The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech | Hacker News Reader

The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech

kennethreitz.org

65 pointsrbanffy124 comments

The Python community didn’t exclude Kenneth because of his condition, at least directly. They excluded him because of his actions and history of shady, manipulative behaviors.

And while workplaces should be accommodating, there’s a point where it gets to be too much.

I worked at a place with a person with similar behaviors and it destroyed that company because they refused to acknowledge reality: this was a business, not a care facility.

One thing is clear: Kenneth is suffering. I hope that he is able to see his behavior from the outside and heal. He’s a great programmer who ships products.

For those who don’t know, Kenneth created the Requests library which is nearly ubiquitous in the Python world.

This doesn't surprise me.

It's central to understand that mental health can alter perception and judgment, even common mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.

I have chronic depression, and even after treating it for 15 years, I still realizes after the fact, despite being attentive to how I behave, that I just think differently when I am depressed.

It's very common for mentally ill people to think they are being persecuted. We also should still inform people more about mental illness, so both are true.

Illnesses that involves psychosis are not a joke and more severe than your average depression, and sadly I would be careful and not 100% trustworthy of somebody who is having such illness.

Truth. This manifests as stigma, however, and needs awareness to compensate for.

I read the post and felt a lot of sympathy. Then I saw your response and re-read the post and it comes across as quite manipulative (if your statements are factually correct). My comment is less about this person (great library, btw), but more how it is Interesting how context can totally change how words on a page are received.

One thing i noticed while reading the post is he doesn’t go into what events led people to be fearful of him. I’ve known someone with schizoaffective disorder and the episodes can be downright scary. You can have sympathy for someone while also knowing it’s a bad idea to let your guard down while they’re holding a fork.

This blog I found seems to support your view https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

> I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups.

This is interesting. I can imagine that going both ways - maybe he feels like he's lost control over the project and that worsens his other reactions?

I think the important thing here is that Kenneth came up with Requests and did the initial implementation beginning in 2011.

The author is referring to Kenneth's involvement in Requests at that time (2019), long after its creation. Substantial work has been done on Requests since he stepped away from the project, but it was born from him.

Oh yeah I don't mean to diminish that part. Rather, I'm thinking this might actually be one of the things he's talking about in the post? Whatever happened that the maintainers took over the repo, that could be a point of tension and maybe a loss of control for him. Which would definitely make you feel like the community was isolating you, right?

Different sides to the story, and neither post here explains exactly what happened with Requests.

I didn't lose control of my project, I removed myself from it intentionally (and unprompted).

gotcha, and I appreciate the info. that sounds less acrimonious than I was imagining definitely

There's an "apology"/response from Keith.

https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2023-01-an_overdue_apology

"i'm sorry, hope we can continue working together in the future" seems like a very mild response to allegedly fumbling 30k, but what do i know...

> the asynchronous landscape within Python's ecosystem failed to meet my expectations, leading me to conclude that Requests should retain its synchronous nature.

i concluded that the ecosystem does things differently than my personal standards, so i'm gonna revert and keep the money. nice.

4 years late and no clarification on what actually happened with the money.

My name is Kenneth, not Keith.

no idea why i wrote the wrong name, sorry about that, Kenneth!

you personally replying to my comment makes me regret the harsh tone of my initial comment, could've just posted your blog post and fairly criticize it instead of taking the gossipy route...

doesn't make it better that i misnamed you and that this is a comment chain below a post of yours venting about your experiences of others treating you differentely. hope you can find more people like Sarah or just a better work environment in general.

Yeah, I’m on mobile, sorry.

You can Google or HN search these past events. In fact, Kenneth lurks on HN, too.

tl;dr (from the linked author):

>In short: He chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem.

A similar (but unrelated) fundraiser mechanism is why I no longer donate to any fundraisers, online (no accountability, no refunds). I'm looking at you µOptics >:-|

Written by Nathaniel Smith, who also got Oliphant out of the NumPy Steering Council? And that linked post was approved by the CoC compliant Python Steering Council, a later version of which canceled and defamed Tim Peters?

Maybe Smith is right on the facts here, but the methods are despicable.

I don't know any of these people, I just thought this blog post seemed credible and painted a very different picture of Reitz than he presents in his own blog.

I do not know the truth, i just thought people might appreciate another perspective.

CoCs suck because the newly empowered people often wield it like a blunt hammer to bludgeon everyone they don't like. They're almost always applied arbitrarily and unfairly. They have the noble goal of equalization but they're really just a co-opting of power by a new in-group.

This blog post is nothing like that. They're not asking you to silence Kenneth, or ignore him, or oust him from anything. They're just laying down the facts. The post isn't even asking you to stop interacting with, it's just a heads-up for anyone who does.

The depth of the politics of the python community is very funny to someone that knows nothing about the community. You are expecting a lot of background knowledge about the opinions of OSS maintainers.

It's kind of like having very strong opinions about the council of yoyo judges and their dramas.

> Silence means constantly monitoring my behavior for signs that might reveal my condition, avoiding discussions of mental health that might trigger suspicion and living with the constant anxiety that discovery will lead to rejection.

This framing is at the very least maladaptive and possibly indicative of the mental illness they are writing about. Mentally healthy humans regulate their behavior around other humans depending on the context. Sometimes this produces anxiety. And the fact that the author can pull that off at all (even with some difficulty) is a positive sign.

There is no reason for an employer or professional colleagues to be aware of an employees medical issues. Maybe there are exceptions for in-office workers with conditions like epilepsy. There are plenty of companies with no questions asked PTO, and as long as they do good work (which the article indicates) no one will bother them for using it.

> There is no reason for an employer or professional colleagues to be aware of an employees medical issues.

Totally agree, but it can get a bit weird. I struggle with depression, and at times I have felt like I owed my co-workers/manager/boss an excuse as to why I "suck" sometimes. IE; I didn't show up late for the meeting because I am irresponsible, rather because I'm just in a bad spell this week and have brain fog. If I don't tell them, they may think the former. If I do tell them, who knows.

The rationalization matters far more to you than it does to your coworkers or boss. I have no opinion on how you should frame it to yourself.

However, I think it's genuinely good advice to say that professionally, people are just trying to build a mental model of how reliable you are. The reasoning doesn't really matter to them, and a psychological diagnosis is a predictive theory about how you will behave. Unfortunately, people will assume close to worst case for any condition you tell them about. The mental model you put in someone's head with a psychological diagnosis is always worse than how they currently perceive you.

I believe you are spot on! Thanks for the insight. The rationalization helped alleviate my guilt, but it didn't realistically change anything at work. Might have made things worse, actually.

This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent.

On another note though:

"This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience."

I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it.

If you write concise but with some panache, people will think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023.

It really sucks. In a similar vein, before LLMs my friends always used to call me "the walking Wikipedia" because I tend to always have a fact or trick or trivia in my back pocket. These days more often than not, I get told "okay and now for a non-AI ass answer".

I completely understand why people have that reflexive response to it, but it also feels really vile.

For what it's worth, I do also notice it. Especially on Reddit, you'll start reading a comment and halfway through your gut feel tells you it's likely written by an LLM.

I do also get that pretty often. Also because I've always liked using hyphens and emdashes, so I get that as well. I don't know if I'd call it "vile" to notice a common pattern like the above though.

But it does have a certain code smell sometimes, I often get it on Reddit posts as well.

Ah, I should have perhaps formulated it better. What I meant with vile is the sensation of having put effort in to write pleasantly only to then have the effort misattributed to a machine and to be seen like a hack.

It's as if you reaped a field by hand for the skill of it and to then have everyone's first remark be "well, you certainly know how to operate a combine. Now show me some real effort!"

Ah, yeah, I understand that feeling, the sensation is very unfortunate. I feel the same!

    If you write concise but with some panache, people 
    *will* think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation 
    leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023

Nobody's ever accused me, but I am definitely conscious (paranoid) about the possibility. I have found myself editing my words to look "less LLM-like"

What a world!

Less serious, but this reminds me of how before stable diffusion was consistently useful, there were artists who made a sizeable Patreon income on anime characters in 'realistic' style. Unfortunately that seems to have been one of the styles that got trained into models the best and now their good work is associated with cheap looking art, and not through any fault of their own.

All the way down this kind of genai has weird impacts I guess.

That's something I find very interesting, honestly. I think the two way nature of the relationship between the impacts of a tool on humans and the impact of humans on the way the tool develops is a particularly weird little phenomenon that exists these days. It's overall fascinating.

Yeah, I also kind of wish he published the blog in his own words instead of using what seems to be LLM polishing. It seems ironically like the same defensiveness and lack of transparency he wants to avoid?

As someone who is autistic and bipolar, I've been told my words often come across as unnecessarily aggressive even though I mean them in a neutral way, so I sometimes use LLMs to try and mediate my tone when I'm talking to an unknown audience. I suspect the author has been told he is acerbic and might be self-conscious of using his own words.

I would definitely believe that, yeah. I just think that reflects something sad about the culture we're in, especially in an essay about struggling with transparency. I would like to get more of a sense of his emotions and writing style, but maybe that would have consequences in a public post and he's more guarded about that.

I don't mind AI polishing any more than I mind somebody using a spellchecker.

The article overwhelmingly reads like a (painfully) honest and personal account of what he's going through, it's not AI slop.

It's definitely not slop, but there's something kind of sad about a very personal and emotional account needing to be fed through the corpo speak grammar checker? At least in my opinion. It feels like if a friend wanted to vent to me on discord but didn't trust me enough to do it without editing their post for hours, or something.

> there's something kind of sad about a very personal and emotional account needing to be fed through the corpo speak grammar checker?

There is! But it of course follows the content, which is about how the author's emotions have caused him professional harm. Someone who's been through that would be shy about sharing their raw words.

Hah. Indeed and also this person was posting to the, on average, uncharitable Internet.

There's a very large range of situations (many highly personal) for which I'd consider an AI writing assist to be super valid. They may have dyslexia. English may not be their first language. They may have brilliant ideas but otherwise struggle with writing. They may simply be highly invested in making sure they are expressing themselves clearly. They may be too physically or mentally tired to polish their writing "manually." They may be under unfortunate time constraints. Maybe the guy has kids to take care of, or just needed to finish his blog post by a certain time so he could get a good night's sleep.

The list of possible reasons is so vast and varied that I coalesce this down into essentially "I don't care and I don't need to know. As long as the end result is an honest representation of the author's intent, i.e. is not AI slop"

    It feels like if a friend wanted to vent to me on discord 
    but didn't trust me enough to do it without editing their 
    post for hours, or something.

I'm being pedantic but as a good comparison. A friend DM'ing you is explicitly asking you to spend your time reading the message. Additionally you and your friend have preexisting context and rapport. If they don't express themselves in anal-retentive detail clearly in the DM, you can fill in the gaps with your shared context, a luxury that a person writing for the public doesn't have. (again, pedantic on my part, I know!)

I thought the same exact thing. The "proper" em dash (or is that an en dash) as opposed to two dashes "--" is a typical giveaway, it seems to me.

However, the article in general certainly reads like it is coming from the author's own voice. Painfully so, even, because this guy is clearly suffering.

The em dash existed long before LLMs. The fact that 95% of people don't use dashes properly doesn't mean that every single person who uses an em dash is relying on an LLM.

Yeah, it's clear he's going through a lot of pain. Even just going through that many job changes outside of the other events sounds painful and difficult to deal with.

What specifically is the LLM verbiage you're seeing here? That reads like a normal sentence to me.

Slight variations on "This isn't X—it's Y." have been popping up all over the place, almost definitely because it's a pattern that ChatGPT has been tuned to (over-) use.

em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing. I see it in several other spots in the essay and it's kind of a "code smell"

Of course it's also a normal, polished sentence with good grammar, but it seems a little unrealistic. It's too polished basically.

pops up multiple times, too. One or two, sure maybe it's just a reflection of using LLMs often, but this many suggests that the article was (atleast) re-written by an LLM

I use Copilot to re-write emails all the time. I'm not going to act like I'm above it. I will say, it makes your emotional plea ring a little more hollow than it should, but so does posting it online, in text form anyway.

> This isn't job-hopping by choice—it's a survival pattern forced by systematic exclusion. > This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience. > The discrimination I'm documenting isn't just about hurt feelings or career setbacks—it has life-and-death consequences for people with schizoaffective disorder: > These aren't abstract statistics—they represent the human cost of the systematic exclusion I've experienced. (little looser here, but still fits the bill) > The pattern of discrimination I've experienced isn't unique—it's systematic. > The discrimination I've faced isn't my fault—it's a reflection of society's failure to move beyond tokenistic awareness toward genuine inclusion.

Earlier today, I read a news article about how a historic 100-year-old family-run farm in my state is closing, but the town is buying the land and supposedly keeping it as farmland. The mayor of the town released a statement that included the sentence "This isn’t just a transaction — it’s a testament to our shared values and vision for the future."

It seems we live in a society where our elected officials can't even be bothered to have a hired PR person write their vacuous statements, let alone writing them personally on their own. A vision for the future indeed...

It’s pretty common to use a dash in that context. It’s weird that you’d be analyzing punctuation so closely in vacuous press releases.

It's not just the dash, it's the specific construct that's an AI smell, as directly mentioned upthread in the comment I was responding to:

> em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing

Literally all of the sibling comments in this subthread are about this specific phrasing, which AI overuses to an absurd degree, especially when combined with hyperbole.

It's very common to see the particular syntactic structure of restating a point in the following general manner from Claude/ChatGPT in my experience and that of others:

"It's not X -- it's Y." or "This isn't just X -- It's actually Y."

Usually with an emdash there as well for the separation. As I said it's very plausibly becoming more common among people not using LLM-assisted writing too, just from seeing the stylistic approach used more often and having it spread naturally, but I do have been seeing it spread with dramatic speed over the last couple years. I even catch myself using other phrasing more often from reading it more. I think it's just part of how language spreads, honestly.

Interesting, thanks. I've always been a fairly "heavy" (vs other people) user of the emdash after a high school english teacher made us use one in every paper to learn how they worked (along with a colon), and I've been a fan ever sense.

The "it's not ... it's" phrasing though definitely stands out as a bit odd when repeated.

Yeah, I also tend to have heavier usage of them. I'm not exactly sure why I do though, I don't have a particular incident like yours in high school. I think I just read too many blog posts as a teenager, haha.

It is a bit of an odd repetition, right? I wonder if anyone has done analysis on usage of that construction by year.

>I wonder if anyone has done analysis on usage of that construction by year.

This just hit the front page of HN for like an hour or two today. Not that exact construction (It's not just x, -it's y) but this suggests that (English) speakers are starting to use 'AI Buzzwords' in speech. (Words like delve, intricate, etc.)

I think it's safe to extrapolate that the construction would also start to appear more often in human-written and spoken content as well, but I'm sure there's other factors at play.

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45045500 Relevant article: https://news.fsu.edu/news/education-society/2025/08/26/on-sc... Relevant paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00238

"This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent."

I can't stop seeing this LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.

Very snarky, but okay, haha. Do you not get that sort of sense at all from the above structure? I'm curious if it's just in my head and what the perspectives of others are.

I think an llm would have put a comma in the middle of that?

I wonder why no one's tuned their model to make minor errors that way or leave a few things uncapitalized to fake a human touch

You can do it after, remove all commas and newlines. Make it all a huge continuous blob of text that is hard to read. Definitely not LLM written.

A lot of this here imo is just llm paranoia. I do not think the style of the author is different than their pre-llm posts. One em dash is not proof of anything imo as long as the text in general does not smell as much like llm-generated. I could be wrong because I do not interact much with llms lately, but it does not seem that to me.

It's more like 4 or 5 uses of it, and some of the phrasing choices also have that vibe. Everyone's threshold for the smell will be different, of course.

It seems to me like it's more effort to write something and then have an llm clean it up instead of just posting it so I mostly don't understand the behavior to start with. Why are we going through this new effort?

Until around a year or so ago, I could see and experience that I give some text of mine to an LLM and instantly it may often (not always) feel more structured and well written. I would think that using LLMs for "improving" my style made my text better. I no longer think it actually does. For one, the feeling that everything has the same style is unnerving. And we are getting more sensitive in distinguishing this kind of style, and together with the parts of it that are not actually as nice, or they are too much like polite "corpo" speech, and these stand out much more.

Who would have thought that losing individual styles would make us feel so bored.

Personally I was expecting it to get more diverse since there are a number of companies producing the models but it seems to have converged? Are they all cheating off OpenAI Is there some fundamental linguistic reason for that?

It seems super strange to me. At the very least I thought they'd try to RL other personalities to make it harder to catch. The older base models definitely could handle that.

Yeah I noticed the same, in the beginning they seemed to have different "personalities" as in ways of interacting with users. Maybe it is just a design related thing, same as all commercial websites ending up being the same, as the users know what to expect and how to interact.

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look.

emdashes have been pretty popular among net native folks for the last 20+ years, e.g. if you were to look back at the most popular Kuro5hin stories from ~2001 - 2005, you'd see them everywhere. People just aren't used to the average person being able to write well, so it looks weird to them.

I also use emdashes a lot. I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.

> I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.

But that's one of the main uses of emdashes, for signaling that the second half of the sentence is more important than the first half. If you Ctrl-F for emdashes on my blog, you can see I do it everywhere, even though all of my posts were written before LLMs existed:

https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/

Out of curiosity, why em dashes and not en dashes? Is one easier to type in a particular keyboard layout or the default in some editor?

em dashes are for denoting emphasis, whereas en dashes are for connecting compound words or phrases.

Maybe everyone is just learning to be overly paranoid about the source of writing

people in states of psychosis often behave in frightening ways out of their control, and do and say hurtful things to those around them. if someone hurts you or does something very frightening, fear and anger are natural emotions.

but it’s not morally wrong to experience psychosis. so how could it be right for me to feel fear and anger towards that person when they haven’t done anything wrong? it is a tough contradiction.

you can resolve the contradiction by just deciding to hate and fear anyone who shows signs of psychosis, treat them as if it is a morally bad trait, which many people do, see discourse about homeless people in NYC.

or you can just try to pretend that psychosis doesn’t exist, which a lot of people do, like when some public figure shows obvious psychotic symptoms but people act like it’s rational behavior.

or you can disavow the fear and anger, but if a person does actually frighten and hurt you, the resulting negative feelings often tend to be expressed in weird and unfair ways. i suspect this author’s employers and doctors probably do a lot of this.

personally I think the least bad solution is to acknowledge that anger towards a person can be justified even if they’ve done nothing morally wrong, just feel anger, and express it only in controlled ways. but this is philosophically confusing, easy to state, hard to really believe deep down.

FYI, I updated the post to acknowledge the public criticisms of my previous behavior:

> I need to be clear about something. I'm not claiming innocence in every workplace conflict or community dispute. I've made mistakes, handled situations poorly, and there's been legitimate criticism of my behavior in some cases. The Requests 3 fundraising situation, in particular, was handled badly - I took on commitments I couldn't deliver and didn't communicate well about the problems. I've apologized for this, though I understand the damage was already done. Mental illness doesn't excuse harmful behavior, and I'm not asking it to.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hi Kenneth, I read through your post and the other one linked here and I want to take a moment to speak directly to you.

I also struggle with my mental health, and was diagnosed with PTSD and OCD a few years ago. Until I started treatment, and even some while in treatment, I managed to hurt a lot of people around me. I struggled to take accountability for my actions, and often felt I was being persecuted in one way or another. The world is awful, and we don't have the support systems or safety nets for those with mental health struggles that we should. Most of what I'm seeing in discussions about your actions, and what I'm getting from your post, is a lack of accountability. That said, I recognize that you're trying.

A lot of people, myself included, have struggled to learn how to take accountability for harm while still holding compassion for themselves, and that seems to be where you are. You are correct that workplaces often discriminates against people with mental illnesses, but true understanding and compassion means holding you accountable for your actions. You're more than your illness, but it's still a part of how you engage with the world and others, and is your responsibility. Obviously, I don't know why you've been let go so much, or if there was more to it then just being open about your struggles, but I wanted to give my two cents as someone who has often felt the way you speak about feeling.

Best of luck <3

Regarding the Python Documentary, that is just the old boys boosting their personal brands and valuations again. If you aren't part of that club, you are nothing in the Python world.

It does not matter what you have done, whether you just maintained an email module throughout Python-3 or had your broken code fixed and completely rewritten by people who came later: The only thing that matters is that you have been there before around 2000-2005.

Ok so I was writing python professionally in this time period and ... if I were making a python documentary I'd expect it to honor folks that were active back this far much to the exclusion of late comers. I presume you were one of those?

Back then the language felt like a quiet little also-ran behind Perl and we looked with jealous eyes as Ruby On Rails took over the mindshare. If you were a python advocate then, you were really singing into the void.

My personal low-effort view has been that Python is only on the map today because MIT switched to teaching it as the language of choice in their CS classes. A quick internet search says that happened in 2009 though so ... maybe that's not fair. I thought it happened around 2005 causing the popularity to surge around 2010 but... them starting in 2009 seems like it wouldn't've been that quick to spur change. Sounds like I should go watch the documentary. ;)

Besides that, any documentary about something as vast as the Python ecosystem will leave some people out. It's not personal - it's the nature of any work with a finite and limited scope.

Feeling attacked in these situations is a relevant issue, and, if one struggles with mental health issues but can recognize the symptoms from within, this is one of those moments when you take a step back and try to deescalate your own response, not only for the benefit of others, but for yours as well.

The post echoed some similar points from Freddie DeBoer on real mental illness not always being pretty. There's limits to inclusivity that you quickly run into with schizoaffective disorder or bipolar. Companies are proudly supportive on paper, but that rarely extends to mania or psychosis.

It's a reality that most people are absolutely not equipped to deal with a coworker (or any contributor) that has manic or psychotic episodes. Mental illnesses is not anyone's fault, but there are still behaviors that will make it difficult to work with others, even for someone like Kenneth who is very good on the technical side.

I had never heard of Kenneth Reitz and I was curious about his Python contribution so I googled him and this was one of the first results

https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

That post is all about money. The author came into someone else’s project, acts miffed that he isn’t treated as a founder right off the bat, and then complains endlessly about where the donations went. Even belaboring the “dishonesty” of rounding 28k to 30k. I won’t read to the end because clearly this person has major faults of their own and just wrote an attack without making any reflections on himself

It certainly isn't all about money, though I think the money is worth talking about. Anyway you're welcome to make up your own mind, I thought the blog seemed credible and reasonable and it certainly cast some light on why this person is having social problems beyond just a diagnosis.

I wasn't really looking for information to discredit Reitz, it was just the first thing I stumbled upon.

I imagine I could write a similar blog post about my experience in the field while suffering from autism and severe depression.

But the thing is, if you asked my employers, I'm sure they'd give very good reasons as to why I was let go.

I wonder what some of those 20 companies he's worked for would say if they were allowed to share their side.

I'm not trying to blame Kenneth here, but things are not often as clear cut as he is implying here.

I was reading along with great sympathy until I got to this bit...

Schizoaffective disorder carries stigma that depression and anxiety don't. People can relate to feeling sad or worried; they cannot relate to experiencing reality differently.

Depression is not "feeling sad" and very much is experiencing reality differently. Flippantly calling something so horrifically painful "feeling sad" is exactly the kind of thing he's accusing everyone else of.

When he says "experiencing reality differently", that is meant in an extremely visceral sense - I could be extremely depressed and that is debilitating, but I will never literally see or hear other people that aren't physically there. The vast majority of people cannot relate to that experience. Most people have experienced depression or anxiety, at least at some level.

This is a very ignorant thing to say. I agree that most people cannot relate to the experience of psychotic episodes.

While prevalence IS higher for depression and anxiety, most people have not experienced depression or anxiety and will not in their life.

Lifetime prevalence of depression is 10-20% worldwide, depending on the studies. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-21243-x

Anxiety prevalence is a little higher but also not experienced by a majority. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.31887/DCNS.2015.17.3...

People that have not experienced anxiety and depression can not relate.

Depression and anxiety are not amplified version of emotions. They are not on the same spectrum.

Comparing the disorders makes no sense and only helps stigma.

Youre right its not just feeling sad but relative to the extreme symptoms of Psychosis, delression is very mild by comparison

These disorders don't exist on the same spectrum. There is no point in comparing the two. Both can be absolutely debilitating. People that feel the need to compare severity of disorders like you do actively contribute to the stigma and invalidation of severe disorders. Tell the families of the more than 700k people that commit suicide every year that "depression is very mild by comparison". An absolutely ignorant comment.

Well we agree they exist on different spectrums. The suicide rate is also very bad for psychotic disorders although far fewer people suffer from them. Having faced stigma and invalidation for my issues I suppose I let that rub off on me to the point I stigmatized others. Thanks for pointing that out, I suppose I should be more mindful in the future

I appreciate your reply. Psychotic disorders are absolutely debilitating and any stigma and invalidation towards those is just as shameful. I understand your reaction and I apologize if I was being a little too confrontational. I guess we both share a similar history of stigmatization.

I have schizoaffective disorder and work in the tech industry and have not noticed any of the things this author talks about. While I am medicated, even if I inform bosses, coworkers or HR that I have this dangerous mental illness, I am treated completely normal. It is only when I have an episode of psychosis that things get difficult, and rightfully so for the people around you, because it is extremely difficult for someone to have any sort of normal relationship with someone who is psychotic and delusional. Psychosis happens when there is a failure in the healthcare. Psychosis does ruin relationships, but I don't blame other people for this. As a patient, while still in my right mind, I must insist that my healthcare needs are adequately addressed. This includes retaining a qualified doctor, setting up a medical power of attorney, reminding myself that I must take medications that work, despite the side effects, and possibly asking for reduced hours or responsibilities. It is neither everyone else's fault for the difficulties I face, nor my fault, it just is the way it, and pointing the finger at everyone else is not helpful. I am grateful for the consideration and forgiveness people do offer considering the objective circumstance.

All the comments here about how it's okay that he got excluded because he did the bad things fall right in line with what he's describing. Mental health awareness is easy when you just throw away all the people who make you uncomfortable! I thought it was a pretty good read and I'm not discounting it because it was written by someone struggling with mental illness.

I don't think anybody is dismissing it. But what are you suggesting? That a company should just ignore mental health issues that affect other members of the company, potentially in a very serious way?

No on is suggesting that, but at the same time, such companies offer zero ways for people experiencing a mental health crisis to heal. And maybe that's not their role, but more and more the government also is pushing people toward the private sector for their healthcare needs, so no one wants to deal with it. The choice is either hopping from job to job just to get healthcare, or homelessness. Which, if you look at who is on the streets, that's the choice many schizoaffective people are left with. It's very easy to end up on the streets when you are mentally ill; most people who are ill and manage to stay off the streets are fully supported by family.

Mentally ill people sometimes just need a good 7-8 months to get off a bad manic episode. It doesn't fit with corporate next-quarter hustle culture, and it doesn't fit with our "the private sector must monetize your misery" healthcare system. Which means they slip through the cracks, onto the streets, and everyone says "well what are we supposed to do, we've got a business to run here!"

Until of course you're stepping over them sleeping on the sidewalk your way to the office. Then it's time to send in the national guard to "clean up the streets". Which is a travesty a national failure.

What people are suggesting is there should be another option. Things don't have to be so dire.

I think there’s just a practical matter of if you have a person in this situation, you need to consider the others around him - as they may just leave to easier situations instead of dealing with it.

I agree that "Companies tout their mental health benefits and neurodiversity initiatives" really should not do this token performative crap without fully understanding what they are implying.

Mate, theres another blog post about how the guy stole almost $30k of fundraised money. That's not mental illness, that's behavior that we should not be welcoming in any community.

>That's not mental illness, that's behavior that we should not be welcoming in any community.

No, acceptance of mental illness doesn't work if you define away anything serious as not mental illness. That's precisely the trouble the author is having, when they have a mental illness that's not just the cute idealized Tiktok version.

People with well-managed schizophrenia can lead relatively normal lives. Or they can wake up from a three day psychosis, not remembering why they've been arrested. It's a spectrum, and it does sometimes get ugly.

I'm sorry, I have to disagree. Why should the python community still support someone who misappropriated funds?

Others trusted him, and he proved he cannot be trusted. It's that simple, as far as I'm concerned. He knew about his mental illness, and still put himself in the position of control there. All could have been avoided

They shouldn't. Just like you don't have to support when a psychotic person becomes violent.

But you also can't pretend it's not part of the package. It doesn't stop being mental illness when it becomes inconvenient.

You will sometimes see people write "mental illness doesn't cause people to do this, because I have it and I don't". The truth is that most mental illnesses are on a spectrum. That includes both people who have no problem in daily life, and people who have serious problems.

It's not mental illness because we don't want to support it is not the right conclusion. It's completely backwards.

Welcome to Hacker News.

You're not wrong. I thought it was a good read and some awesome honesty if not also leaving some things unmentioned or undescribed. Sometimes the details matter a lot.

Let's imagine another, non-existing, person so as to clearly differentiate from the author. Said imaginary person gets violent due to socialization and a anger issues. How should the company handle an episode that leaves another employee with a broken nose and bruises? Disclosure doesn't defend a company from it's duty to protect the bodily health of that person's coworkers does it?

Most people have some mental unwellness or at least experiences they struggle to navigate or understand. Their experiences can make the problem worse and some conditions lead to behaviors that add processing load and tax their capacity to remain well. At times that exceeds a capacity to navigate and injury occurs. While invisible that injury has impact and costs. Employees have a right to not be harmed by their coworkers and a right to demand employers protect that right. I'm making that argument on a basis of common decency but there are legal liabilities to consider as well. All of this sort of thing is a distraction from the work the employer needs done.

Our world is better off to the extent we help everyone be productive and contribute at their maximal capacity. While some of the affects we have on one another are very positive, today we are struggling with how to balance the negative hard affects.

I can report leaving a really wonderful job after being socially attacked by a coworker that lost reality and falsely convinced my team that I had harmed them. Despite sharing evidence from the third party involved that it was a departure from reality, my boss decided not to help correct the problem. This has very negative impacts on my mental health, finances, marriage, and it derailed my career for a while. I probably had good standing to sue for damages. I certainly was damaged. There had been many poor behaviors from that person prior.

It is complicated and messy. As much as I appreciated it, the essay reads to me as though it minimizes the negatives. Without discounting it and while being understanding and inclusive we still need to manage impacts and the distractions those negatives create.

I feel pretty sympathetic, but I also feel sympathetic when I imagine working with someone who has outbursts. The details of how he responds to "routine workplace stress" and the actual symptoms are pretty absent from this piece.

I'm not sure how to resolve the interests of everyone involved - I just know that when I've had to work with a colleague who was volatile or prone to yelling at me it made my own life and mental health much worse.

Interesting interpretation of the comments.

Sigh. I too would like to know an employer that can accomodate unpredictable performance or a partner willing to do emotional labor.

As for unpredictable performance, employers never want to have that. But it is possible if you have your own business or consultancy. Or if you work with art and creativity, where it is the norm to have ups and downs.

Perhaps one option: work at a non-profit whose mission deals with your disorder.

They probably understand it more than most disorders and likely have some level of skills to cope with it and it makes them look good employing them.

Idk artists I know have to work hard whenever there's some opportunity, regardless of whether they are up or down at the moment.

I don't think it's about working hard or not, it's about predictable performance. Artists work harder than most people when they are active, but also have hiatuses. It's completely expected for artists to have break periods.

> A perfect example: the Python documentary releases tomorrow, featuring interviews with Python community leaders and contributors. Despite creating one of the most foundational Python libraries in history, I wasn't even contacted about participating. No email, no mention, complete invisibility. The omission speaks volumes about how mental health disclosure transforms you from community asset to community liability

It features 22 people, which already seems quite a lot for a 90 minute documentary. And I can think of several other prominent Python people who are not listed. And lets be real here: "I made a Python library people like" really doesn't compete against "I was a core Python dev for 20 years". requests being "one of the most foundational Python libraries in history" seems quite exaggerated.

This kind "I need to be front and centre of attention and when I'm not I am being oppressed" type stuff is a big part of the reason why so many people found it hard to work with Kenneth. His constant self-aggrandizing and need for endless validation gets very tiring very fast.

I appreciate that Kenneth's mental health struggles are very real and I do not mean to devalue that in any way, but his constant use of his mental health to dismiss and and all criticism of his behaviour is another thing that gets very tiring very fast.

Of course I have no insight in many aspects of Kenneth's life and can't comment on any of it. I am perfectly willing to believe that sometimes in some places he has been discriminated due to his mental health diagnosis.

I can however comment on the state of things in Python because much of it is public, and the problems there have been mostly or entirely unrelated to his mental health diagnosis.

Many people are crazy, few are honest. Most people say they want diversity but they really don’t. But mentally ill people will trust what people say because they can’t trust their own instincts and this makes them prone to being victimized and othered, often by the systems and people that are supposed to help.

Page seems to be down now.

Archive link: https://archive.is/UjCgv

Non-negotiable tenet(s): all human lives are valuable, all humans deserve dignity, and when we as a society can't find a place for a valuable and talented individuals like the author then we have failed in some sense.

That said, within the current system...

Morally and legally, what are the limits of accommodation?

Accommodation, in my uninformed layman understanding, is about accommodating people who can do the job, but need to do it differently than others. For example, wheelchair accessibility for white-collar office workers.

Does it include the inclusion of people who can't perform all aspects of the job?

Communication and collaboration are absolute pillars of nearly any engineer's job, but by the writer's own statements it seems like his condition often prevents this.

How do we resolve this?

> Non-negotiable tenet(s): all human lives are valuable, all humans deserve dignity, and when we as a society can't find a place for a valuable and talented individuals like the author then we have failed in some sense.

This sort of framing assumes the author bears no responsibility at all, and it's just society that has failed. The thing is though, even in an ideal society, it would be not reasonable to expect people to deal with someone's issues indefinitely, particularly when they chalk up all criticism as "discrimination"; I'm quite certain there are legitimate reasons, completely unrelated to his mental health, that he was fired or passed over for promotions.

I wholeheartedly agree. Individual responsibility is, really, a crucial pillar of just about anything. Especially this question.

    The thing is though, even in an ideal society, it would be 
    not reasonable to expect people to deal with someone's issues 
    indefinitely

Agree 100%.

Now, in that somewhat narrow perspective, this seems unsolvable. If we accept that communication and collaboration is an essential part of nearly any engineering job then I don't know that many companies are going to be able to accommodate an engineer who can't do those things. That gets back to the fundamental distinction between "is able to do the job, but needs to be able to do it differently" versus "cannot do the job."

Zooming out a bit, though, it's also true that in an ideal society we'd be able to use everybody's talents to their full potential.

Getting to 100.0% of that is surely not achievable but getting as close to it as possible should be our "north star" if you'll forgive the cliched corpo-speak term.

The author has proven himself (unless I am mistaken) to be a valuable and dedicated Python engineer, and creates code that helps others, and it really is a loss to society if those talents cannot be utilized.

"Schizoaffective disorder is a mental health condition that is marked by a mix of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression, mania and a milder form of mania called hypomania. Hallucinations involve seeing things or hearing voices that others don't observe. Delusions involve believing things that are not real or not true."

I'm not sure this is an employable condition unfortunately. As progressive as anyone wants to be, I can see the disruption an illness like this causes not being tenable. Businesses are competitive entities, not machines for inclusion. My heart goes out to OP but I don't think I'd want him on my team either.

It is a condition that is employable in the abstract, as symptoms are as varied as individuals are.

The difficulty begins with the treatment- the medications can be extremely unpleasant, and it is not uncommon for patients to cease taking them.

Unfortunately, people with the condition can be unreliable narrators, so to speak, and so any deviation from perfectly normal becomes suspicion of medication refusal, as the author noted in the article. Even when they are perfectly honest and accurate, just having a rough day will mean being met with distrust at best.

The thing that struck me as odd in the article is the repetition of fear as a reaction in others. There's not enough information to understand if this is accurate or not. One of my friends growing up had a cleft lip; his low self image had him constantly assuming the worst in others despite it (from my observations) contributing far less to people's reactions than he'd imagined.

So, we are left wondering: is the author of the post a reliable narrator, or are their symptoms coloring their perception of the interactions with others in a way that they are misjudging?

[redacted]

Thank you for sharing. I am sympathetic to the struggle, being an occasionally unreliable narrator myself.

It can be incredibly surprising and disappointing how people can react to mental health issues, even just hearing that you have them despite not presenting symptoms at the time.

A prior acquaintance of mine was a social worker who helped people with such conditions live (semi)independently. One in particular hated his medication, but when he wasn't on it, he'd become increasingly paranoid that vampires were out to get him. To the best of my knowledge he was never violent, but you're right- when imagining defensive paranoia, popular media always brings to mind a loose cannon who might be a danger to themselves and others.

In time, this may change, but I can't say that I'm too hopeful. We no longer associate menstruation with hysteria, but it's easy to change when we're talking about half the population. So long as fictional media outnumbers real lives, it'll be harder to change.

With that said, change comes from learning, and I hope your sharing will help others understand.

I hope you don't have to go through that in the future. The way people treat the homeless and how ERs treat anyone who asks for medication (accusations of pill seeking, as if it's impossible anyone might need pills) are horrible. Good luck out there.

I would hope that there would be some possibility for folks like this to utilize platforms like Patreon or GitHub sponsorships to help pay their bills - they are obviously motivated and productive coders and also talented writers.

In my experience there is sort of a discrepancy often times. Someone discloses a severe mental health diagnosis and the company just goes on pretending they are just like every other employee - making no changes to accommodate them.

On the flip side, employees with severe mental health disorders often want to be treated exactly the same as other employees - so it seems a bit of an un-winnable situation.

You've got to put them behind a remote, narrowly-scoped, async interface. Basically hire them as a remote consultant, with 1 point of contact, and send them non-urgent tasks that they can complete whenever. It can work like this, I've seen it. Eventually they blow up, but the interface prevents any negative side-effects, and in the interim it was a win-win arrangement.

> Businesses are competitive entities, not machines for inclusion.

I think this is less true than you're stating. It has been a drum beat of the business schools though. The rich, influential, and socially active people I know are far more free and diverse than any of the working people I know. A sizable contingent of them believe society should be run to maximize everyone's ability to be productive. It's part of why there are many laws mandating so.

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