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Comment by throwaway3912 | Hacker News Reader

Don't ask HN for psychological support. Talk to a professional.

Why not? I don't see the guidelines that say that it can't be done. I think people reading this are a super audience prone to the above due the coolness and hypeness of the startup world having to move ever more. If anything, I think it should be talked about on channels like this. And yes, also a professional is necessary.

At some level I agree with you. You can learn tons from folks that are in similar situations or have gone through similar things.

But, if you are really burnt out or depressed, this could quickly become a life or death situation, so seeking professional help in a timely manner, is the best option. Your life could literally be at stake. Reason is, HN lacks context and any sustained attention/followup. Take this thread for example. OP has not provided any comments or followup. We have no context on why this person is asking this question. Are they going through this personally, asking about a co-worker, a spouse? We have no idea. Their question and following discussion could come back to haunt them via a search if they give enough details. We are not experts with context, sure we can offer advice on something we might have gone through, but that is not expert advice tailored to their situation.

So, it is really a good idea, to seek professional help if you find yourself in this situation vs asking random strangers on HN. Chatting with a professional is confidential, they will ask and gather the correct context (with local customs, current medical practice, and laws in mind), and hopefully give you a good path forward.

Your advice might be different on where you are located too. Do you have the same options if you live in the US, EU, or Asia? I have no idea on what your situation is, what your support network looks like, what your resources are, how bad it is, etc. You are much better off chatting with a professional.

Don't forget that a lot of professionals in the psychology area are not very good. Some years ago I had severe depression and a lot of other problems and finding a professional who would actually listen was a really difficult and frustrating experience. So I think there is a lot of value in discussing things on a forum like this in order to get multiple opinions and especially hear from people who have gone through this.

You shouldn't take information in a forum at face value but also don't trust blindly the advice from "professionals" be it doctors, surgeons, lawyers, consultants or others. A lot of them suck.

Right, but no-one is complaining about the "how to find a good professional" advice. People are complaining about the fact that these threads often have a mix of useful, actionable, advice that is somewhat evidence based, and then a bunch of horseshit.

You will get the same mix of somewhat useful information mixed with horseshit from professionals especially in not so clear cut areas like mental health or nutrition. I went through five therapists without improvement to end up with picking up a meditation practice together with some behavior and attitude changes. All these suggestions came from online forums and made a huge difference.

As with everything else, gather as much as information as possible and make up your own mind. Don't believe anything blindly but try it out and see what works for you.

It's the same in tech. I get better information in online forums like this one than I get from most highly paid consultants my management likes to hire.

I agree with this.I had the same experience. It really takes a lot of effort to find someone you feel comfortable with. To be honest the best support I got was from a bunch of total strangers on the internet, that went trough a similar experience as I did. I felt mostly disconnected with professionals that had steady lives that were paid to listen to. With the total strangers on the internet we were at least exploring our issues and trying to find a way out and reporting to each eachother as a sort of journey.

The reason there's a modern flat Earth movement is that technology has enabled people who are grossly underqualified to answer questions about the shape of the Earth fit each other.

I'm curious to see what HN readers think of this subject, but I think it's important to realize the answers may tell us far more about HN commenters than about psychology or any objective truths about mental health. Which is to say: if the OP is asking the question because they're trying to work through their own stuff, they need to know this is no substitute for asking professionals. I expect a lot of wrong answers in the comments, and everyone else should too, and as a non-expert I'm not even sure I can recognize the wrong answers as wrong.

It's also dangerously easy to mistake professionalism with competency. There are a lot of incompetent professionals in absolutely every field and this includes mental health. Just like there are professional programmers who copy-paste code from stackoverflow, there are mental health professionals who copy-paste solutions from a favorite book or two. They don't actually have a deep understanding of what they're doing and will be hopelessly lost when someone's issues don't exactly match the examples in their books.

Now it's still probably true that the average HN commentator knows even less than the average mental health professional, but at the same time there are plenty of people on HN (including actual MDs!) who know more than the average mental health professional. Knowing how to identify these posts can be tricky, but even so I think there's value in seeking for these.

I agree completely: I had meant to imply that the "professional" bit was necessary, but not sufficient.

In therapy a wide range of topics can be explored, and more safely: when I first started therapy my motivations all had to deal with stressors in my present life, but after much discussion I ended up learning and realizing how past trauma influences how I perceive the present. I really didn't know the full set of questions I should have asked when I started, but the professional atmosphere - where I could discuss a wide range of things relatively easily (because of the professional ethics surrounding patient confidentiality) ended up making it easier and safer to explore things I shouldn't.

I think for many people who read this, if they were to go to a therapist motivated by wanting to change their response to stimuli like work stress, may eventually end up discovering how the specifics of their lives to date influence their present, and that knowledge can be empowering.

But here on HN, I don't think you'll get to meaningfully explore things like childhood, past traumas, deep fears, etc. to better understand the present. Stress is common to our (and any) profession, but the ways which we respond to it are deeply personal and transcend our industry.

It's really easy to self diagnose depression or other things because a lot of the feelings and experiences are easily to relate with, which causes people to misunderstand and under value the affect diagnosed depression has on other's lives.

> Why not?

HN is about as qualified to give good advice on health issues as it is to give good info on astrophysics. There are few licensed medical professionals here.

This is silly. Someone can know something about a topic without being licensed in it. Similarly, someone can be licensed to do something and give poor advice. I don't see why you wouldn't just take all the advice you can get and try to figure out what makes sense and what does not.

This kind of logic is why we end up with anti-vaxxers and flat earthers. Not all opinions are created equal, and if you're having a hard time with mental health, mental health professionals are the best place to go for help.

I completely agree that the actual paper of a license means nothing, and someone can know more than a licensed pro through their own research and experience. BUT, the replies here are from random people on the internet, and there's no way to qualify their level of experience. I'm not surprised to hear this "anyone can do it" perspective from fellow software engineers, because of the shape of our industry, but it's a mistake to apply that universally.

This is why I follow it up with "try to figure out what makes sense". The fact of the matter is, neither you nor I get to decide who voices their opinion on something on the internet. This is why it is important to scrutinize everything you read instead of blindly following the first piece of advice you read.

I do agree that anti-vaxxers and flat earthers are a problem and it is clear that not everyone has the same ability to scrutinize what they read and determine where the truth lies. That being said, I tend to assume that people posting on HN are intelligent and capable of thinking for themselves and in that case, I think it is fine for non-experts to offer opinions.

Yeah, but how do you even do that? Like, realistically - step-by-step

Look at all the other people commenting about how terrible the experience was for them?

I'm very, very skeptical of jaded "professionals" that quickly make a diagnosis and move you along the pharma train. I'm also concerned by my location that I may not even have access to "Good Professionals?"

It seems like talking to a professional without a deep prior level of introspection and self-research is precisely the expressway to being on a road that might not even work. (What if I have ADHD and get treatment for something else entirely, or vice versa?)

This thread fits someone like myself perfectly: I feel lazy, I'm certainly depressed, and I experience burnout all the time, and I have absolutely no idea how to actually seek out help.

Simplistic comments like yours always aggravate me a la:

"Call your attorney or seek legal council for further information" (not many people have a lawyer on retainer, bud)

So, I'm very likely to seek out information from the internet from people who have been in my shoes and have helped themselves, and until I get a solid feeling that I know how to proceed safely, I will continue to do so.

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