by asto on 7/28/12, 4:06 PM with 72 comments
by hobin on 7/28/12, 5:27 PM
I've got clinical depression. What this means is that there is something fundamentally wrong in my brain that causes me to be depressed. There is no direct environmental cause that makes me depressed. Now, here's what many people get wrong about severe depression:
Severe depression does NOT mean that exercise, a healthy diet and getting a social life won't help at all.
Rather, depression completely drains your motivation to do any of those things. Which in turn make you more depressed. Which makes you even less likely to do any of them. And so on and so forth. It's 'positive' feedback, but it starts with a neurological problem. This is why all the 'cheer up'-sort of advice doesn't help people who're depressed, and why it tends to only make them more miserable.
Of course, this is only my experience. I'm quite sure there are plenty of people who are depressed for reasons found in their environment, and then get stuck in the same loop. But it would be ridiculous to presume that I'm unique in this regard.
by paulrademacher on 7/28/12, 4:32 PM
> There is no computing project that is worth your life. Turn off the computer. Seek help. Get outside, enjoy the green grass, the birds in the trees. Talk to people you know. Talk to strangers! Drive to Wisconsin, and find out whatever it is they do there. Build a treehouse. Park on a parkway and drive on a driveway. Make a macaroni necklace. Visit a dairy. Climb a rock. Seek life.
Every point except for Seek Help is just "cheer up, pal" bunk.
by Udo on 7/28/12, 4:30 PM
by noonespecial on 7/28/12, 7:43 PM
This is advice for someone who had a bad day. This is not advice for someone who is depressed! These suggestions assume that the person has hope. Or even considers the possibility of ever having hope again. There's just no way I can tell someone who hasn't been on this train what it's like to ride it. It's like being dead in a way. Would you tell a dead man to get out and enjoy the grass? It's a bit like that.
by zackmorris on 7/28/12, 7:07 PM
These days I think of programming the way I think of working out: intense bursts of focus on creativity for maybe 2-4 hours if I'm lucky, and then hours to days of melancholy because the tools and methodologies I'm using are all garbage.
Examples of mainstream trash: ios, objective-c, flash, php, c++, 802.11, usb, xml, html5, mpeg, mp3, dram caches, opengl, just on and on and on. Literally every tool I use on a daily basis, every file format, every communication protocol, everything, all fatally flawed in some way. My life has been an almost complete waste.
I don't know much about IDE/ATA but it must be quite a garbage dump to traverse. Turning that into something clean like a socket/file reference is remarkable. Just think of all the things that don't work on hard drives: how they fail to write the last bit of data in a power failure or maintain directory consistency, how they were so far behind on caching and hybrid flash/platter drives, just on and on, a tower of babel of remarkably cheap but inadequate hardware. Dealing with that, and the layers of politics that perpetuate such monstrosities would be enough to drive a person mad.
Thank god I'm not depressed though. I was severely out of it from 2000-2010 for a lot of obvious reasons but I finally let everything go and have never been happier. I. Am. Not. Depressed. It's glorious to say, I feel it all the way to my core. Life can turn around, and one day you'll wake up and realize that you don't give a crap about solving the world's problems anymore, because it's all too far gone. It's not your fault. Just find your niche and reach some level of sustainability, and save the world later.
by andrewvc on 7/28/12, 4:24 PM
If you feel like making a difference I'd recommend donating to the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. They fund studies into mental health disorders, an area of science that is still only vaguely understood.
by bschlinker on 7/29/12, 5:44 AM
Towards the end of my internship, I was there until 10 PM some days working on code. Andre would see my cube lights on and come over to talk to me. Considering how I was just working all alone when there that late, I really appreciated the brief talks, as they provided me when an opportunity to think about something other then the problems within my code for a few moments. He would often share a few technical tips or an interesting story with me during our conversations.
Although I didn't work with him much, it's disappointing to hear of his death. It seems like most of the comments in here (on HN) are regarding mental illness -- something which I never observed during the brief period of time that I knew him. Regardless of his reason for taking his life, I'm glad I had the opportunity to meet him and thank him for those brief conversations.
by catastrophe on 7/28/12, 5:35 PM
What does that mean? Nothing, except I completely see myself in Andre's description. What am I doing about it? Exercising, reading affirmations, trying to watch the diet (tough when broke) etc, etc.
But I read Andre's story and it makes me very sad.
by steve8918 on 7/28/12, 6:23 PM
He was working in patent law in NYC for a few years, and then abruptly quit and moved back home. He said he had some ideas on businesses, and it seemed rational. He started venturing into religion, not for the sake of religion, but to explore the concept of morality. He didn't have a Jewish background, but he became very interested in Judaism because of it's views on morality, and I even bought a book on the Talmud at his insistence, so that we could talk about it. We would have pretty elaborate discussions on morality, etc, over email. He was engaged to get married to a lovely girl, and things looked fine.
Then, just before they got married, they abruptly cancelled their wedding. I emailed him, and I asked him "How are things going? Enquiring minds want to know!"
His only response was "Who are these enquiring minds that you are asking on behalf of?" We exchanged a few emails after that, he accused me of being immoral, and then I never heard from him again.
I contacted his fiancee, and apparently he was exhibiting signs of paranoid schizophrenia. He had become increasingly paranoid over the last few years, and become more and more disassociated with reality.
After that, he basically disappeared. He was always a bit paranoid about leaving his mark on the Internet, and had multiple fake email addresses, so trying to track him down was basically impossible.
Last year, after many years of no contact, I got a phone call from him, presumably from a number that wasn't his, because he had recently realized that in one of his discussions on his business over 10 years ago, he may have gotten me to agree to terms that would have been personally unfavorable, and he wanted to release me from all obligations from this agreement. I didn't know what he was talking about, but we never did anything more than talk about things, and his "businesses" never amounted to anything except talking. But I agreed to be absolved from those obligations. Then asked how things were with him, and he was extremely vagued, and then hung up on me.
It's very sad, because he was very brilliant, but it's clear he is mentally ill. And there's nothing I can do about it. He has no siblings, and both his parents are dead, so there's no one I can even contact.
It sounds similar to the case of Garzik in that I don't know if the concept of "take care of yourself" is relevant. He probably didn't realize he was mentally ill, if what the original emailer said was true about him being paranoid. It probably would have been something the family would need to pursue, but getting someone evaluated, etc, is hard, and as the emailer said, it would only increase the negative feedback loop for Garzik, since he would suspect everyone was out to get him, so it's a really tough problem to solve.
by Chmouel on 7/28/12, 7:18 PM
by Monotoko on 7/28/12, 6:02 PM
by olliesaunders on 7/28/12, 11:24 PM
Citation needed.
by combataircraft on 7/28/12, 5:28 PM