Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

There are 3 battles which are being fought here, and they should ideally be separated out during discussions.

The trial affected a brilliant person who pushed limits of the world around him, to his limits.

At the same time there are thousands of convicts who have committed far more heinous crimes, and others who are being prosecuted harshly for crimes they didn't commit who don't follow this path.

Aaron died not because of the trial but because of depression. Having dealt with depression and depressed people, I know this fact intimately.

Depression and mental illness are humiliating, and with depression things reach a stage where anything and everything can become a trigger.

The second issue is the over-zealousness of the prosecution, . What they aimed to do is wrong, not just for Aaron but for many other accused in America.

And the finally battle is the one for culture and openness that Aaron was a champion of.

So far I have seen people champion the latter two causes (over-zealousness and open access to information) more than the first (depression).

>Aaron died not because of the trial but because of depression

Aaron died because he decided suicide was the best course of action. Given that the trial was what ultimately and unjustly squashed him, I would say he did die because of the harsh and unjust trial.

Depression is not a cause, is a consequence.

> Aaron died because he decided suicide was the best course of action.

People suffering from depression are not rational.

I don't mean that "I can't make sense of this decision therefore they aren't rational", but people having recovered from depression consider their own thought processes from the depression to be flat out wrong.

In my view there is depression and depression. Some people have good reasons to be depressed and those can be very rational reasons.

Depression has a side effect of making normal thinking patterns unusable.

You could literally win a lottery, and feel that the world hates you.

Your thought process would go - I won a lottery, but I still feel dead inside. Why go on, there isn't anything for live for.

I hate to use an example to explain depression, because its always "explainable", but hopefully as a vignette into what every waking moment of life is like for someone with depression, it should serve its purpose.

Edit: grammar in last para.

Just to be clear, the article is addressing Clinical Depression not just "having the blues" or any other form of day to day depression which most people suffer.

If you want a good description of how Clinical Depression varies wildly from 'rational depression,' read the Andrew Solomon's book The Noonday Demon. It's well written and, at least for me, expanded my perspective of how little I understood of severe depression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Noonday_Demon:_An_Atlas_of_...

that's complete and utter bullshit. you're missing the exact point the article was trying to make.

It is not. There are more types of depression than you think. Do you want me to list them or you can use a search engine?

Aaron struggled with depression long before he downloaded the JSTOR papers. How is depression a consequence of the trial?

I never said his depression was a consequence of the trial. What I did say is that is death is a consequence of the trial, i.e. without trial he would be alive (so far at least, but I don't think he was necessarily suicidal prior to the trial). What I did also say is that depression (when not an chemical imbalance problem at least) is a consequence of a series of events and therefore caused

when not an chemical imbalance problem at least

This qualifier undermines your point, since there was certainly evidence (as I posted upthread) that he did have a medical problem.

Besides the fact that my point was generic to depression and not his type of depression let me clarify and say that I don't think he had 'chemical' depression.

If you check when he started having depression and what he was reading at the time and how this depression developed you see it has to do with the way the system works, which eventually killed him.

If you check when he started having depression and what he was reading at the time

Are you referring specifically to the JSTOR/MIT case, or to something else further back? If it's the latter, can you give a reference?

If it's the former, you are aware, aren't you, that Swartz was on record years before the JSTOR/MIT case describing his depression?

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick

His description here sounds like the classic symptoms of chemical depression. Which is not to say, once again, that there weren't also other factors involved in the JSTOR/MIT case.

Sorry I wasn't aware, I've read a quite a bit about Aaron but didn't come across this. I didn't imagine actual physical pains either. It must be terrible.

Depression is not a cause, is a consequence.

It can be both. Someone linked to a post by Aaron describing his depression; at that period it didn't seem like he had any particular stressors causing it, it was just that he was depressed. He also said that things which normally improve the mood of a person who feels down did not improve his mood. That sounds like he had a genuine medical problem.

That does not mean that his response to the pending trial was entirely irrational; but it does indicate that the pending trial was not the only factor in play.

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