Christopher Aloezos, MD

Fantasy, suicidal ideation, ecstasy, pride, shame, opportunities gained, opportunities lost, fortunes made and fortunes squandered-these are some of the topics that a psychiatrist will encounter. Often, they are the factors that drive people into states of mental illness or ones that perpetuate suffering. Each of these topics is given thorough consideration in a new podcast series, 

by Jon Ronson and produced by Lina Misitzis (available at 

 tells the story behind the wide availability of free internet pornography, the psychiatrist listener will quickly appreciate that this is only the beginning of the story.

, a book that told the story of nearly instant and almost universal shaming made possible by social media. In this book, he encourages all to consider others not as either “intelligent” “stupid” “moral” or “immoral” but rather everyone is a mixture of these and infinite other elements.

studies free internet porn as a continuation of his study into shame and its harmful effects. The stories he tells will resonate with practicing psychiatrists who now toil in the tidal wave that this pornographic expansion has set in motion; the unprecedented numbers of young people who now have video of sexual behavior living for eternity, the exposure to performance sex that is perfectly matched to and the emergence of younger generation of men unable to achieve arousal with their real-life sexual partners.

Mr. Ronson was interviewed in New York about 

in general and about its relevance to the practicing psychiatrist.

 I consider myself, I guess a storyteller. I try and find stories, mainly nonfiction, but sometimes fiction these days, that sort of shed light on the way the world works. And I suppose I'm always ... I'm pretty much always looking for stories that are kind of humanist, for want of a better word. And sort of stories ... The older I get, I think it's more stories that kind of bring people together as opposed to push people apart. So I guess stories about empathy and curiosity as opposed to what a lot of other journalists do, which is judgment.

 You have said in other interviews that you like stories about outsiders. And I was wondering, do you have any insight or ideas as to why this is the case?

 Yeah, I'm pretty sure. This famous British writer called Caitlin Moran said that it definitely goes back to the fact that I was bullied at school. And so I'm trying to make sense of the horrors of the world by going to the places where you might find horror and de-horrorizing it.

But I think I would say I'm definitely drawn to outsiders because both as a Jew and also as somebody who grew up in wrong town, I was an outsider.

as a continuation of your appraisal of internet shaming in 

 Yes, It's all about re-humanizing . . . It's all about people not thinking about the consequences of their actions on the internet. So that's a very big parallel between the two stories. It's about me trying to re-humanize demonized people-and also about making people think about ripples and consequences.

 Can you comment on what you perceived as the presence of mental illness in the pornography industry that you studied so intensely for this project?

 Suggest a sentence rephrase: When I started writing 

 I asked psychologist Ray Hymen, "Why are so many people who believe crazy things inside the intelligence services?" He said, "Because people are nuts. People are nuts inside the intelligence services; they're nuts outside the intelligence . . . They're just nuts."

And I thought, the other day I was talking, I was being interviewed by this really great British podcast they've got out and the interviewer asked "Yeah, but surely the porn world is full of people who've had really terrible childhoods, and are very sort of emotionally damaged." And I was like, "Yeah, but where else do you find people who've had really bad childhoods and they're really emotionally damaged? Everywhere."

 What do you hope most practicing psychiatrists take away from 

 I think it's about empathy and curiosity and compassion and being more important than judgment and suspicion. In many ways it's about trying to get people to rethink what they consider reputable and what they consider disreputable. And then speaking out about that.

Articles

While ostensibly The Butterfly Effect tells the story behind the wide availability of free internet pornography, the psychiatrist listener will quickly appreciate that this is only the beginning of the story.

The Butterfly Effect: An Interview With Jon Ronson

Interview by Christopher Aloezos, MD and Howard L. Forman, MD

 in which he explores the seemingly new and growing phenomenon of public shaming. With the advent and expansion of social media, we are seeing more and more of mass shaming. Until this book, shame on this unprecedented scale has never been so thoughtfully studied and explored. The topic of shame in general is of great importance and interest to the field of psychiatry because shame exists at the core of many patients and their psychopathologies. As social media continues to grow and play a larger role in communication, in social connectedness, and in relationships, public shaming will increasingly find its way into our offices and at the bedside. As such,

 is an insightful resource for many clinicians.

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 Many of your books cross paths with the field of psychiatry. I’m curious about how you became interested in this field.

 Yeah, it’s funny-I agree with you about that. I think it’s coincidence; I guess maybe it’s the type of journalism that I do, and psychology, psychiatry, and maybe anthropology, they’re all kind of connected, right? They’re all about trying to work out why we, humans, behave the way that we do.

I’ve always been a writer, a nonfiction writer, who is interested in humans and human behavior rather than someone who’s interested in facts and figures. I guess there’s always been that connection. If I hadn’t become a writer, I might have ended up in psychology or psychiatry. Hopefully not anthropology, because that sounds a bit more boring.

 You probably didn’t delve too greatly into the childhoods of the people featured in your book, but I was wondering whether experiences during childhood perhaps partly explain why some responded really well and with resilience to being publicly shamed while others didn’t fare so well.

 That’s a really interesting question. You’re right, I didn’t really go into detail about these people because my assumption, actually, was that most people respond fairly badly to a shaming. And so, there’s this sort of myth about our age-some people think, oh you know, all the youth of today, they’re all shameless. Look at the way they’re walking around, shamelessly.

That’s nonsense. Shame, as you guys know, is very much alive and well but it’s just moved elsewhere, for instance, to people who are accused of misusing their privilege, and so on. They’re the people who’ve been shamed. A public figure may not feel ashamed if photos of him naked appear on the Internet, because he doesn’t feel like he’s done anything wrong, and rightly so, as far as I’m concerned.

I suppose the answer to your question, just from my research over the past few years, is that almost everybody handles shame badly. It’s a very rare person indeed who handles it well.

 In your research, did you encounter any examples of what would be considered the opposite of public shaming: public empathy?

 I’m meeting Monica Lewinsky tomorrow and I’m going to ask her, but my fairly strong guess is that her TED talk had a hugely powerful, positive impact on people’s perception of her. You know, getting a standing ovation from the entire TED crowd was probably legitimizing, in the same way that many of the people in my book are so much happier since my book came out, I’m sure it’s the same, in a sense, for Monica.

Concerning Monica’s standing ovation, I’m going to tell her tomorrow that I still think we’ve got a long way to go. People may have given Monica a standing ovation because we now no longer see sex scandals as being particularly terrible things, but I bet you half the people who gave Monica a standing ovation would still happily tear apart Justine Sacco.

 What do you think psychiatrists can get from this book to help their patients who have been shamed, either publicly or privately?

 The first thing I want to say is that I’m really, really glad you’re taking my book seriously; I think it is a valuable book in that respect.

Shamers, underestimate how profoundly traumatizing it is to be shamed. Some people would tell me that they would wake up in the middle of the night forgetting who they are. You can probably tell me, but that sounds to me like a symptom of PTSD.

You sort of lose your sense of self and you lose your sense of place. It’s profoundly traumatizing. So I think: first, people underestimate just how traumatizing being shamed is. And second, the opposite of being shamed is to be brought back in: it’s compassion and kindness.

Also, it just seems so obvious, but people seem to have forgotten . . . we’re all a mixture of talents and wisdom and stupidity and idiocy, that’s what human beings are. Yet, on social media in particular, everybody’s going around looking for clues as to other people’s inner evil, you know, by some badly worded Tweet.

It’s nonsense because we know that’s not how human beings are. I think it’s sort of understanding that we’re all a mix of wisdom and stupidity and that stupidity shouldn’t be shameful because it’s human. Minor transgressions are human. This stuff is human. Yet we’ve created a kind of surveillance society where we’re pretending that we don’t know that about our fellow human beings. I think all that stuff’s really, really important.

 Let me close by saying just a few things. First of all, we need to take your book seriously. I think that one of the great messages of your book is how many people actually do get welcomed back. For example, Mr Lehrer (see book review), who not only did something wrong but also apologized for it the wrong way, and is now contracted to write 2 books.

 Yes, absolutely. I’m so glad about that because I always thought of America as the land of second chances and so on. But one of the things that really surprised me when I moved to America was its legal system. I’m speaking from a position of some ignorance here-but it seemed to me that the legal system in America is actually less likely to forgive and allow people re-entry than the legal system in some European countries.
I want to live in a world where people get second chances. So I’m glad that Jonah Lehrer is getting another chance. It took a long time-he had to be in the wilderness for 3 years, and it was agony for him, but I’m glad he’s been allowed re-entry.

Dr Aloezos is a PGY-2 Resident in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Montefiore Medical Center, and Dr Forman is an Attending Psychiatrist in the division of psychosomatic medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY.

With the advent and expansion of social media, we are seeing an increase in the phenomenon of mass humiliation. In this Q&A, we learn what surprised the author of a book on public shaming.

Christopher Aloezos, MD

Articles

The Butterfly Effect: An Interview With Jon Ronson

The New and Growing Phenomenon of Public Shaming