Aaron Swartz on illness and depression

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My dad was diagnosed with celiac disease several years ago but (mostly) refused to go on the diet because he's strong willed about things like that. He's in a rather bad way now, so if anyone here gets diagnosed with it, please follow the diet.

I just found out I am gluten intolerant. The symptoms he describes are that of an intolerance to gluten. After reading the post, I was glad to see a comment that recognized this. It isn't fun and is really hard to get things done when you constantly feel sick.

To prevent it has undertones that he can't freely choose what he wants. That to me, is more depressing than being jailed with depression.

I keep seeing the same retorts, here, on Reddit, Gawker, and whatever outlet treating this as if it's Kurt Cobain.

That if only someone had talked him down, or that if he had opened up more, that the DOJ was bullying him, so on, so forth. The most egregious offense I keep seeing is how selfish suicide is.

That, to me, is a very intimate and personal thing to say. That's something he shares with him, his family, and close friends.

But my conclusion is this... emotional guilt tripping someone to say their suicide creates pain for others thereby he should never choose to commit suicide doesn't perpetuate healthy growth.

Moreover I think it's interesting as to how a community responds. The first thing people are doing is to find a solution, to problem solve depression which has many variables, vectors, causes, and results.

I believe this is our challenge oriented engineering brain at work. But maybe that's not the right approach, maybe like dealing with your girlfriend in a the relationship, the point isn't to immediately jump to rescue, just listen.

Just say hi.

Having spent some time on and off the past few years on suicidewatch boards I keep seeing the same pattern over and over again. The majority of people just want to talk, a sign, and they'll take anything, that they are worth it. There's a minority of people, though, that just wants the pain and suffering to stop. Death is incidental.

To those people, I don't wish it, but if it is what they want, I don't want to ever be further trapped than I would already feel.

I think it's difficult to really help others beyond a degree, as they have to get help themselves (this is based on personal experience, I am a severe depressive.)

I think the best you can do is to show them that you understand the illness, share your own experiences and describe things that helped you in the hopes it might help them.

Overall I feel the key advice is to see your doctor. Get help, go + get the most help you can, and don't be ashamed by it. I have got so much better and dealt with things so much better with the help of my doctor and others. No need to go through it all alone.

I've been tempted to write something about my experience with depression recently, but have been worried about the impact it might have on my hire-ability as there is such a stigma to mental illness (I've even been wary of commenting on HN on the subject, in the past.) The sad and tragic news about Aaron tempts me to go ahead and write it in the hopes that maybe somebody will find it useful.

> such David vs Goliath cases spark people and give them purpose, or at least a schedule of milestones to reach

Up to a point, yes, but "inevitable doom" can also have a walls-closing-in kind of effect. In particular, it's not that uncommon for people facing long prison sentences to kill themselves.

Thank you. I am using this as my cover photo to bring awareness to Aaron's work. Strangely enough, I celebrated the death of my best friend, who killed himself 13 years ago, yesterday. Another brilliant mind taken too soon.

Modern medicine has a habit of attributing unknown physical ailments to a sketchy diagnosis of mental illness. The thinking goes "well we don't know what's wrong with you, so it's probably anxiety or depression". The symptoms he states could be allergies, Lyme Disease, a brain tumor for all we know, or something else. The quickness with which some doctors rush to a diagnosis of anxiety or depression is scary, sometimes doing so before running any tests.

Your post kind of comes off as blaming the patient. This is the quickest way to get people to avoid seeking help, because they will be told they are at fault for all their symptoms, which makes them want to seek treatment even less.

> and that individually crafted cognitive behavior therapy - slow-but-steady, iterative, but radical changes in ones behavior, ones habits is the only way out.

This statement sounds nice and all but I don't think you can back it up with non-anecdotal evidence. Cognitive behavior therapy is one way that some people can overcome depression, and as this post even states it has a 50% success rate. There is no factual basis by which you can claim that those other 50% just "didn't try hard enough".

The fact is there are many ways people overcome depression, through cognitive therapy, through exercise, through medication are very common ways, but there's also things like electroshock which are still practiced today for extremely severe depression. No one approach is guaranteed to be effective by any means and it's likely that the majority depressed people will need to use a combination of approaches in order to experience relief.

Just reading a bit about his life today is enough to convince me that he was a practical, busy, and enterprising person who tackled problems seriously and systematically. His involvement in various projects shows sustained effort at difficult things. He wasn't "bookish" in the least, if "bookish" means tending to neglect the things outside of books. We should take his suicide as evidence that the techniques that work for other people aren't sufficient for everyone. David Foster Wallace is another example of someone who was well-read in everything from mathematical philosophy to self-help literature, who famously talked about cognitive therapy in a commencement address he gave, who was disciplined enough to write 1100-page, two-and-a-half pound books, and who surely did not want to be so miserable that he would choose to end his own life.

Maybe those of us who are doing okay are more skillful, or maybe we are dealing with more tractable problems. How could we know the difference? What evidence would be relevant to that distinction, if not the fact that people brighter and more accomplished than ourselves have failed?

I strongly disagree with what you said about self-control and "emotional intelligence". Depression is always caused/triggered by multiple factors. And in Aarron Swartz's case, you have to understand that he was going through a lot of stress and pressure at a very young age. Were you being put into Swartz's position, how could you handle that amount of stress? Everyone perceives things differently. To you, one thing may seem trivial but to others, it may seem important. Maybe to Swartz, this whole thing is a big insult to him. You would never know what he is going through. The fact that you are implying Swartz's lack of "emotional intelligence" makes me wonder if you have much emotional intelligence because a big component of emotional intelligence is empathy and reasoning from other's perspective.