A misunderstood mental illness that only 0.5% of the population has that is like a cross between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
I was making Windows and Web Apps 80+ hours a day, under a lot of stress and had just recently developed high blood pressure and my meds weren't right for it yet.
I ended up on short-term disability, got paid $500/month instead of my salary. 9/11 happened and then anyone with a mental illness is never looked at the same way again. I returned to work in November 2001 and once I had a panic attack from the stress I was fired for being sick at work.
I kept looking for work, anything I did find didn't last long, as soon as they discovered I was mentally ill, I got fired.
I ended up on disability in 2003, and been trying to get off of it since. Trying to get a startup going, but lost all of my friends and my family disowned me.
You cannot force IT people to work under a lot of stress and not expect them to develop a mental illness because of it. I suppose that is why they hire 20sometimes, they can handle the stress, but once they get mentally ill from it, fire them and hire someone to work cheaper to replace them. How many suicides in the industry before you figure out you need to treat people with dignity and respect and not stress them out so much?
I get accused of having autism or asperger syndrome because of the way I talk and write. I am 'high functioning' as opposed to those who are 'low functioning' and not as smart. Before World War II they would take high functioning mentally ill people and treat them to develop their talents to be used in complex stuff like code breaking, etc. But after world war II they only treat the low functioning mentally ill and the same thing doesn't work for high functioning mentally ill.
My p-doc claims I speak a certain Filipino (It is Tagalog but I didn't want to correct him) language that only other high functioning people can understand, and that this is common in the tech industry to speak that language that the average person cannot understand.
This cuts both ways. A psychologist might say, "People with no knowledge of psychology often relabel mental illness as genius." A critic of psychology might say, "Psychologists with no knowledge of natural human society often relabel genius as mental illness."
Asperger Syndrome, which famously and regularly did relabel genius as mental illness, has been thrown out of the new edition of the official diagnostic guide, but with little effect on its diagnosis rate (I still hear from parents whose children have been given this diagnosis, more than a year after it was officially abandoned).
My theory about psychology is that if you're gainfully, productively employed doing something that fewer than 1% of people can do, it might not be mental illness, it might be a positive evolutionary adaptation. But that's just my opinion (and that of the chair of the NIMH, and his predecessor).
Depression can have many causes. I can think of a really deplorable but easily avoidable one -- being told by people in pseudo-authority that your natural gifts actually stand as proof that you're mentally broken.
A misunderstood mental illness that only 0.5% of the population has that is like a cross between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
I was making Windows and Web Apps 80+ hours a day, under a lot of stress and had just recently developed high blood pressure and my meds weren't right for it yet.
I ended up on short-term disability, got paid $500/month instead of my salary. 9/11 happened and then anyone with a mental illness is never looked at the same way again. I returned to work in November 2001 and once I had a panic attack from the stress I was fired for being sick at work.
I kept looking for work, anything I did find didn't last long, as soon as they discovered I was mentally ill, I got fired.
I ended up on disability in 2003, and been trying to get off of it since. Trying to get a startup going, but lost all of my friends and my family disowned me.
You cannot force IT people to work under a lot of stress and not expect them to develop a mental illness because of it. I suppose that is why they hire 20sometimes, they can handle the stress, but once they get mentally ill from it, fire them and hire someone to work cheaper to replace them. How many suicides in the industry before you figure out you need to treat people with dignity and respect and not stress them out so much?
I get accused of having autism or asperger syndrome because of the way I talk and write. I am 'high functioning' as opposed to those who are 'low functioning' and not as smart. Before World War II they would take high functioning mentally ill people and treat them to develop their talents to be used in complex stuff like code breaking, etc. But after world war II they only treat the low functioning mentally ill and the same thing doesn't work for high functioning mentally ill.
My p-doc claims I speak a certain Filipino (It is Tagalog but I didn't want to correct him) language that only other high functioning people can understand, and that this is common in the tech industry to speak that language that the average person cannot understand.