To begin with, I was baffled by some of these common mistakes. Surely it’s obvious? But after talking with a few people on Twitter, it turns out that maybe it isn’t. Developers: I assume you want people to know about your game, so here are a few suggestions of what you might like to consider doing in the future.

1. Have a website
Yes, I know, that IndieDB page sure is convenient. And your Facebook profile is looking all splendid and white and blue. But it communicates something about the effort you’re prepared to put into this project if that’s all you have. It’s especially problematic if the only way I can contact you is via a Facebook message, or similar, because quite frankly I’m not going to do that. I’m a professional person with an email address; why don’t you have one too?

Which brings me onto…

2. Display your email address somewhere sensible on your website
One of the most astonishing things I’ve discovered is that several games’ websites don’t have an email address on them at all, let alone displayed somewhere prominent. This is especially true when a developer decides their game’s website is going to take the form of a dev blog, but then seems to forget to put all the necessary information such as: What is your game about? and How might I get in touch with you to discuss it? I don’t especially want a contact form, either, because there’s no sure-fire way for me to guarantee that it’s even working, and I’ve had situations in the past where I’ve contacted a developer through a contact form to later find they never received my message. In an absolutely ideal world, you’ll have a dedicated inbox for press requests, named something sensible like press@yourgamename.com or something. But really, any way I might get in touch would be nice.

And when I do…

3. Reply to my emails
Seriously, what?  I mean, I thought it was safe to assume you’d want the publicity I’m offering you, but let’s pretend for a minute that you don’t. Your game’s at a stage of change at the moment, you’re hoping to keep what you’re working on close to your chest, and you’re planning a bit of a PR campaign to start in a couple of months’ time… so you… just don’t reply to my email? Really? In my world we have a word for that, and it’s called ‘rudeness’. My guess would be that one in five indie devs I email never even bothers to get back to me. Did you forget you set up that pr@ email address, or something?

4. Even better, reply promptly
Even if you are periodically checking your inbox and replying to messages from the press, it might be that you’re not being quick enough. These days, games journalism works at a remarkable speed, and if you’re self-employed, like I am, you need to make sure you’re keeping up and pitching things as quickly and frequently as possible. If I send you an email on Monday, then by the weekend I’ve almost certainly moved onto something else, got a reply from another developer, and starting working on that job, instead of the job I’d planned to pitch in relation to your game. If I’m especially busy at the time, it might be that you just blew your chance of getting me to write anything about your game at all – not because I’m being a dick, but because more work has arrived, more news has broken, and we’ve all moved onto new things.

5. Furnish me with decent screenshots, artwork, information, and so forth
Listen, guys? I know you really, really want to be a supercool games studio that can tease and drip-feed information about their game. I get that. Wouldn’t we all love to be in that position? But if you’re not, you absolutely cannot get away with being vague about what it is you’re actually working on. That single screenshot on your website which is of a mysterious-looking menu screen? It’s not going to cut it. Similarly, I know you’re trying to save on web space, but it’s useful for me to be able to access an image that’s more than 300 pixels wide. As for being vague about what the game even entails (especially if you say something like ‘totally unique’), well, there go your hopes of getting coverage. When I pitch an article, I need to also be able to provide high-res screens, sometimes some separate artwork, and – y’know – information about the game. Not having this stuff on your website is silly. If you still won’t give me it when I email you about it, you’re being ridiculous, and need a reality check.

6. Give me something playable
Your game looks awesome from the screenshots… but don’t they all? And you’ve managed to make it sound effortlessly compelling in your blurb, but then you’ve probably got someone who’s good at writing snappy copy working on your team. That’s all well and good, but the surest way for me to be able to feature your game on a major website is if I can email the editor and say, ‘Listen, I’ve been playing this indie game, and it’s awesome.’ Budgets are tight, and editors need to ensure their pages are being filled with only the most interesting content. Taking a punt on an unknown title that may or may not be good is a risk most aren’t willing to take.

7. Understand lead times
In journalism, even in today’s fast-moving world of web writing, things take time to prepare. So, your game’s all done and dusted and ready to go on-sale this coming Tuesday… where are your review copies? Have you sent them out yet? Of course, reviews may still trickle in over the next couple of months, but they’re far more impactful if you can time them along with release. So, let’s be very clear: in order to get a review on release day, you need to get a copy to online media two weeks before, and print media six weeks before. Things don’t happen instantly. Set an embargo if you like, but allow for the wait.

8. Spoil us
We journalists are people, just like anyone else. When we open an email to find that it’s obviously a mail-merged press release sent out to hundreds of journalists, it’s not very exciting. But if I open an email to find something personally addressed to me, that’s a delight! It’s even more of a delight if you’re – say – offering me the chance to come and play your game in your offices or at your house, or to meet up with me somewhere to show it. Maybe you’re giving me some assets that no one else has, or offering me a quick Skype interview? That’s awesome! Basically: make us feel like it’s us you really want to talk to, and we’ll be more inclined to help you out, because that’s just human nature. Remember, the major players fly us to foreign lands and put us up in five-star hotels. Those of us with an ounce of credibility don’t let it affect our judgement of their products, but that’s still what you’re up against.

9. Don’t, under any circumstances, try to ‘bribe’ us
Two indie developers have tried to get me to behave unscrupulously, which compares nicely to a grand total of zero major studios. People think of the big boys as being the unscrupulous ones, but that hasn’t been my experience. So let’s make this extremely clear: No, I shan’t accept a £20 iTunes voucher in exchange for a review of your game. It doesn’t have to be an outright bribe, either, because also, no, I probably won’t be copy-and-pasting one of the reviews you’ve written and pretending it’s mine just to save time. I have my professional reputation to consider. If you had an ounce of common sense, so would you. (Of course I understand that this is a tiny minority of developers, but I wanted to do ten tips, so put this one in too.)

10. For goodness sake, contact the right publications
I write a column about free games for PC Gamer. So it’s quite astonishing the number of emails I get asking me to cover something that simply doesn’t fit into these categories. Even if the name doesn’t make it clear, is it so difficult to look at what I write? You’re asking me to cover your new Half-Life mod, even though it’s quite obvious I only write about standalone games if you read more than a few of my columns? You’re sending me a bloody Android game? This is probably the most comfortable way to make me think you’re an idiot and never want to cover any of your games again.

Gosh, that ended on an angry note, didn’t it? Anyway, I hope these tips have been useful to some people.

On the internet today, news broke of a man in Leeds who, after discussing his depression with his employer, was told that the company would have to let him go. The reason? That his difficulties would be likely to lead to prolonged poor performance at work.

Employers aren’t allowed to fire somebody because of illness. Of course they’re not. People get ill, it isn’t their fault, and they should never have their right to work taken away from them as a result. But the burden of proof does, to an extent, lie with the person who is unwell. Do you have a doctor’s diagnosis to prove it? No? Tough: you’re not ill, then.

This manifests in a variety of different ways. Some employers require you to present a doctor’s note if you wish to take more than a couple of days off sick. In the case of mental health difficulties, it can be a lot more damaging. These illnesses don’t go away on their own after a week or so. They require effective treatment, in the long term, and this is at odds with the plans of big business.

But if a doctor will vouch for you, diagnose you with something, present a document to prove that it is the case, then the law kicks in. You can’t have your contract terminated. Unscrupulous companies will of course try to find a way around this – they’ll suddenly decide that your performance has been shoddy in the past, despite having never raised the topic with you before, for example. But at least the system’s there to protect you. If you’re ill, and a professional agrees, the ball should be in your court.

The problem in these cases lies with the NHS’ well-meaning strategy that suggests mental health difficulties aren’t necessarily illnesses, they’re just emotions that people go through from time to time, and the right balance of lifestyle changes and unintrustive assistance can get you back on the right track in a jiffy. In many cases, this is absolutely correct. What’s troubling is that the NHS is already overstretched, especially within the field of mental health, and so this non-diagnosis gets applied across the board.

Suddenly, the burden of proof is back on the sufferer, and this time it is not the employer that is demanding it. Recently I have heard stories from people who, by all accounts, seem to be feeling really rather bleak, displaying all the telltale signs of depression. Their GPs’ suggestions? Yoga. Cycling. Even spirituality.

Diagnoses aren’t handed out these days. They’re seen as unhelpful, and as adding to the already fierce stigma surrounding mental health problems. If you’re clinically depressed, people see you as sick, different, mental. If you’re just a bit down in the dumps at the moment, that’s perfectly normal. That’s what happens to people. There’s an idea that diagnosing someone with a mental illness creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t have a diagnosis, the theory states, then you’ll feel more optimistic about your outlook, and that in turn assists those attempting to recover.

But the man in Leeds will now have to convince his doctor to diagnose him with clinical depression if he wishes to take any legal action against his employer. Which, clearly, he should be doing. And it has a knock-on effect for those seeking treatment, too. Therapies with high efficacy rates are being held back from people who need them, simply because they don’t have a diagnosis for which these treatments are available on the NHS.

Oddly, even a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily cut it any more. I know someone with a diagnosed personality disorder. When this person went to their GP, saying the symptoms of this disorder had worsened and they would like to seek therapy once more, they were told that first they should try doing some exercise.

Now, of course, lifestyle changes can make a great deal of difference. But in cases beyond a spot of the blues, they can only be effective in combination with other treatments. It has been demonstrated.

Knowing this, the person stressed that they had a history of mental illness, a diagnosis, and recommendations from previous practitioners that they should continue with therapy should the situation worsen. The GP sneered that diagnoses ‘aren’t helpful’, and suggested that they would struggle to find the treatment they were seeking within the local area.

Pushing for some sort of treatment anyway, this person was told to expect a call back within four weeks. After this time, they contacted the GP once more. It turned out that the promised referral had very intentionally not been made, the doctor having noted that the patient hadn’t contacted them again after the initial assessment, and so probably wasn’t really in need of the requested treatment after all.

I’m sure this is an especially bad case, but these sorts of incidents appear to be fairly commonplace, and even in a brief chat on Twitter today I came across several people telling similar stories. They’re all the more troubling because of the stigma surrounding the illnesses. Sufferers often find it extremely difficult to approach GPs about these sorts of issues, for fear of being seen as weak, immature, needy. Responses like this only confirm these fears.

If you do get therapy for your depression, it’s probably going to be cognitive behavioural therapy, because that has the highest general efficacy rate for anxiety- and depression-related disorders. Yet that rate is only 40 percent. I spoke to my own mental health practitioner back when I was receiving therapy for similar issues, and she admitted that the NHS trusts are reluctant to offer anything but CBT, even though they know other treatments may be far more effective for a specific individual. Why? Because the services are already stretched to the limit of funding. They’re pushing CBT because it’s a relatively cheap and easy way of attempting to cure people – even though, in the majority of cases, it does nothing of the sort.

We need to be prepared to stand up and say that this is unacceptable. That doesn’t mean slamming the NHS and saying they should pull money from where the sun don’t shine. Every area of the NHS is having its funding cut year after year; the issue is not isolated to mental health. The difference is that, with mental health issues, there is no ‘one size fits all’ treatment. Each case demands tailored techniques to help a specific person through their own specific issues. And as our understanding of this increases, it surely seems like an area we should be focusing on improving – not merely settling for a system that’s better than the one we had in the ’70s.

In essence, our current system assumes that the mentally ill, unless they have a serious condition, will simply ‘get over it’ if they try hard enough. And while ever the system thinks that, popular opinion is never going to change.

Despite a series of deaths linked with PMMA – a highly dangerous chemical that’s been infrequently used to adulterate ecstasy tablets for a while now – police in Vancouver say that they are reluctant to reveal what the seized and tested adulterated tablets look like, because they don’t want users to think they are sanctioning other pills.

The thing that ecstasy should be – MDMA – is relatively safe when taken in controlled dosages, and when users understand how to regulate hydration and body temperature. PMMA, however, is considerably more unpredictable, and even low doses of the chemical have killed on a number of occasions.

Seemingly refusing to acknowledge that people are, in fact, going to continue to take recreational drugs, this police force has taken the decision to actively endanger users’ lives by withholding astonishingly important information.

In a report on Canadian news station CTV, criminologist Darryl Plecas (the report fails to explain why a criminologist is interviewed about a medical topic) says “using ecstasy is like playing Russian Roulette” – perhaps he would like to explain to the police department that doing so would be less like playing Russian Roulette if they would inform people of which tablets may be adulterated. While it’s true that any pills may be bad, and markings on tablets can be easily replicated, the police have knowledge of at least one tablet type that definitely could kill you. And yet they’re refusing to say which one it is.

This is one of the most flagrant examples of disregard for public safety from a police department that I have ever seen. I’d say it is likely that several more people will die because of it.

A lucky winner will be selected by the NowGamer team to write a new regular blog on the popular games website, whose other writers are all professional and paid. Games journalism might sound like the best job in the world, but whether that’s accurate or not it is still a job. NowGamer is turning it into something you win, not something you earn.

Understandably, many eyebrows were raised, and arguments broke out between those who strongly opposed the move and – mainly – NowGamer’s own staff. The arguments against the idea are numerous and convincing. If you’re good enough to be selected to write for a publication which usually pays for content, it has been said, then you are good enough to demand a wage as well. Imagine Publishing, NowGamer’s publisher, is a leading company with several national and international editorial properties, and everyone else who contributes receives remuneration. Why should the new guy or gal be any different?

More pressingly for me and my peers, this position is now gone from the market. It is not to be filled by a professional journalist, someone who has spent years honing their craft, working their way up the ranks, improving to the point where their words are worth something. A position usually reserved for the cream of the crop of writers – because let’s face it, everyone wants to be a games journalist – will now go to somebody who’s starting out and, rightly or wrongly, sees this as an opportunity. This isn’t an internship, whereby a position within a company is created for non-commercial means as a way of training up future talent. This is a position for a blog writer. Even if NowGamer offer the most comprehensive training package in the world to go along with this (I asked the team about this on Twitter, but did not receive a reply), they are still offering someone the amazing opporunity to produce publishable content for free, when such content is traditionally the work of experienced professionals, which sets a precedent that’s worrying for anyone in the industry.

I was initially troubled by the response of NowGamer staff members to the inevitable criticism which cropped up on Twitter in the hours after the competition was launched: comments that stated they ‘didn’t understand’ why people were so upset, writers saying they didn’t ‘want to get into’ a debate about it, suggestions that ‘if you don’t like it, you don’t have to enter’. But the more I think about it, the more I realise that NowGamer’s staff writers are the people we should really feel sorry for.

It wasn’t their decision to set up the competition. They put words on a page for people to read, and – as they have the skill – get paid to do so. Because of the way the media works, these writers become the face of the publication and, by extension, the company: they’re the names and noses and beards that we think of when someone says the name ‘NowGamer’.

But they are not the decision-makers, and they are employees of a company. It doesn’t matter what NowGamer’s staff think of the decision to exploit the enthusiasm of kids who think being a games journalist sounds really cool is repulsive. What matters is that the people who are the decision-makers are paying the writers to be representatives of whatever ideology they choose to impart.

If I’m a writer on NowGamer, I can’t voice my disgust on Twitter. I might have fought tooth and nail to prevent the competition from ever being launched, but now that I’ve failed, I’m obliged to sit on Twitter explaining to everyone how the trivialisation of an important profession is a really cool opportunity for gamers worldwide.

If I had to do that, I’d probably get a bit snappy too.

This time the stories – which I somehow hadn’t picked up on over the past few days – relate to two deaths at London’s Alexandra Palace, which has recently played host to a series of dance events. As well as the two fatalities, 20 further people were alleged to have been admitted to hospital, one of whom was critically ill.

It is ecstasy that takes the blame. And yet there is no evidence, it seems, that ecstasy was taken.

The Daily Mail‘s original headline, which began with the words ‘Ecstasy Alert’, has since been changed – perhaps when it became apparent that you can’t blame ecstasy for deaths when the body copy of your article notes that it is not known if those who died had taken ecstasy. It now says they took a ‘lethal drug’, although it is still made clear that it is only a suspicion that the men’s deaths were drug-related.

Chris Greenwood’s article serves to highlight the ways in which we can use both evocative language and clever syntax to present otherwise accurate information in a dubious manner.

“Two people have died and 20 more are in hospital after taking a deadly batch of the party drug Ecstasy, police fear,” is a perfectly true statement, but its phrasing somewhat glosses over that crucial information, relegated to a mere subordinate clause at the end of the sentence: ‘police fear’.

Detectives ‘suspect’ that perhaps the unfortunate clubbers ‘may’ have taken ecstasy before they died, seven hours apart from each other. And these deaths ‘highlight the dangers’ of ecstasy use, drills home one particularly nasty presupposition.

Rita Tierny of the Met Police said: “[i]t is too early to say what caused these men’s health to deteriorate” – but her quote is sandwiched between reams of unpleasant writing that aim to suggest the exact opposite.

Elsewhere in the piece, it is stated that two men in Ayrshire died earlier this year after taking ecstasy “six times stronger than normal”, but we already know this to be untrue. And the Government’s advisory body on the misuse of drugs, which has repeatedly suggested that ecstasy should be downgraded on the classification list, is referred to as “controversial” – a statement that appears quite rich once you consider that the controversy was created by the tabloid press in the first place.

The Mail’s article becomes especially interesting when you compare it to the BBC’s version of events. Here, a separate police spokesperson says: “At this time we have no further reports of anyone unwell at hospital having taken substances at the venue.” And yet the Daily Mail says that it is ‘understood’ that 20 people were taken to hospital. Intriguing? Well, we have already seen evidence of the Mail simply making up quotes: when they accidentally published the wrong result of the Amanda Knox case, for example, the resulting article included victorious statements supposedly from the prosecuting team, even though Knox was found not guilty of murder.

According to the Beeb, it could be a “rogue batch” of ecstasy – as in, one containing a chemical other than MDMA – that was the cause of the deaths. This is infinitely more plausible, though still unconfirmed.

How does The Sun tackle this issue? With an ENORMOUS HEADLINE containing a completely unmitigated statement of fact that these ‘deadly’ drugs ‘come from China’. Within three paragraphs we understand the slightly fuller truth: it is ‘feared’ that they consumed drugs that were ‘possibly’ made in China. (Side-note: I’m not sure exactly why this is a thing to be ‘feared’. The men are already dead, and the fact that a drug would come from China rather than – I don’t know – wintriest Russia seems to have no bearing on the risk involved with taking it.)

And then we get the remainder of the article from a member of FRANK, the youth-centric charity that attempts to raise awareness of the dangers of drugs. Now, I’ll lay my biases on the table: I think FRANK is an awful resource to be promoting in this way. The facts and figures on its website are outdated, and much of the information the charity comes out with sounds like it would belong far more comfortably on the pages of The Sun than those of a campaign that aims to reduce harm to our country’s young people. So oh, look, what a surprise to see what Chris Hudson has to say.

Hudson’s comments are most troubling because very little of what he says can be contended, and yet all of it is loaded with extraordinary scaremongering language that does nothing to aid understanding.

“The number of people who have taken ecstasy coming to my treatment centres has increased over the past year” might sound alarming, but it says nothing of why these people are in treatment, nor does it mention any other factors which might play a role in this increase of cases.

MDMA ”is very powerful,” he continues. “[A] small amount has huge effects so it’s a total gamble.” A sentence comprising a number of vagueisms. ‘Powerful’, ‘small’ and ‘huge’ are all relative effects. What is a small amount, and what is being gambled? Few ecstasy users would consider 35 high-end tablets – roughly what it would take to kill the average human – to be a small amount. That’s close to £200 worth of the drug.

Or is it? “They go for around £5 each, but I’ve heard of them selling for just 50p,” he says. Ecstasy tablets being sold for 50p might indeed be a huge draw for young people… but the statement once again glosses over the fact that these cases are surely a tiny minority.

After managing not to outright make stuff up for the majority of his article, Hudson does let the charade slip towards the end, when he claims that “almost all pills contain a stimulant, even ketamine (horse tranquiliser).” This is when my head smacked against my desk. Ketamine is not a stimulant. It’s a general anaesthetic, which is – I dunno – something akin to the exact opposite. I also wonder when we’ll stop this ludicrous idea of it being a ‘horse tranquiliser’. Ketamine is indeed used to anaesthsetise horses. It is also used to anaethsetise a whole range of animals, including humans.

Given my associations with the publication, I am extremely pleased that it is The Telegraph leading the way for the sensible coverage. There, Andrew M. Brown rightly calls for more legal tolerance of drug use, so that users may get their products tested for strength and purity without the worry of prosecution. (I’m going to conveniently skip the bit where he calls piperazines ‘worming powder’, falling neatly into some nonsense that was made up by the tabloids a few years ago.) It would be ideal if these drugs didn’t exist at all, Brown observes, but they do. And so we need to accept this, and deal with it.

Make no mistake: to be a tabloid reporter demands a tremendous ability with language. The writers on the Sun and the Daily Mail are incredibly talented. But they are bound by their positions to use that talent in unhelpful ways. Perhaps, through the method that Brown suggests, we could prevent a number of tragedies, and ascertain what these unknown tablets actually contain. Then we’d stop giving the alarmists so much ammunition.

Once again: drugs are not to be messed with. But exaggerating the risk does nothing to alleviate their dangers, and it does everything to muddy the potentially life-saving facts.

It’s called ‘Adventures in Depression’ . “Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed,” it begins, “but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason.”

At various points in my life I have displayed what could be – and have been – defined as “symptoms of depression and anxiety”. It’s cool, I kinda learned how to deal with them. Never before, however, have I seen these feelings explored so candidly, nor with such extraordinary simplistic accuracy.

Brosh tells the story of her own experiences with depression, recounting how, one day, she woke up feeling sad for no reason. And the more she challenged these emotions, the stronger they became, as she fought a battle in her own mind to understand why she felt this way, and why those feelings would not disperse.

Through carefully chosen words and perfectly evocative imagery, Brosh explores the nature of depression and the exact reasons why it is impossible to “just snap out of it”, demonstrating how difficulties in doing so can lead to further feelings of self-loathing which only add fuel to the fire of the initial problem.

And yet, in doing so, she also explores how this very inability to change the situation can lead to something extraordinary: that it’s possible to look back with hindsight, and realise you “just snapped out of it” accidentally, setting things off on the road to wellbeing. Recovering from depression requires tremendous effort on the part of the sufferer – effort that it can feel like it is impossible to make unless a situation forces you into doing so.

Like ‘Alot’, and indeed much of Brosh’s work, ‘Adventures in Depression’ is eye-openingly observant – but it is also unwaveringly poignant, and I found it to be deeply, profoundly moving. Give it a read.

In fact, it’s The Independent that wins the award for the most ludicrous coverage of “Mano 10″, supposedly a dangerous new drug that’s hit the streets, but in fact simply a brand of diazepam that’s been imported from India. Diazepam is, of course, more widely known as Valium, and is an anti-anxiety medication commonly prescribed to patients who suffer from panic attacks or insomnia.

In low doses, it calms your nerves and relaxes your muscles (which is why it’s also prescribed to people whose muscular problems are causing them a lot of pain). In higher doses, it’s a sedative. To The Independent, it’s actually heroin, which came as a surprise to me when I read their take on the matter earlier today.

Most problematic with The Independent’s coverage isn’t the body copy itself – which is actually more reasonable than other articles I’ve seen – but the headline. Whoever wrote the article clearly has a better grasp of the situation than others – the drug is correctly labelled a benzodiazepine, and Mano is identified as an Indian pharmaceutical company, which it is – which means “Children at risk as ‘pocket money heroin’ hits the streets” is no more than an utterly contemptible, irresponsible hack trying to draw in a hysterical crowd of naive parents to whom the arrival of a new drug is, understandably, cause for massive concern.

The quote comes from the police officer at the centre of the PR campaign, Sgt. Mark Peasgood, whose uninformed ramblings are being taken as gospel by the mainstream media, while people in the know – drugs workers, doctors or anyone with the slightest knowledge of psychiatry – get completely ignored.

The Independent quotes Peasgood at more length than I’ve seen elsewhere, and his comments really are preposterous. This is a man in a position of authority who, as far as I can tell, is simply making stuff up. This drug, he says, is leading to anti-social behaviour. Because people completely lose all their senses and memory while taking it, he recounts, they’re committing crimes such as burglaries.

Now, diazepam can indeed cause amnesia when taken in higher dosages, so I’m not doubting that there has been an instance known to the police on which this has occurred. However, claiming that a sedative drug is likely to be responsible for such behaviour is stark-raving bonkers. Try blaming alcohol, cocaine or amphetamines, if you like: such chemicals lower our inhibitions and lead us to under-evaluate risk. Or blame addiction potential: once someone needs their fix, it’s surprising how far they’ll go to get it. But to say diazepam causes people to take leave of their senses and commit crimes as a direct effect? I simply don’t believe it. I would be happy to eat my words if Sgt. Peasgood could demonstrate it to be true.

Peasgood’s comments are horrendously misinformed and misinformative, but as it is not necessary for the police to understand pharmacology, one might – on a good day – be inclined to forgive them. But how about the drugs workers we should be going to for comments on such stories? In fact, we might find that one of them makes some equally baffling statements – although I’d hazard a guess that Peta Godney was supplied some dodgy information at some point along the line, because you’d hope that she would otherwise know that in diazepam there is diazepam.

“The main danger with the drug is that we just don’t know what’s in it – it could contain anything,” she says in what was presumably a press release, as every paper’s article contains the same quote. Except we do know what’s in it, because quickly Googling ‘Mano 10′ yields this as the top result.

But wait: local publication This Is Hull and East Riding contains more words from Godney – and it emerges that it’s she who came out with the lines about the drug being “similar to benzodiazepine” and and such chemicals being “anti-depressants”. Tomorrow, I fully intend to attempt to contact Godney: because if these statements are genuinely what she believes, under no influence from either the media or the police, then she should not be working in her current position, and I think people ought to know about that.

The prevailing comment that runs through this absurd media coverage is that ‘Mano 10′ is a killer drug, one that could stop our children’s breathing, leaving them dead on the ground. Except that it would appear there is no evidence for this whatsoever. Diazepam is, even for teenagers, an incredibly difficult drug to overdose on. It is safe in rather high quantities. It will knock you flat out, and you might stay that way for some time, but you will not die. There are reports of people consuming as much as two grams of diazepam – 200 of these little blue ‘Mano 10′ pills (yes, as you might have guessed, the ’10′ refers to how many milligrams are contained within). That’s a ridiculous amount to take. You would be an idiot (and a rich one at that) to do so. In fact, any more than two or three of these pills and you’d be asking for an unpleasant time. But reports of it being a killer drug are simply unfounded. They seem to be based upon nothing but a couple of hospitalisations, but in both cases it seems someone took some diazepam, passed out, and was taken there as a precautionary measure. “Frothing at the mouth” is kinda just what happens when a potent sedative knocks you out: it’s nothing to be afraid of, necessarily.

(The exception to this is if the diazepam is taken with alcohol, which can indeed be very problematic. What’s alarming is that there has been no mention anywhere of this potentially fatal contraindication. That‘s your horror story, dear media; not the diazepam itself.)

So where does this leave us? With a police department aggressively campaigning against a drug despite knowing nothing about it, and a media populace happy to print the story verbatim without any fact-checking whatsoever; and, worse, a major broadsheet newspaper whose writer clearly does understand the issue, at least somewhat, but is comfortable with running an alarmist, inaccurate headline anyway. It’s true that there’s a new science scare story every other week, and that they are quickly buried away in the archives, but this represents a massive, embarrassing failure on the part of the British press: where there was the opportunity – perhaps the need – to print a measured and accurate story about the dangers of combining prescription medications with legal drugs such as alcohol, the papers ran with the police’s PR nonsense that doesn’t make any sense. I really hope that, in the end, the ‘Mano 10′ death count stays at zero.

The article reports that “teenagers are risking death by taking a new drug that is sold for as little as 50p a pill.” It’s called Mano 10, says the piece, and it has effects that are – quite bizarrely and contradictorily - similar to both heroin and amphetamines.

However, the drug is in fact not new. The pills marked ‘Mano 10′ are a brand of diazepam – more commonly known by its most prominent brand name, Valium.

It’s a quite remarkable error for the paper to make, but impressively they attempt to back up their made-up story by going to the police for quotes. (If I were less cynical, it would continue to surprise me that journalists go to the police for quotes on drugs stories, instead of scientists. However, we do live in a country where drug policy is considered to be a purely legal matter, rather than having anything to do with medical policy at all.)

And the police say that “these pills are being sold quite openly on the streets and they are being sold for 50p, which is pocket money. We know of one 15-year-old girl who started taking Mano 10 on a Monday and by Friday she was addicted to it.” It’s a fucking disgrace, as Bernard Manning would say.

The police also know of a 17-year-old boy who has taken the drug, which is, spectacularly, enough for Sgt. Mark Peasgood to claim that the drug “can kill”. Of course, it can. Much like any drug – legal, illegal or prescription-only – can kill if not taken sensibly. Remember, you can quite easily die from drinking too many cups of coffee.

Next, enter PC Dan Lee. He says that “Mano 10 is sold as a headache tablet and is produced in Thailand.”

Pardon?

Let’s just read that again to make sure I’ve got it right.

“Mano 10 is sold as a headache tablet and is produced in Thailand.”

Okay.

Diazepam is never, ever used to treat headaches, to my knowledge. It’s used to treat cases of severe anxiety, and sometimes to tackle persistent insomnia. If you’ve got a headache, you take paracetamol, aspirin or ibuprofen. If it’s absolutely agonising you might be given something like codeine in a low dose. Diazepam does not cure headaches. It’s also produced in a great number of countries other than Thailand, including right here in the UK.

Worryingly, reports The Metro, it is believed that in the UK, a version of this tablet is being sold that is “laced with heroin”.

For 50p.

As with all these reports of Drug A being “laced” (always “laced”) with Drug B, or of super-strength versions of Drug C arriving on the scene to murder our teenagers, I would like people to ask “why?” before mindlessly reporting it.

Why would you add heroin to diazepam and then sell it for less money than you could make by just selling the heroin?

To get the kids addicted? Sell them the diazepam: it’s an addictive drug anyway. But then why would you need to get kids addicted to a drug? It’s not like there is a shortage of addicts who will happily swap some coins for some chemicals.

You can’t lace a pill with a thing. Either the thing is in it, or it isn’t. Putting heroin in one of these pills would be pretty silly. It’s relatively benign when taken orally (it converts to morphine pretty quickly), and you’d have to put far more of it in there to get much of an effect. It would be terrible business sense on the part of the producers and dealers.

Anyway, it’s nice to know that Peta Godney, who works for Compass, a drugs charity, knows that Mano 10 is “similar to benzodiazepine”. So similar, in fact, that it is a benzodiazepine. The Metro reports that this drug (not category of drugs) is an anti-depressant. But benzodiazepines are never prescribed for this unless the depressive symptoms are related to an anxiety disorder.

Godney says benzos are respiratory depressants, “which means you are in danger of stopping breathing.” Well, it doesn’t really mean that, Peta, but I’ll give you this one: you at least know that “respiratory”, in this instance, is something to do with your lungs.

Slow claps all around? I might try to get in touch with the people interviewed tomorrow, to discern quite how much of this alarmingly inaccurate report is invented by The Metro, and how much of it is people who really should know better providing a naive journalist with completely nonsensical information. It could be the latter. The police have been known to file utter rubbish as press statements before, after all.

Either way, the media’s science reporting – and remember, drugs are medicine is science, not law – continues to baffle and upset me.

It’s a strange criticism, not least because – well – yes, that’s how online editorial works.

If people don’t click on your articles, it means you don’t have any readers, and your publication cannot make any money. This is the business of online journalism.

Every single website you’ve ever read is either a hobbyist endeavour that has no desire to go pro – and as such will never be able to deliver the same level of content as its professional counterparts – or it attempts to carefully craft every article to be as desirable to read as possible.

It’s the same in print, though. Think about what goes on the front cover of a magazine, or the front page of a newspaper. Think about how those headlines are crafted, how those contents boxes are positioned. They’re “for the hits” too. They’re to grab your attention, and your coins. No one seems to mind about that, for some reason.

There are a few occasions on which people seem to get really riled up by this. The first is low-scoring reviews for generally high-scoring games. Edge takes a lot of flak around the internet for this. The notion that Edge scores games low just to get attention is hilarious because they’ve been consistently one of the more critical review publications for a long time now: far longer than the magazine has had its own website, let alone published reviews upon it.

Edge almost never mentions reviews on its front cover. You have to delve inside to find the scores. It even attempted to drop scores once, but there was such an outcry that they lobbed them back in just one issue later.

Then there are the editorials. If you so much as dare to voice a dissenting opinion, you’re doing it for the hits. Regardless of whether you’re being honest or not. If you voice an opinion that’s straight down the middle of the road, either no one reads it, or people read it then moan that it’s stating the obvious. Our readers would like us to shut up either way, it would seem.

Or how about news stories? There are some headlines that are dubious enough that I’d agree. Taking a quote out of context to make it sound more controversial than it is, for example. That’s the seedier side of “doing it for the hits”. But the art of a well-crafted headline is a fascinating thing. There are ways to “do it for the hits” that don’t require you do be disingenuous in any way. Is that okay?

The funny thing is that controversy in the online world only works for social traffic. Which amounts to so, so little of the traffic that goes through any website above amateur level. As a guide, BeefJack’s pretty small in the scheme of things, but only around 20% of our pageviews come through the likes of N4G, Digg, Reddit, or subject-specific forums. In the grand scheme of things, controversy works only the tiniest amount. In fact, the best way to “do it for the hits”, we’ve found, is to be as straight-up informative as possible, and to drop the controversy altogether.

We’re all doing it for the hits, then – just not in the way for which we’re continually criticised.