IT PTSD

Introduction

The phone rings while blasting out email and text notifications. It is 3 am Sunday morning. Immediately, I awaken knowing that something has gone terribly wrong. That feeling of anxiety and fear begin to crawl in my stomach. However, I know that I have to squelch it because I need to be able to concentrate 100% on whatever the problem is.

I do not answer the phone or look at the texts. I run immediately to the network management console. There I am greeted by series of blinking red dots connected by red lines. All of which means nothing good is happening.

I called the on-duty text staff and asked them what the problem is. They are already in a panic. Then the calls from the clients begin. Some of the calls are polite, but insistent, others are screaming death threats. Often followed by series of personal insults and promises to take away all business if something isn’t done immediately.

After a period of time, the problem is eventually solved. This required such total concentration and coordination of various resources that you are completely exhausted. However, the day has just begun. The consequences of the outage must be dealt with.

This involves lengthy discussions and reports about what caused the problem and how to prevent it in the future. Unfortunately, this is often accompanied by comments such as that you cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars, we are a mission critical organization with lives at risk, you may have cost me my job and a variety of other, unpleasant comments that you have to process.

You also have to deal with what you went through trying to fix the problem. There is a combination of fear, quilt, anxiety, anger, despair, relief and exhaustion that flows through your mind. Often times, you do not have time to process this as the day is coming with all of its demands and deadlines. You just stuff it and move on.

The reality is that there is a great deal of responsibility working in IT services. Businesses are dependent upon up time, often lives are at stake, there are global operations that need to be monitored 24 hours a day and can tolerate little to no downtime, people's jobs are at stake as well as a variety of other responsibilities and consequences. Sometimes the problem is caused by internal failure sometimes it caused by natural disaster and other acts of God, sometimes by end user error and sometimes by other parties who are outside of your control.

PTSD and IT

Chat GPT (I figured since I’m dealing with primarily an IT audience, I would use one of their favorite tools) defines PTSD as follows:

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition triggered by experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety, and uncontrollable thoughts about the event. People with PTSD may also experience emotional numbness, increased irritability, and difficulty sleeping. It can interfere significantly with daily functioning and relationships. Treatment typically involves psychotherapy, medications, or a combination of both.

My company sold telecommunications and data networking systems. If these systems failed, the organization could not function. Therefore, any issues with the systems had a strong negative impact on the end-user organization. Sometimes the issue was business survivability and other times it directly affected human life. Many of the organizations operated 24 hours a day seven days a week and 365 days a year. There were no unimportant days. They do not write five nines availability requirements into service level agreements for no reason.

Failure of these systems could be a very traumatic event. Lives and jobs could be at stake. How many of you could survive for an extended period of time if your organization had no external communications?

Is important to understand how our brain operates. There is a very strong flight or fight survival instinct built into every human being. Your brains prime directive is your survival. Subconsciously it interprets traumatic events as life-threatening. Therefore, your system generates a chemical cocktail that is designed to give you the best chance to survive. The non-conscious brain can interpret traumatic IT events as life-or-death situations based upon how you are reacting. If you are under high stress the brain creates the biochemical conditions that enable you to survive a fight or flight scenario. Unfortunately, sitting at a desk full of flashing network management consoles does not give your body the opportunity to express fight or flight activities. You just can’t takeoff running or start punching the screens. You have to stuff these emotions so you can give your full concentration on the problem at hand.

It is these situations that create the potential for PTSD. Everyone is different and some people are better at processing these situations. For me, as owner of the business these situations could drastically impact my business fortunes Therefore, my entire world view evolved so that I could avoid situations that created the possibility for failure. Despite my best efforts, they still occurred. All of us in IT understand there are so many variables and issues outside of your control that eventually you will face some kind of difficult technical problem that causes potential trauma.

Mission critical IT roles are responsible for the survival of the organization. They need to provide 24 hour a day availability and up time. Failures can create traumatic situations that cause trauma and anxiety that can affect the mental health of the IT worker.

Personal impact

I always tried to give off the impression that I was a tough and savvy businessperson with excellent troubleshooting skills that could handle any pressure or situation. I backed this up by trying to perform at a very high level. I also expected those who worked for me to do the same.

However, this was often a façade to cover up the fact that I was scared all the time that something was going to go wrong and ruin my customers organization, my business and the lives of both organizations' employees. Nothing like a massive carrier outage over which you have no control causing half your customer base to hate you and you can’t do anything about it but hope it gets fixed it before it’s too late.

The other issue is that the pressure is unrelenting and can intensify the higher up the management scale you climb. In my case, the pressure never ended. I was the CEO and the business owner. It was my responsibility to be there when things were at their worst. This is my particular situation. My situation was exacerbated by the fact that we were growing while being under financed. This made it difficult to afford the required staff to evenly spread around the stress.

As I look back, seven years away from my retirement, I can see how this impacted my world view and my life. For example, I was way more paranoid than I realized. Although sometimes being paranoid is quite useful. Phone calls after 9 o’clock at night would create a short but strong panic attack. My first thought was to go run to the network management screen before I even answered the call to see if there was a problem. Even though the vast majority of the time it was nothing to do with any problem, the severity of the impact of the few times it did occur created a sense of paranoia. Ot wasn’t until I had been retired for over five years that I could sleep with the phone turned off and that I did not jump over every after hours or weekend call.

Then there was the constant low-level anger that occasionally erupted into high-level anger. The anger is a response to the anxiety. You begin to resent everyone who may potentially cause you problems. This includes yourself. You knew that any mistake could potentially come back and haunt you in a very severe way. This caused anxiety that transformed into anger that was directed at those around you. It was impossible to perform or manage if you gave into this anger on a consistent basis, therefore you just had to live with it. Of course, when I retired, my brain was so used to living in that state that it took me seven years to reprogram it into a new reality.

Basically, I had to deal with paranoia, anxiety, and anger. This created mental conditions that I now recognize as PTSD. I do not want to leave the impression that I did not receive many positive benefits out of being in IT. I meet wonderful people who are still my friends, made money and created elegant solutions that solve problems. I love the art of creating IT solutions. However, I wish I had dealt with the trauma that affected me, my clients, my family and my employees. I would’ve incorporated mental health care into the operations of the company, and it also would’ve changed the way I dealt with people on many occasions.

I strongly believe mental healthcare should be viewed as a business tool to improve overall performance of the entire organization. There should be no moral context. Mental health healthcare should be viewed similarly to exercise, proper diet, and all the other things you need to maintain a healthy lifestyle. It needs to be integrated into the organizational ethos.

Summary

I spent from 1982 until 2017 working in mission critical IT. No one talked about mental health. You were supposed to deal with the stress and continue working. They were employee assistance programs, but they primarily dealt with very obvious problems such as substance abuse. They missed the subtle issues.

I certainly was no pioneer in employee mental health. I was concerned with running a business. It was not until after years of study that I understood how trauma affected performance. Unfortunately, this was about the time I retired. I wish I had started much earlier.

IT is extremely stressful. The consequences of failure are dramatic and traumatic. IT workers live under the constant anxiety of downtime, delayed due dates and acts of God that are out of their control. They are subject to verbal abuse from inside and outside the organization. This creates conditions for PTSD. I believe that is essential that IT workers understand their professions potential impact on their mental health. They need access to tools to help them mitigate the impact of IT trauma. If their company does not provide them, they should look to outside sources. I wish that I had taken these steps far earlier in my career.

IT trauma is real. The potential for mental health problems is real. Employees and employers need to recognize the problem, treat it as an environmental hazard if you provide tools to mitigating negative mental health impact.

In the end, I had a successful career. If I had taken better care of my mental health, I would’ve had a way more successful career. I’m writing this for those who are still out there so that they can begin to look at this to improve their lives and well-being.