Tiina Parikka was half-naked when she read the email. It was a Saturday in late October 2020, and Parikka had spent the morning sorting out plans for distance learning after a Covid outbreak at the school where she was headteacher. She had taken a sauna at her flat in Vantaa, just outside Finland’s capital, Helsinki, and when she came into her bedroom to get dressed, she idly checked her phone. There was a message that began with Parikka’s name and her social security number – the unique code used to identify Finnish people when they access healthcare, education and banking. “I knew then that this is not a game,” she says.
The email was in Finnish. It was jarringly polite. “We are contacting you because you have used Vastaamo’s therapy and/or psychiatric services,” it read. “Unfortunately, we have to ask you to pay to keep your personal information safe.” The sender demanded €200 in bitcoin within 24 hours, otherwise the price would go up to €500 within 48 hours. “If we still do not receive our money after this, your information will be published for everyone to see, including your name, address, phone number, social security number and detailed records containing transcripts of your conversations with Vastaamo’s therapists or psychiatrists.”
Parikka swallows hard as she relives this memory. “My heart was pounding. It was really difficult to breathe. I remember lying down on the bed and telling my spouse, ‘I think I’m going to have a heart attack.’”
Someone had hacked into Vastaamo, the company through which Parikka had accessed psychotherapy. They’d got hold of therapy notes containing her most private, intimate feelings and darkest thoughts – and they were holding them to ransom. Parikka’s mind raced as she tried to recall everything she’d confided during three years of weekly therapy sessions. How would her family react if they knew what she’d been saying? What would her students say? The sense of exposure and violation was unfathomable: “It felt like a public rape.”
Therapy had been Parikka’s lifeline. Now 62, she’d had three children by the time she was 25, including twins who had been born extremely prematurely in the 1980s, weighing only a few hundred grams each. One grew up with cerebral palsy; the other is blind. Parikka spent years juggling medical emergencies, surgeries and hospital stays with a demanding job and a crumbling marriage. “During those years, nobody ever asked me, the mother, ‘How are you?’”
View image in fullscreen ‘My heart was pounding. It was really difficult to breathe … It felt like a public rape’: Tiina Parikka. Photograph: Juuso Westerlund/The Guardian
She divorced in 2014 and met her current partner a year later. By then, her children were adults with independent lives. After decades of putting everyone’s else’s needs before her own, she should have been finally able to exhale. Instead, she had a breakdown. “I had full-scale anxiety running through my body all the time. I couldn’t sleep. I had panic attacks. I couldn’t eat.” Driving at high speed on the highway one day, dark thoughts descended. “I was thinking, I wouldn’t mind if this car crashed.”
In search of urgent help, she went to Google, which led her to Vastaamo, Finland’s one-stop digital shop for people in search of psychotherapy. No doctor referral was necessary. She managed to book a session for the very next day. “It was that easy.”
Being able to confide in a total stranger felt liberating. She told her therapist things she had never told another soul. “Trauma in relationships. The disappointment and tragedy of having disabled children, and the influence it had on my life,” she says. “Silly things, childish things. It’s very human to feel hate, anger, rage.”
After Parikka read the email that left her struggling to breathe, she had no idea where to turn for help. She rang the emergency services, but the police told her to get off the line; they needed to keep it free for real emergencies. In her bathrobe, her phone still in her hand, she felt utterly alone.
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