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> People tend to minimize the lethality of mental health problems. My sister fatally overdosed on heroin in January of this year. She suffered close to a decad

> People tend to minimize the lethality of mental health problems. My sister fatally overdosed on heroin in January of this year. She suffered close to a decade of a progressively worsening bipolar/depression/substance abuse loop, even after spending over a year in voluntary, in-patient treatment centers. Serious mental illness is no different than cancer. The trouble with mental illness is that it manifests itself in socially undesirable behavior. Drinking, drugs, erratic actions, not a visible tumor hanging off of an organ. The lack of compassion for those people with mental illness is one of the greatest tragedies of our society.

orionblastar 12y ago
I agree, I got schizoaffective disorder. I had too much stress in June 2001 and got sick, had a stroke, ended up in a hospital and got diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. It is a rare mental illness that has part schizophrenia and part bipolar in that it has schizophrenic, depressed, manic, and normal cycles lasting about two weeks each. Every time I tried to post about mental illnesses and startups here, I always got downvoted and flagged. I think that the high stress causes some people to develop these serious mental illnesses. Because there is no compassion or empathy for the mentally ill, they have to hide it and go untreated and this is why there are so many suicides in the startup community as well as the banking industry and financial industry with the youth. http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624 http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624 http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-ill-out-of-work-programmer-down-on-his-luck http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-ill-o... I post about this on Slashdot and all other tech news sites. It seems nobody actually wants to care enough to help out a mentally ill person such as myself work on side projects and startup my own company or even join their startup or even help write a blog. So I had made my own website and tried to do things with it. Nobody still cares enough to help. I was told I would not live to see 40, I am 45 now. I hope to live a long time, but been out of work since 2002 because nobody cares.
- arel 12y ago
  I wish you all the best with your condition and hope you find the right job at the right time.
  - orionblastar 12y ago
    Thank you, for caring enough to post that. Most people read what I write and just ignore it and move on.
- Mz 12y ago
  I have a different condition but similar outcome in terms of not being taken seriously and finding that frustrating. But I will suggest you need to look for support from a position of strength -- what do you have to offer -- not from complaining about what has gone wrong. I know that's hard to do -- I often don't manage to pull it off myself -- but you need to figure out what you do have to offer. I get told constantly (including again today) that I will not be financially successful with my projects. The reality is that I do make some money online, just not as much as I really need. That amount is sporadically improving. I have worked super hard on my health. Getting myself stable and more productive is one of the keys. If you lived 5 years longer than you were supposed to (my count is 13 so far), then you must have some competencies. What are they? What is the position of strength you have to offer the world? What is the unique value proposition you bring to the table? There has to be one. Finding a path forward is hard and my frustrations with other people not taking me seriously is a very big thing in my life. But I keep working on what I can do and I keep working on what I do have to offer and I keep working on my various projects and things are slowly improving. I expect them to pick up speed in the near future. This past month has been a major positive turning point in my health. I expect to be more productive, more able to communicate, etc in the future. ((HUGS)) if you want them.
  - orionblastar 12y ago
    Thanks for the hugs. I learned over 37 different programming languages on many different operating systems over the years. Some might be old and outdated but thanks to open source projects they got compilers for modern systems. So I can do COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, Turbo C, Ada, and a lot of other misc languages that the current graduates and drop-outs don't even know. I can do legacy programming for that and convert code from one language to another. I can even do that with SQL databases and convert flat files and DBF files to SQL databases. Many of my jobs for which I got paid $150K/year was upscaling a database from Excel, Access, etc formats to MS-SQL server and turning VBA code into Visual BASIC code. I used to write the program that would read the file, and then sync it up with SQL Server and then modify the Visual BASIC code to pull the data from SQL Server. Yeah I know I got laughed at for using Visual BASIC, but it paid very well. I used quicksort and heapsort algorithms to speed up the code that coworkers write that was just too slow. It went from 15 minutes to generate a report to just 15 seconds. Most problems in Visual BASIC is due to the programer using a slow algorithm and if you know how to rewrite it, then it runs faster. most Visual BASIC programmers use the bubble sort, don't know why it is called a bubble sort or why it is so slow. I do security and quality checks, read some stuff by Schnermann and Deming. I almost always write a function named SQLFilter that filters out control codes and SQL codes to prevent SQL injection attacks in order to sanitize inputs. I also write one named HTMLfilter that filters out HTML codes, because you don't want someone to exploit you by adding in HTML tags that do something nasty. Ask Pesico about that Name your own Dew contest and they didn't filter out HTML tags and how "Hitler did nothing wrong" won the contest due to some hackers and trolls on 4Chan and Reddit. Well if they used my HTMLFilter function, that would not have happened. I see spammers exploit Facebook using HTML codes and Javascript to automatically like posts and tag friends in a new post with an embedded video. If only they sanitized out HTML codes and rejected Javascript in the forms, spammers could not even do that. Well maybe now you see how important what I do really is, most if not all of the 90% of startups that fail, don't do quality checks and security checks, because it 'takes too long' and they are in a hurry to get that code released so they can get a paycheck and start up that IPO. I am a super debugger, you see, I fix the mistakes the rookies make. Most high school and college dropouts are rookies who make these rookie mistakes. I debug those mistakes and correct them. Right now I am learning Haskell, I got my own GNU/Linux distro but I also use Lubuntu. I also know C++, Java, Python, PHP, C# and feel like given enough time I could learn any language and find ways to translate code from one language to another. Sort of a Polyglot for computer languages I suppose?
- throwaway-01 12y ago
  Posting from a throw-away account. Here I am, somewhere in the autistic spectrum. Quick learner, scores well on IQ-tests but I have a lot of problems understanding, interacting and connecting with other people. Although my mental illness is somewhat different and probably not as severe as yours I recognize my own situation very much from what you describe. I don't have an official diagnose, and I'm not overly eager to get my mental illness on paper as that can be to your disadvantage in many situations and besides there isn't really much help available for someone like me within the public health-care system of my country. From the outside I appear to be functional. I have a job, a home and a car, although I'm in my forties and don't have any family. But I have to fight really hard with myself just to get by some days. Sometimes using self-medication, I've found SSRIs to be helpful. Although I'm not always sure why I should bother to get through that day, I still keep fighting. I'm thinking about suicide at least a few times every year and sometimes I have gone quite far with the actual preparations. And you are so extremely spot on when you describe how nobody cares. I try very hard to perform well at job, besides my illegal medications, which doesn't even have any narcotic effects, I abide every written law of society, I try to help and give kind words whenever I can, I donate money to charities every month. And nobody would even care to listen, answer a question or give an advice, at least not with any truthfulness or honesty. Hey guys I'm not asking for your money, only a moment of your time and some honesty that I really could use to find my way onwards in life. Some people around me, both at work and my neighbors have noticed my condition and are willing to talk about it when I'm not around. But they are obviously not prepared to give me 15 minutes of their time and just brief moment of truthfulness, they just want to get rid of the crazy guy and move on. Nobody cares, for real!
  - orionblastar 12y ago
    Well people often fear what they don't understand. High functioning autism just scares them as does my illness. They are misunderstood and so are we as well. I always blamed myself, but it seems society shuns mentally ill people from all spectrums.
- np422 12y ago
  We are all nothing but data-points on a distribution curve. If you end up just a little bit outside of the very narrow band where the majority of people can be found, welcome to the land of the lost and ignored. If you are lucky medical science has put a name on that part of the distribution curve and maybe they can help to move you closer to the peak of the distribution curve. Myself and rest of mankind, please take a note. Room for improvement: how we treat and interact with other people that didn't have the same luck in the big lottery of life.. Orionblaster, I want you to have better times ahead in your life than what you've seen so far. At least I can offer you my best wishes over the internet.
  - orionblastar 12y ago
    Thank you, I am a few standard deviations from normal I guess? Whatever normal is, I don't know.

orionblastar 12y ago

I agree, I got schizoaffective disorder. I had too much stress in June 2001 and got sick, had a stroke, ended up in a hospital and got diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. It is a rare mental illness that has part schizophrenia and part bipolar in that it has schizophrenic, depressed, manic, and normal cycles lasting about two weeks each. Every time I tried to post about mental illnesses and startups here, I always got downvoted and flagged. I think that the high stress causes some people to develop these serious mental illnesses. Because there is no compassion or empathy for the mentally ill, they have to hide it and go untreated and this is why there are so many suicides in the startup community as well as the banking industry and financial industry with the youth. http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624 http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624 http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-ill-out-of-work-programmer-down-on-his-luck http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-ill-o... I post about this on Slashdot and all other tech news sites. It seems nobody actually wants to care enough to help out a mentally ill person such as myself work on side projects and startup my own company or even join their startup or even help write a blog. So I had made my own website and tried to do things with it. Nobody still cares enough to help. I was told I would not live to see 40, I am 45 now. I hope to live a long time, but been out of work since 2002 because nobody cares.

arel 12y ago
I wish you all the best with your condition and hope you find the right job at the right time.
- orionblastar 12y ago
  Thank you, for caring enough to post that. Most people read what I write and just ignore it and move on.
Mz 12y ago
I have a different condition but similar outcome in terms of not being taken seriously and finding that frustrating. But I will suggest you need to look for support from a position of strength -- what do you have to offer -- not from complaining about what has gone wrong. I know that's hard to do -- I often don't manage to pull it off myself -- but you need to figure out what you do have to offer. I get told constantly (including again today) that I will not be financially successful with my projects. The reality is that I do make some money online, just not as much as I really need. That amount is sporadically improving. I have worked super hard on my health. Getting myself stable and more productive is one of the keys. If you lived 5 years longer than you were supposed to (my count is 13 so far), then you must have some competencies. What are they? What is the position of strength you have to offer the world? What is the unique value proposition you bring to the table? There has to be one. Finding a path forward is hard and my frustrations with other people not taking me seriously is a very big thing in my life. But I keep working on what I can do and I keep working on what I do have to offer and I keep working on my various projects and things are slowly improving. I expect them to pick up speed in the near future. This past month has been a major positive turning point in my health. I expect to be more productive, more able to communicate, etc in the future. ((HUGS)) if you want them.
- orionblastar 12y ago
  Thanks for the hugs. I learned over 37 different programming languages on many different operating systems over the years. Some might be old and outdated but thanks to open source projects they got compilers for modern systems. So I can do COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, Turbo C, Ada, and a lot of other misc languages that the current graduates and drop-outs don't even know. I can do legacy programming for that and convert code from one language to another. I can even do that with SQL databases and convert flat files and DBF files to SQL databases. Many of my jobs for which I got paid $150K/year was upscaling a database from Excel, Access, etc formats to MS-SQL server and turning VBA code into Visual BASIC code. I used to write the program that would read the file, and then sync it up with SQL Server and then modify the Visual BASIC code to pull the data from SQL Server. Yeah I know I got laughed at for using Visual BASIC, but it paid very well. I used quicksort and heapsort algorithms to speed up the code that coworkers write that was just too slow. It went from 15 minutes to generate a report to just 15 seconds. Most problems in Visual BASIC is due to the programer using a slow algorithm and if you know how to rewrite it, then it runs faster. most Visual BASIC programmers use the bubble sort, don't know why it is called a bubble sort or why it is so slow. I do security and quality checks, read some stuff by Schnermann and Deming. I almost always write a function named SQLFilter that filters out control codes and SQL codes to prevent SQL injection attacks in order to sanitize inputs. I also write one named HTMLfilter that filters out HTML codes, because you don't want someone to exploit you by adding in HTML tags that do something nasty. Ask Pesico about that Name your own Dew contest and they didn't filter out HTML tags and how "Hitler did nothing wrong" won the contest due to some hackers and trolls on 4Chan and Reddit. Well if they used my HTMLFilter function, that would not have happened. I see spammers exploit Facebook using HTML codes and Javascript to automatically like posts and tag friends in a new post with an embedded video. If only they sanitized out HTML codes and rejected Javascript in the forms, spammers could not even do that. Well maybe now you see how important what I do really is, most if not all of the 90% of startups that fail, don't do quality checks and security checks, because it 'takes too long' and they are in a hurry to get that code released so they can get a paycheck and start up that IPO. I am a super debugger, you see, I fix the mistakes the rookies make. Most high school and college dropouts are rookies who make these rookie mistakes. I debug those mistakes and correct them. Right now I am learning Haskell, I got my own GNU/Linux distro but I also use Lubuntu. I also know C++, Java, Python, PHP, C# and feel like given enough time I could learn any language and find ways to translate code from one language to another. Sort of a Polyglot for computer languages I suppose?
throwaway-01 12y ago
Posting from a throw-away account. Here I am, somewhere in the autistic spectrum. Quick learner, scores well on IQ-tests but I have a lot of problems understanding, interacting and connecting with other people. Although my mental illness is somewhat different and probably not as severe as yours I recognize my own situation very much from what you describe. I don't have an official diagnose, and I'm not overly eager to get my mental illness on paper as that can be to your disadvantage in many situations and besides there isn't really much help available for someone like me within the public health-care system of my country. From the outside I appear to be functional. I have a job, a home and a car, although I'm in my forties and don't have any family. But I have to fight really hard with myself just to get by some days. Sometimes using self-medication, I've found SSRIs to be helpful. Although I'm not always sure why I should bother to get through that day, I still keep fighting. I'm thinking about suicide at least a few times every year and sometimes I have gone quite far with the actual preparations. And you are so extremely spot on when you describe how nobody cares. I try very hard to perform well at job, besides my illegal medications, which doesn't even have any narcotic effects, I abide every written law of society, I try to help and give kind words whenever I can, I donate money to charities every month. And nobody would even care to listen, answer a question or give an advice, at least not with any truthfulness or honesty. Hey guys I'm not asking for your money, only a moment of your time and some honesty that I really could use to find my way onwards in life. Some people around me, both at work and my neighbors have noticed my condition and are willing to talk about it when I'm not around. But they are obviously not prepared to give me 15 minutes of their time and just brief moment of truthfulness, they just want to get rid of the crazy guy and move on. Nobody cares, for real!
- orionblastar 12y ago
  Well people often fear what they don't understand. High functioning autism just scares them as does my illness. They are misunderstood and so are we as well. I always blamed myself, but it seems society shuns mentally ill people from all spectrums.
np422 12y ago
We are all nothing but data-points on a distribution curve. If you end up just a little bit outside of the very narrow band where the majority of people can be found, welcome to the land of the lost and ignored. If you are lucky medical science has put a name on that part of the distribution curve and maybe they can help to move you closer to the peak of the distribution curve. Myself and rest of mankind, please take a note. Room for improvement: how we treat and interact with other people that didn't have the same luck in the big lottery of life.. Orionblaster, I want you to have better times ahead in your life than what you've seen so far. At least I can offer you my best wishes over the internet.
- orionblastar 12y ago
  Thank you, I am a few standard deviations from normal I guess? Whatever normal is, I don't know.