after months of negotiations had ended with a signed 380-page contract. So Pope waited.
The wire arrived the next day. Pope--along with his company--was saved. Afterward, he made a list of all the ways in which he had financially overreached. "I'm going to remember this," he recalls thinking. "It's the farthest I'm willing to go."
Since then, WellDog has taken off: In the past three years, sales grew more than 3,700 percent, to $8 million, making the company No. 89 on the Inc. 500. But emotional residue from the years of tumult still lingers. "There's always that feeling of being overextended, of never being able to relax," says Pope. "You end up with a serious confidence problem. You feel like every time you build up security, something happens to take it away."
Pope sometimes catches himself emotionally overreacting to small things. It's a behavior pattern that reminds him of posttraumatic stress disorder. "Something happens, and you freak out about it," he says. "But the scale of the problem is a lot less than the scale of your emotional reaction. That just comes with the scar tissue of going through these things."
"If you're manic, you think you're Jesus. If you're hypomanic, you think you're God's gift to technology investing."John Gartner
Though launching a company will always be a wild ride, full of ups and downs, there are things entrepreneurs can do to help keep their lives from spiraling out of control, say experts. Most important, make time for your loved ones, suggests Freeman. "Don't let your business squeeze out your connections with human beings," he says. When it comes to fighting off depression, relationships with friends and family can be powerful weapons. And don't be afraid to ask for help--see a mental health professional if you are experiencing symptoms of significant anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, or depression.
Freeman also advises that entrepreneurs limit their financial exposure. When it comes to assessing risk, entrepreneurs' blind spots are often big enough to drive a Mack truck through, he says. The consequences can rock not only your bank account but also your stress levels. So set a limit for how much of your own money you're prepared to invest. And don't let friends and family kick in more than they can afford to lose.
Cardiovascular exercise, a healthful diet, and adequate sleep all help, too. So does cultivating an identity apart from your company. "Build a life centered on the belief that self-worth is not the same as net worth," says Freeman. "Other dimensions of your life should be part of your identity." Whether you're raising a family, sitting on the board of a local charity, building model rockets in the backyard, or going swing dancing on weekends, it's important to feel successful in areas unrelated to work.
The ability to reframe failure and loss can also help leaders maintain good mental health. "Instead of telling yourself, 'I failed, the business failed, I'm a loser,' " says Freeman, "look at the data from a different perspective: Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Life is a constant process of trial and error. Don't exaggerate the experience."
Last, be open about your feelings--don't mask your emotions, even at the office, suggests Brad Feld. When you are willing to be emotionally honest, he says, you can connect more deeply with the people around you. "When you deny yourself and you deny what you're about, people can see through that," says Feld. "Willingness to be vulnerable is very powerful for a leader."
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