Still, Harmon sees the Net as a godsend for ongoing support and as a crisis aid even if the help isn’t always immediate. Goldberg agrees: “It’s mobilized people to all kinds of interventions.”[1.4] “I’m sitting here with a knife in my hand,” wrote a community college student asking for support from Walkers. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill myself—just hurt myself a little. I just feel as though I deserve pain.” She went on to tell how she had been in the National Honor Society in high school, gone on to an honors program at Loyola University for several years, then had been forced to leave. “I used to be strong, brilliant, and ambitious and now I am stupid and manic depressive. It just hurts so much. So I guess that’s why I’m cutting on my wrists tonight.” She told me when I wrote to ask about her condition—improved—that “I would be lost without Walkers.” A near-suicide in Santa Clara, California, aided by the newsgroup alt.support.depression, recalls: “I was so close it was amazing.” Medical debts had overwhelmed him. He was a single father and his boss had put him on probation after child care gobbled up too much work time. In tears he began his note: “It doesn’t really matter any more.” A New York woman saw the note and begged people online to help. Hundreds of messages came over the Net from as far as Japan. Tracked down despite his unsigned post, the California man received help not only from a colleague at work but also from police. “Something snapped,” he recalls, “and I just realized that there were a lot of people there who cared.”[1.5] Madness, another self-help group on the Net, is a mailing list for people who suffer drastic mood swings, hear voices, and see visions. Now, says Sylvia Caras, who runs the list, they can use the Net to carry on a dialogue with federal mental health officials. The Net offers a very _real_ voice for those the world might otherwise ignore. I could go on forever about support groups on the Net. Whether you’re short or extra tall, anorexic or 300 pounds, a victim of cancer or of child abuse, the Internet teems with people wanting to share their experiences with you—a task made much easier through the efficiencies of the Net, which have brought the cost of electronic mail down so much. I bristle when I hear people talk about the Internet as worthless unless big profits await megaconglomerates. The activities of support groups and other virtual communities may not show up in any country’s gross domestic product, but in the aggregate they’re just as valuable as anything to emerge from AT&T or Time Warner.