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I know nothing about depression and even less about the "startup community", but I still think that this might be a good thread to throw in some of my thoughts,

by edw519 15y ago

I know nothing about depression and even less about the "startup community", but I still think that this might be a good thread to throw in some of my thoughts, for what they're worth: First, a little background... In March, 2008, I attended my first Startup School. Even though I had been programming for many years, it was my first in-person exposure to the "startup community". It was incredible! For the first time in my life, I felt like I was immersed into the group of people with whom I belong. (The closest feeling I had before that was here at Hacker News.) Two great days talking about passionate things with like minded people! Then I got on the plane home and sat with 2 girls reading "People Magazine". All I could think was, "Welcome back to the real world." Fast forward to today... Sorry to say, I'm having trouble distinguishing our "community" from the "community" of those 2 girls. Sure, they were probably interested in celebrities while we're interested in technology & business, but the similarities are still striking: We're both often caught up in the latest fads, the "cool" stuff, what the fanboys are interested in, who got funded, who met with whom, who knows whom, where everyone's hanging out, etc., etc., etc. There are days when I come to Hacker News and have trouble finding a single reference to the most important thing: our customers. I became interested in building digital things because it was such an incredibly cool way to provide for others. I still feel that way. Whenever I start thinking about the "startup community" and all the details we mistake for issues, it's no wonder people get depressed. Sometimes we just lose our way. But whenever I start thinking about my customers, what they need, why they need it, and how cool it is to help them get it, it's almost impossible to get depressed. If you think you're getting depressed because of all the distracting details, find someone who needs something, focus on them instead of yourself, and build something. Just a thought from an unqualified observer too busy and having too much fun to get depressed.

tptacek 15y ago
Suicidal depression rarely has anything to do with how much fun you're having. It's an illness. You can't pushup your way out of cancer, jog your way out of MS, and you can't fun your way out of real depression. You make several good points, but let's not trivialize mental illness. I doubt (a lot) that it's something endemic or "taboo" among startups, but any time we can make any group of people more aware of the signs and symptoms of clinical depression, let's do that. (Lost several friends, one of them close, to suicide).
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  >I doubt (a lot) that it's something endemic or "taboo" among startups, but any time we can make any group of people more aware of the signs and symptoms of clinical depression, let's do that. Indeed. Also keep in mind the symptoms can be extremely subtle, likely suppressed due to shame, and potentially impossible to notice without some active probing, accidental or otherwise. Ilya's recent suicide that seemed to take everyone by surprise was a reminder of that. Brings to mind the saying, 'Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.' Some moreso than others.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  As far as I know, the standard treatment for depression is medication to provide a short term fix (thereby convincing the patient that the therapist can help) and cognitive behavioral therapy as a long term fix. As I understand it, CBT is basically teaching the depressed person how to "fun" (or stress manage/expectation manage) their way out of depression. In any case, I believe the distinction between "illness" and "not an illness" is usually not very important - it's usually an attempt to appeal to medical authorities rather than address fundamentally social and ethical issues. http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...
  - lotharbot 15y ago
    There is no "standard" treatment for depression as a whole. There are different types of depression, with different treatments. I know one person who will probably be on medication for her whole life (bipolar), another who needed medication for about a year and found therapy to be a waste of time (postpartum), and some for whom therapy was the primary treatment.
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    I'm sorry but I take issue with your tone. I've been on around 4 antidepressants since reaching adulthood and I've dome (I'm still somewhat still doing) CBT. I'm fine now without further treatment but while I was being treated I must say that the pills work. Some more than others. Some people need them forever and some don't. The point of taking them is to get you motivated and just functional enough to start working out the cause. In my case they gave me just enough energy to get slightly involved in a few things. Those things then snowballed to the point where I didn't need the pills and had other outlets. I still am prone to be depressed far easier and more often than most but the treatment got me to a point where I have the tools lift myself out of it each time despite the fact that depression really is totally crippling and makes you believe there is no solution. I still go to CBT though not often just because I really enjoy it and I get a lot out of it. Even the therapist agrees I'd be fine without it but it makes me happy so I go once or twice a month. Depression is an illness just like addiction or diabetes. I mention addiction because that's another one people like to write off as a moral failing or something that just isn't a real illness. I could be misunderstanding your point but my experience tells me you're wrong on this.
jpdoctor 15y ago
> But whenever I start thinking about my customers, what they need, why they need it, and how cool it is to help them get it, it's almost impossible to get depressed. I noticed you omitted how-much-the-customers-will-pay-for-the-product from your list.
true_religion 15y ago
> Sure, they were probably interested in celebrities while we're interested in technology & business, but the similarities are still striking.... I'd relate the start-up community to the celebriy community in this way: In both communities there are those who have succeeded: Celebrities and Startup Founders with an exit. There are those who want to do: People who move to Hollywood, and people who move to Silicon valley. And there are finally those who only watch others doing: People who only read People Magazine, and People who only read Techcrunch. The girls you saw were the last bit but HN is something akin to an industry journal/forum---we have a greater mix of the first two bodies: the doers. So when an article on HN appears about depression in the startup community, I instantly think of people who have their own startup, work 12 hours aday, and pour their savings into building a product based on a dream. These guys are nothing like a passive watcher, and the causes of their depression ought to be far different from merely mistaking 'details for issues'.
- philwelch 15y ago
  > but HN is something akin to an industry journal/forum---we have a greater mix of the first two bodies: the doers That may have been the case a few years ago, but I think the proportion of founders and hackers on HN has been massively diluted.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
I get the sentiment and I'm glad youve found your passion but I most definitely see that you're right when you say you know nothing of depression and the startup community. Not to knock you at all but depression is one of those things that you can only "get" if you've experienced it. Like sex or love or being a billionaire. It's almost indescribable. I've been to the depths of it and back. Imagine the worst sadness you've ever felt in your entire life. Multiply that by 2. Then add in a feeling of loneliness. The kind of loneliness where you feel like a man with no home, no family, no friends, and strangers hate you. Then your own mind turns against you. All logic is gone and your inner voice is on an infinite loop telling you that there is no way out, things always have and always will be this way, that you are not exactly worthless but worth less than any person you know including strangers on the street (yeah, that includes the homeless and destitute). Now that you imagine feeling this way you also must imagine taking every ounce of energy you have and throwing it away. You have no energy, you're constantly tired, and your body even aches as if you were sick at times! The worst part of all is that these negative thoughts and feelings feed on each other, digging you deeper and deeper into depression. People in that state will do anything they can to make it stop. Drug abuse/self medication is very common along with suicide. When you're depressed you can't see that there's a way to gradually make your life better so you reach for instant gratification. The instant gratification only leads to more problems. It's such a vicious cycle that you just wouldn't believe. So I'm a person who's been affected by deep depression and it's consequences and I'm also just about to reach my first anniversary of being in business. Startup depression has hit me hard twice in this past year (most likely because I'm more prone to it). So after my long rambling rant I'll get to the point: there are no easy answers but one thing that will help out people suffering from this is just to talk about it publicly. There are far more people suffering than we know about. Whenever I see a post on startup depression I have the exact opposite reaction to when I see yet another post about how someone loves Emacs. I think "thank god! I'm not the only one!". Just talking about it is a big relief to people because they know they're not alone and can learn or help each other. There will never be enough posts about startup depression. Ever.
- lusr 15y ago
  An excellent description of severe depression. I wonder how many people who have never experienced a depression episode will manage to have empathy for it, though. I say this because now that I'm on the path to recovery, it seems I can recognize all aspects of your description based on my memories but I can't comprehend my memories as a personal experience any more. It's almost as though I'm trying to access a memory written for an incompatible mental model (like trying to load an old version of file into newer software). In a way this makes perfect sense because what CBT did was restructure my mental model of the world. It also seems give me a useful way to understand why healthy people struggle so much to understand depression - the underlying causes (chemical imbalance; dysfunctional thought processes) are incompatible with their way of reasoning about the world. I completely agree that being open about one's difficulties is crucial to recovery and living a healthier mental life. It's unfortunate how many apparently depressed people I know in my field who identify with applying the concepts I've explained to them (from CBT), but the second they find out the book I recommend to learn more ("Feeling Good" by David Burns) is about "depression", they ALL lose interest. (I understand this, though, because I was the same until I reached a point where I had to do something about my depression or risk serious consequences.)
6ren 15y ago
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that." - John Stuart Mill (who suffered serious depression) on Carlyle's "anti-self-consciousness theory" http://theliterarylink.com/anti_selfconsciousness.html http://theliterarylink.com/anti_selfconsciousness.html A wrinkle on serving customers as this purpose is that they pay you. So... are you serving them, or making money? Being a servant of two masters is tricky (e.g. who is served by "raising prices"?). A resolution is to elevate one as the master, which prevails when they conflict. Also customers can be fickle (like those 2 communities), not knowing what they want. So, yet another purpose is to make something great, according to your ideals (if others like it, so much the better...). This is not other-directed, but at least not self-directed.

by edw519 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago

Suicidal depression rarely has anything to do with how much fun you're having. It's an illness. You can't pushup your way out of cancer, jog your way out of MS, and you can't fun your way out of real depression. You make several good points, but let's not trivialize mental illness. I doubt (a lot) that it's something endemic or "taboo" among startups, but any time we can make any group of people more aware of the signs and symptoms of clinical depression, let's do that. (Lost several friends, one of them close, to suicide).

SkyMarshal 15y ago
>I doubt (a lot) that it's something endemic or "taboo" among startups, but any time we can make any group of people more aware of the signs and symptoms of clinical depression, let's do that. Indeed. Also keep in mind the symptoms can be extremely subtle, likely suppressed due to shame, and potentially impossible to notice without some active probing, accidental or otherwise. Ilya's recent suicide that seemed to take everyone by surprise was a reminder of that. Brings to mind the saying, 'Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.' Some moreso than others.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
As far as I know, the standard treatment for depression is medication to provide a short term fix (thereby convincing the patient that the therapist can help) and cognitive behavioral therapy as a long term fix. As I understand it, CBT is basically teaching the depressed person how to "fun" (or stress manage/expectation manage) their way out of depression. In any case, I believe the distinction between "illness" and "not an illness" is usually not very important - it's usually an attempt to appeal to medical authorities rather than address fundamentally social and ethical issues. http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...
- lotharbot 15y ago
  There is no "standard" treatment for depression as a whole. There are different types of depression, with different treatments. I know one person who will probably be on medication for her whole life (bipolar), another who needed medication for about a year and found therapy to be a waste of time (postpartum), and some for whom therapy was the primary treatment.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  I'm sorry but I take issue with your tone. I've been on around 4 antidepressants since reaching adulthood and I've dome (I'm still somewhat still doing) CBT. I'm fine now without further treatment but while I was being treated I must say that the pills work. Some more than others. Some people need them forever and some don't. The point of taking them is to get you motivated and just functional enough to start working out the cause. In my case they gave me just enough energy to get slightly involved in a few things. Those things then snowballed to the point where I didn't need the pills and had other outlets. I still am prone to be depressed far easier and more often than most but the treatment got me to a point where I have the tools lift myself out of it each time despite the fact that depression really is totally crippling and makes you believe there is no solution. I still go to CBT though not often just because I really enjoy it and I get a lot out of it. Even the therapist agrees I'd be fine without it but it makes me happy so I go once or twice a month. Depression is an illness just like addiction or diabetes. I mention addiction because that's another one people like to write off as a moral failing or something that just isn't a real illness. I could be misunderstanding your point but my experience tells me you're wrong on this.

jpdoctor 15y ago

> But whenever I start thinking about my customers, what they need, why they need it, and how cool it is to help them get it, it's almost impossible to get depressed. I noticed you omitted how-much-the-customers-will-pay-for-the-product from your list.

true_religion 15y ago

> Sure, they were probably interested in celebrities while we're interested in technology & business, but the similarities are still striking.... I'd relate the start-up community to the celebriy community in this way: In both communities there are those who have succeeded: Celebrities and Startup Founders with an exit. There are those who want to do: People who move to Hollywood, and people who move to Silicon valley. And there are finally those who only watch others doing: People who only read People Magazine, and People who only read Techcrunch. The girls you saw were the last bit but HN is something akin to an industry journal/forum---we have a greater mix of the first two bodies: the doers. So when an article on HN appears about depression in the startup community, I instantly think of people who have their own startup, work 12 hours aday, and pour their savings into building a product based on a dream. These guys are nothing like a passive watcher, and the causes of their depression ought to be far different from merely mistaking 'details for issues'.

philwelch 15y ago
> but HN is something akin to an industry journal/forum---we have a greater mix of the first two bodies: the doers That may have been the case a few years ago, but I think the proportion of founders and hackers on HN has been massively diluted.

billpatrianakos 15y ago

I get the sentiment and I'm glad youve found your passion but I most definitely see that you're right when you say you know nothing of depression and the startup community. Not to knock you at all but depression is one of those things that you can only "get" if you've experienced it. Like sex or love or being a billionaire. It's almost indescribable. I've been to the depths of it and back. Imagine the worst sadness you've ever felt in your entire life. Multiply that by 2. Then add in a feeling of loneliness. The kind of loneliness where you feel like a man with no home, no family, no friends, and strangers hate you. Then your own mind turns against you. All logic is gone and your inner voice is on an infinite loop telling you that there is no way out, things always have and always will be this way, that you are not exactly worthless but worth less than any person you know including strangers on the street (yeah, that includes the homeless and destitute). Now that you imagine feeling this way you also must imagine taking every ounce of energy you have and throwing it away. You have no energy, you're constantly tired, and your body even aches as if you were sick at times! The worst part of all is that these negative thoughts and feelings feed on each other, digging you deeper and deeper into depression. People in that state will do anything they can to make it stop. Drug abuse/self medication is very common along with suicide. When you're depressed you can't see that there's a way to gradually make your life better so you reach for instant gratification. The instant gratification only leads to more problems. It's such a vicious cycle that you just wouldn't believe. So I'm a person who's been affected by deep depression and it's consequences and I'm also just about to reach my first anniversary of being in business. Startup depression has hit me hard twice in this past year (most likely because I'm more prone to it). So after my long rambling rant I'll get to the point: there are no easy answers but one thing that will help out people suffering from this is just to talk about it publicly. There are far more people suffering than we know about. Whenever I see a post on startup depression I have the exact opposite reaction to when I see yet another post about how someone loves Emacs. I think "thank god! I'm not the only one!". Just talking about it is a big relief to people because they know they're not alone and can learn or help each other. There will never be enough posts about startup depression. Ever.

lusr 15y ago
An excellent description of severe depression. I wonder how many people who have never experienced a depression episode will manage to have empathy for it, though. I say this because now that I'm on the path to recovery, it seems I can recognize all aspects of your description based on my memories but I can't comprehend my memories as a personal experience any more. It's almost as though I'm trying to access a memory written for an incompatible mental model (like trying to load an old version of file into newer software). In a way this makes perfect sense because what CBT did was restructure my mental model of the world. It also seems give me a useful way to understand why healthy people struggle so much to understand depression - the underlying causes (chemical imbalance; dysfunctional thought processes) are incompatible with their way of reasoning about the world. I completely agree that being open about one's difficulties is crucial to recovery and living a healthier mental life. It's unfortunate how many apparently depressed people I know in my field who identify with applying the concepts I've explained to them (from CBT), but the second they find out the book I recommend to learn more ("Feeling Good" by David Burns) is about "depression", they ALL lose interest. (I understand this, though, because I was the same until I reached a point where I had to do something about my depression or risk serious consequences.)

6ren 15y ago

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that." - John Stuart Mill (who suffered serious depression) on Carlyle's "anti-self-consciousness theory" http://theliterarylink.com/anti_selfconsciousness.html http://theliterarylink.com/anti_selfconsciousness.html A wrinkle on serving customers as this purpose is that they pay you. So... are you serving them, or making money? Being a servant of two masters is tricky (e.g. who is served by "raising prices"?). A resolution is to elevate one as the master, which prevails when they conflict. Also customers can be fickle (like those 2 communities), not knowing what they want. So, yet another purpose is to make something great, according to your ideals (if others like it, so much the better...). This is not other-directed, but at least not self-directed.