RUNAWAY TRAIN

On August 18, Rosie O’Donnell took to social media to ask her followers to help her find her 17-year-old daughter Chelsea, who had run away from home the week before. O’Donnell posted an alert on her website and Twitter account stating that Chelsea hadn’t been seen since August 11.

One can only imagine the terror O’Donnell felt. Not only was her daughter missing, but Chelsea also had a medical condition that needed treatment. O’Donnell posted that her daughter had stopped taking her medication and “was in need of medical attention.” A spokesperson for the comedienne added that “Chelsea, like millions of people, lives with mental illness. It has been a difficult road for Chelsea and her family and they just want her back safe.”

Thankfully, Chelsea was found unharmed in Barnegat, New Jersey. Apparently, alerts from her peers and the pinging on her cell phone led police to her location and recovery. O’Donnell tweeted her thanks later that day, telling her followers "Chelsea has been found and is safe in police custody - thank u all for the help and light #missingchildren.”

While none of us outside of O’Donnell’s family knows the circumstances that led Chelsea to run away, at least one possible cause is clear. A quick search on social media on the subject of the missing teen revealed that there is no shortage of gossip about Chelsea’s family life, sarcasm about O’Donnell’s fitness as a mother, black humor suggesting she was kidnapped by Donald Trump and idle chatter among strangers about this incident, including speculation about the missing girl’s mental status. There were also reports citing her mother’s pending divorce and shaming commentaries as to how that may have contributed to her daughter’s distress.

It’s more than likely that Chelsea O’Donnell had easy access to all of this, as do most of today’s teens and even children. One can only imagine how a young person in turmoil and on the run was able to make sense out of any of it, and how much of the onslaught of cyberbullying against her family contributed to her distress and demoralization before she made the dangerous choice to head to the home of a stranger, a 25-year-old who had a history of criminal offenses whom Chelsea met on an online dating app called Tinder.

Cyberspace obliterates any sense of sanctuary that children once found when they were away from school and in their own homes. What happens when a teenager who is stressed or overwhelmed with her life and doesn’t have the coping skills to weather the storms of adolescence decides to run and is able to follow the story by simply scrolling through her phone?

All media – conventional and social – can be invaluable in helping to track down a missing child, as was clear in this case. That is a blessing.  Almost anything in the way of messaging that might lead to the recovery of a runaway child is welcome, even if it becomes a bit sensational.

But where’s the dividing line between offering assistance and adding to the emotional damage? What is the benefit in publicly revealing, among a population (that’s us, folks) that remains primitive in their understanding and acceptance of mental illness, that the runaway child has a history of mental health problems? While there should be no shame in having a mental illness, any more than with any other illness like diabetes, we still live in a culture that stigmatizes those who face these challenges. This story, and the subsequent cyberattacks joking about the condition, make that more clear than ever before.

Conventional media in recent decades has skewed more and more in the direction of sensationalism.  It’s not unheard of for certain media outlets to use expressions such as “crazy” or “looney” to refer to those with mental illness. And social media, a 24-7 town meeting with minimal monitoring of any consequence, is a runaway train that assumes more of the characteristics of chaos than order.

It’s clear that the very tools we now have at our immediate disposal that can be instrumental in the recovery of a missing child can also administer damage that the public ignores in the celebratory aftermath of the recovery of a child on the run.

And we must, as always, continue to fight the stigma that still plagues the 20% to 25% of people in this country facing mental illness. There should be no shame in such a diagnosis, any more than a diagnosis of diabetes or cancer.

In the O’Donnell case, it seems likely that the family made a decision to discuss Chelsea’s mental health issues to help find their child, and one cannot imagine a more compelling reason to “go public” with her condition. But it’s also likely that, given the ignorance that is so widespread regarding mental illness, it wasn’t an easy decision for them to make.

If this incident sheds some light and sparks some intelligent discussions about media sensationalism, the role of social media both for good and ill, and the stigma surrounding mental illness, then that will at least result in some positive outcomes from what has been a sad, personal family story made public.

Andrew Malekoff is executive director of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, a nonprofit children’s mental health center in Roslyn Heights, NY. He can be reached directly at AMalekoff@Northshorechildguidance.org