I've said it before and I'll say it again: the blogging community can be a lifesaving resource for new moms (and soon-to-be-moms and been-there-done-that moms and everyone in between and beyond.) That's my Internet - a community of caring peers who are always there to provided support and caring and practical help. But what about the Internet that stood by and watched a young man broadcast his suicide on YouTube? What is it that separates the nurturing Internets from the ones that scream 'jump! jump!' at a young man on a virtual ledge?

And what does it all mean for those of us who have found a key to surviving depression and other mental health challenges online?

Ayelet Waldman took on that question last week on NPR. A writer and former blogger (her blog was called Bad Mother; no relation to yours truly), she talks about how, in direct contrast to the Abraham Briggs tragedy, her brush with suicide was averted precisely because the Internets were there to talk her down off of her virtual ledge:

"Like Mr. Briggs, I suffer from bipolar disorder, but while his
online "community" failed to act to save his life, my own stepped in to save mine... One night, alone in the house with my children, and in the throes of the worst depression of my life, I wrote on my blog,"It does not help to know that one's mood is a mystery of neurochemistry when one is tallying the contents of the medicine cabinet and evaluating the neurotoxic effects of a Tylenol, Topomax, SRRI and Ambien cocktail."

Within hours of my scary blog post, a woman whom I'd met and become friends with online read it, called me and refused to hang up until I telephoned my psychiatrist. I have no way of knowing whether, without that phone call and without the dozens of supportive comments that soon afterward began to pop up on the blog, I would have followed through on my implied threat, but when my cyberfriend called, I was holding enough pills to kill myself."

Waldman's online community saved her life, she says - but to contrast this to the online community that did nothing to save Mr. Briggs is, she insists, a mistake. The Internet - that is, interacting in a virtual space, with the attendant anonymity, etc, etc - does all sorts of funny things to people, but it's not a direct function of the Internet that causes people to be more helpful or more hurtful. People will be those ways anyway. "There is no doubt that the anonymity of the Internet can allow human behavior to turn toxic," she writes, "but fundamentally the impulse to LOL as a young boy kills himself on your computer screen is no different from that which leads some people to shout "Jump!" at a man standing on a window
ledge." End of the day, the Internet might provide new ways for human beings to hurt each other, but human beings have always been inclined to hurt each other. The mean are new; the impulses are not. The good news is, the Internet also provides new ways and means for us to care for each other - that is, to act upon the already existing impulses that we have to be considerate and supportive and caring.

Which is something that we all have to cling to. Waldman was not the first mother - and certainly not the first woman - to struggle with mental health issues online. Search 'depression' or 'PPD' on BlogHer alone and you'll come up with countless blogs and countless posts, most of which can probably make the claim that, at some point, the Internet saved their lives, too.

What do you think? Are we talking about the same Internets here - or is there a bad Internets and a good Internets, and be ye all forewarned that something virtually wicked could your way virtually come if you seek love and support there? And is it really healthy to seek help for things like depression online? (Or is it - as a writer at Jezebel insisted - just a new form of maternal vanity, one that causes more harm to one's children than it does good for one's self?)

Catherine Connors blogs as Her Bad Mother, where she's currently contemplating how to be more Linus-like in her approach to the holidays.