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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

So I just feel terrible frankly that I mistakenly turned down interacting with him. Would have we had some conversation that would have changed his opinion on things? Given him some new hope?

This is a very human reaction, but please don't let yourself get hung up on this line of thinking. Heroic intervention is something we tend to overestimate. What you can do is to be there for the people you know well. When someone's hurting, be generous with your time; be someone they can turn to. If you ever think someone's at risk, know what to look for and know where to turn.

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Please take mortenjorck's advice to heart. There's very likely nothing you could have done that could have stopped this.

Remember that people's emotions are not trivial problems that you can solve if you just spend enough time working on them. The tech culture is particularly toxic, in my opinion, for people suffering from depression. Depression is not something you can sit down and hammer out a solution to over a weekend. It grabs hold of people and doesn't let go. It takes years of professional help (from people who actually understand human emotions and psychology) and the will to get better.

Please don't think about this too hard, because you can get caught up in all of the "If only I'd have called him" thoughts.

If you feel guilty, then talk to someone who understands how to deal with these kinds of events. Even a single visit to a psychologist can do a lot to break this feedback loop of guilt. Talking to someone who knows how to listen about real feelings of guilt or depression is the best thing you can do in your position.

I've written this note in another topic on this tragic event, my apologies for the repost, but I think it's important that taboo subjects like depression are discussed. Even if this turns out to not be depression in this particular case, it certainly is extremely common amongst people in tech (sitting in front of your screen, alone, for a long time really doesn't help). It helped me a lot, personally, to reach out and see just how many people went through something similar and I hope that what I wrote might in turn help out others. So here goes the repost:

--- --- --- ---

I wrote about depression a while ago - http://sk.or.at/elou9l - maybe you will find words that help you in my post.

Always remember: You only fail in things that you do, not in who you are.

Hey skorat,

Thank you for writing that blog post. The worse part of depression has definitely been the lack of productivity. Just saying no to doing a lot of things and doing the remaining things in small chunks seems to work the best.

Thanks again for sharing!

It's actually skore, but I see where you got confused ;-)

And I obviously agree - Depression often means feeling overwhelmed by responsibility. Being better at managing it really does help.

Well said, sometimes a community's harsh criticisms will be brutal to startup founders. But life is not just about making it to the top, just enjoy the journey.

I'm in deep agreement here. Gregory Bateson put it well, many years ago, writing to someone who wondered whether she/he had a role in a friend's suicide:

Complete, in your imagination, this scenario:

Your friend has achieved her suicide and arrived at the Pearly Gates, where she is challenged by St. Peter, who notes that she has come too soon. She says that it was all --------------- 's fault.

There are many ways of completing the scenario, but one way or another, your friend has to demonstrate that she had no free will but you had. I suggest either that you both had free will or that neither of you had.

http://pages.citebite.com/d1u1k9v8e9gfq

that's very well put. there certainly are people who cause others to commit suicide (such as an abusive spouse or parent), but they are precisely the sort of people who wouldn't feel any guilt over the suicide anyway.

I disagree, suicide is selected into the genome to get useless parts to self destruct. Like how skin cells have to shift around to service the whole. He was reaching out to everywhere he could looking for validation and found none. Mixed with a stiff upper lip and a lack of desire to show weakness is a recipe for a feedback loop of perceived irrelevance. When all around you use actions to indicate that you are a burden, not an asset. Freeing up resources is good for the hive. he loved the collective, too much.

Your no's were part of the feedback loop, you couldnt have known the magnitude of what was happening, but your actions are part of his decision. Healing from this will take honesty, you can delude others but not yourself.

You are a part of it, but it wasn't your responsibility.

Ugh, do not listen to opinions like this.

You show a fundamental ignorance of human psychology and the effects of depression on an otherwise healthy mind.

He also shows a fundamental ignorance of evolutionary pressures, and basically makes up a story that fits his prejudices. There is, of course, much precedent for this in human history; for example, to demonstrate how black people were racially inferior.

It's a fundamentally anti-scientific thing to do.

I'd like to see some references or research to back up your comment. As it stands, I down-voted you, as I don't think you are adding valuable content: I would happily reverse my down-vote if you can produce even a small amount of evidence for this, that can be further discussed and critiqued.

There's no evidence supporting his claims, however, it's my opinion that there's no evidence supporting the current hypotheses in the psychology of depression either.

There's too little skepticism surrounding psychology, no mathematical model that can make predictions and the scientific method is not employed.

I take his post simply as a hypothesis based on an opinion and nothing else. Expressing skepticism to the hypothesis is healthy, and justified, but not expressing skepticism to the current state of affairs is not healthy and unjustified.

I feel there's no need to downvote the guy for simply stating a non mainstream opinion. So far, opinions is all what we have in the field anyway.

Any genes that encode suicide would be selected against so quickly they would not make a dent in evolutionary history.

There are selective pressures on societies, but they are utterly and completely dwarfed by the individual selective pressures. Whenever there is any sort of conflict between societal selection and individual selection, evolution will not give the former any say.

The reason is that it takes many many generations for any genetic makeup to actually destroy societies as a whole, and it is an extremely rare event. Genetic selection based on individual success happens all the time.

Suicidal genes wouldn't be selected against if they conferred some greater advantage. See the sickle cell anemia gene for an example of something that's tremendously deadly yet evolutionarily favored in some circumstances.

Or if the genes were expressed after the age of bearing offspring passed...

That would do it too. It seems unlikely that this would be the case in humans, since suicide affects so many young people, but it's at least theoretically possible.

I suspect that the genetic components of suicide are side effects from the various genes that help make us smart.

Sure, but that advantage must be one of the individual, not of society.

Genes are selfish -- they help society only insofar as it helps the individual. They will never choose society's benefit over the individual's.

The benefit doesn't have to be to the suicidal individual, though.

One copy of the sickle cell gene confers a tremendous advantage: great resistance to malaria. Two copies of the gene kills the unfortunate person fairly quickly in the absence of modern medicine. There's no advantage to suffering from sickle cell disease, but there's enough of an advantage to other people that the gene persisted and even flourished in some populations.

Suicide could be similar. There are probably a bunch of genes which coordinate to work on our brains, and are generally advantageous. I speculate that in certain combinations, these genes contribute mental illnesses, including depression and tendency toward suicide. This doesn't get selected out, because those genes in other combinations are still highly advantageous.

Yes, indeed, the gene may be detrimental under certain conditions to the individual (e.g: two copies of same gene), if it helps the individual in the average case.

There are many nuances that my statements in previous comments gloss over and which make them incorrect.

My point is that "societal selection" of genes is rare and virtually completely insignificant.

Militant atheists often claim that religion, in the hands of the simple minded, is very dangerous. Thanks for providing an example on how this isn't unique to religion.

I have the guts to agree with this. He did NOT have responsibility but his words do have an effect..

Do our words have an effect on others? I think most intelligent ppl would say yes, even if the effect is small. I mean, you can't have your cake and eat it too... so the parent is absolutely right.

When you are depressed, small things that may seem trivial like not answering a phone call, responding to an email, etc becomes a big deal as they pile up.. little by little, depressed people lose faith in both humanity, and themselves. It's very easy and convenient to say we don't have time, and very very very easy to say "talk to me when you're in trouble", but extremely hard to actually walk the walk in our busy, occupied lives

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