Tech Has a Depression Problem | Hacker News Reader

Tech Has a Depression Problem

theatlantic.com

60 pointsdfc59 comments

This article focuses on founders, and I've wondered if depression in founders is actually less "Founders get depressed" and more "Depressed people become founders".

My theory is this: being regularly depressed causes folks to regularly fix their depression. They say "What is going to make me happy?", and then they push their lives farther. Extreme amounts of money represent freedom to do what one pleases when one pleases - and how do you get that money? By founding a successful company. And its not just the money - its the satisfaction that you've done something with your life.

I've often wondered why humans get depressed, and I've seen articles on depression being an evolutionary advantage. If its the case that depression drives people to work harder (as is the case for me), then it may be true that it is an evolutionary advantage (I certainly inherited it from my family). This may then also mean that there are a significant number of founders who are just going to be depressed, solitude/stress/success or not. I'd be interested to see how many founders have a family history of depression.

>>If its the case that depression drives people to work harder (as is the case for me), then it may be true that it is an evolutionary advantage (I certainly inherited it from my family).

Depression can also cause people to commit suicide, which makes it somewhat difficult to frame it as an evolutionary advantage.

Yeah I agree: it seems to be a weird double edged sword. Simultaneously pushing people further, while also (in some cases) causing them to fall infinitely back.

I think the percentage of people who kill themselves versus the broader number of people who have depression is small.

It depends on how this averages out. If on average the benefits (increased productivity leading to increased mating) outweight the drawbacks (people committing suicide), then it still might be an advantage. Evolution doesn't care about individuals, it's a statistical process.

Risk-taking behavior can cause males to injure or kill themselves, yet it is still an advantage.

As a mental exercise:

Say from a purely utilitarian perspective, if you consider that the survivors of the depressed group are overall better off (higher overall payoff + inclusive of a strong negative in those under suicide) than the survivors of the non depressed group (say, mostly moderate payoff) then it works out. Kinda.

Dunno if you've ever been depressed, but clinically depressed people do not generally ask "What is going to make me happy?" It's more like "Nothing is ever going to make me happy." This is the difference between ordinary sadness/unhappiness and clinical depression. A mentally healthy person will say "I'm feeling unhappy. What will make me happy?" and then take action to make themselves happier. A clinically depressed person will say "I'm an unhappy person. I will always be an unhappy person. What's the use, and why should I bother?"

I think that what you're describing is better termed insecurity, the feeling that your worth and happiness is conditioned on external events. There seems to be a large - but not universal - correlation between insecurity and career success, particularly in the startup, financial, and executive worlds. The feeling that your worth is tied to your net worth tends to drive people to work harder and harder, and to take risks that secure people don't feel are worth it.

Insecurity can often be a trigger for depression, particularly when those external events that you've tied your worth to don't happen. But they're not the same thing. Plenty of insecure people cope with their insecurities through a combination of manic striving and mild delusion, while others face them directly, alter their fundamental beliefs about their worth, and end up secure. (Ironically, they often give up some financial security to do so - I know some high achieving programmers that gave up the career to travel, or open local small businesses, or become self-help gurus.) I suspect it's also possible to be clinically depressed without being insecure, but don't know enough about clinical psych to be sure of that.

Yeah I think you make a good point about insecurity, I bet that does drive a lot of people. Given some of the bashing behavior I see people engage in, I think insecurity is definitely a factor.

In my experience with depression: while it does span months/years at a time, things can be different from day to day. If we're talking about happiness a scale from -10 to 10, a Major Depressive Episode is not just 6 months of feeling -10. There are days where you can get up to a 0, and maybe moments where you're up to 3 or 4. It is in those 'breaths of fresh air' where I, and I imagine others, have the capacity to think "WTF is going on here, and how do I make this not happen again?" Then its just a matter of making a plan, and putting one foot in front of the other, even at -10.

Fact is "depression" is among the most prevalent illness among humans, and a leading cause of disability world-wide. It affects people in all regions though incidence is higher in industrialized countries for unknown reasons.

Part of the problem in talking about the condition is that the word "depression" may refer to a variety of feelings or behavioral states--in everyday usage it's not a precise term at all.

But in the context of the article, I infer the issue is "clinical depression", a very serious illness that has specific diagnostic meaning.

Distinguishing depression-as-illness from a passing mood, or transient discouragement is important. It's normal to have these moods at times of loss, high stress, etc., but not normal when it becomes persistent and affects thinking, energy, motivation, interests, or physiological rhythms.

As the article points out, suicidal thinking and action can be associated with depression. The mortality rate of severe depression is high, on the order of 15%, a decidedly non-trivial matter.

One more statistic to point out is the cost burden of depression. A very recent study estimated depression costs the US nearly $200 billion per year, more than cancer ($131 billion) or diabetes ($171 billion) annually. Considering that a minority of patients with depression receive adequate treatment, we can surmise much of the high cost of depression could be reduced by earlier intervention.

Depression is a treatable disease, the majority of sufferers respond at least moderately well to medication and non-medication therapies. Treatment doesn't always work as well as we'd like, but the problem is not being neglected. Since there's so much at stake, it's an extremely active field of research; our treatment tools will get better.

The important message is depression is a real illness that can be and should be vigorously treated. Ignoring reality does not make it go away. No one is immune, not entrepreneurs, programmers, engineers, doctors, janitors, or the fabulously wealthy.

Let's not continue to let a treatable illness turn into tragedy.

Treating depression like an illness makes it into a medical problem, and medical treatment is simply not the best recourse for a large number of people with even 'clinical depression'. The huge variety of causes and its transience makes it much less like other medical diseases, and so trying to treat it like a medical disease often won't work.

While I agree that medication is for many people an appropriate way to treat some forms of depression, it's certainly not a panacea. You don't treat diabetes by just taking medicine; you also don't eat crap that fucks with your blood sugar. If you have scoliosis, you don't just wear a back brace during childhood; you also avoid trying out for the football team. If your family has a history of melanomas, you stay out of the sun and put on sun lotion.

It's important to note that some of these treatments are not strictly 'medical treatments' - they're ways of living your life that reduce the impact of the disease. Just talking about disease is incredibly morbid. So to my mind, thinking of yourself as having a disease is actually the opposite of what you want to treat depression. Sure, it's comforting to have a way to define oneself in order to understand what's going wrong. But a negative focus on yourself is really the wrong way to go about reducing the impact of depression.

Yes, studies and medications and non-medication therapies and prescribed treatments are all useful in 'combating the disease', until you realize that it isn't one single disease. It's a human condition that varies in cause from chemical imbalances to unexpected life changes, and is incredibly difficult to diagnose the root cause of, not to mention find a workable treatment for. Relating the emotional state of humans to the working of their organs is a bit like relating an Indy 500 race's lap stats to the engines in the cars on the track.

So until we establish an actual field of science that focuses on every conceivable treatment of every form of depression, could we all please stop being so clinical about the whole thing?

Here is what I consider to be a more accurate portrayal: Depression is an issue that plagues pretty much all of the educated America, which significantly overlaps with tech these days.

I came here to say this. We're not the only industry that suffers from it. In fact many of the traits that make someone a good leader or unusually innovative are the same traits that can trigger depression. We only have anecdotal evidence at this point but I'm confident it will be proven someday.

> We're not the only industry that suffers from it

The article actually acknowledges that:

> Depression is hardly exclusive to tech. The disorder is the leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and costs employers billions of dollars a year in lost revenue. Multiple people I talked to for this story pointed out that entertainers are also known for melancholy. For writers and artists, neuroses are practically required.

Plus this article focuses on the depression founders face, but most of us aren't founders. And while I wouldn't say starting a company should make you depressed, it should be hard in some sense. There is an idea that it will suck for a while and then you'll succeed, or more generally that the suck has some sort of timebox around it.

But for people with jobs, we just... have jobs. Until we retire or die. So depression in that case is a bit more of a problem, I'd say.

So true. I think it's the fact that the general public doesn't think startup founders (and employees) face depression that is the story. But the same can be true of many other professions too: doctors, lawyers, consultants, etc.

Why just educated America? People who are uneducated may still be depressed, but less educated about mental illness to try and address it.

As they say, ignorance is bliss. If you never educate yourself about how other people in the world live and how your lifestyle impacts them, or how the food you eat is made, or the actions that governments take on your behalf, you won't feel empathy or anger about all the injustices and abuses that occur. Once you realize how much pain exists, and how much of it is a result of your action or inaction, then the real depression starts.

I don't know how much depression is caused by external and abstract world events and how much is caused by more personal events. People are more likely to become depressed after a divorce for example.

Actually my impression is that poorer people are more likely to be depressed. Consider the high rate of suicide among poor Indian farmers, or the high number of homeless with mental illness.

A quick google search for studies of the correlation between wealth and suicide seem to confirm my view, eg "a 2009 Gallup survey [shows] the rate of depression is nearly twice as high for Americans making less than $24,000 a year than it is for those with annual incomes above $60,000." Of course, the real story is more complicated: It seems the correlation is much less clear for poor regions than for poor individuals, and I saw some suggestions that poor people living next to wealthy people were more likely to commit suicide.

That might be confusing cause and effect. It's not that homeless people are more likely to be mentally ill, it's that the mentally ill are often homeless.

And that's by choice - we've decided that we'd rather not give a shit about mentally ill people, because it might cost money. (Cf. the killing of the Mental Health Systems Act)

You're assuming that suicide is a result of depression and not something else such as hopelessness.

Sorry, my opener was misleading. I intentionally did not comment about the less educated because (at the cost of sounding elitist) I know very few of them personally. I'd love to hear about depression among the uneducated (I would not be surprised if this, too, is a serious issue) from more learned folks out here.

If you're interested in this, definitely read the book _Suicide_ by the sociologist Emile Durkheim. (Published in 1897). It's an incredibly incisive analysis of several of the flavors of depressive thoughts that smart folks have. One of the top 3 books I've ever read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(book)

Not mentioned in the article: those young people in the tech industry with a stable, boring job working for a conglomerate company and depressed by constantly observing our adventurous peers trying to change the world in hip start-ups, wondering if we made the wrong decision.

Grass is always greener, I suppose. Or depression is just infectious.

I've slowly felt my soul being crushed after five years at a small, Office Space-esque mechanical engineering firm in an LA suburb. Our perks include two 10-minute breaks per day where we can make personal calls, walk around the parking lot, or close our office doors. Actual methods of analysis draw heavily from '70s to early '90s engineering. I sound horribly millennial (which I am) to complain about these things while I'm making six figures at age 29, but it feels stifling and inhumane to work like this.

You oughtn't feel guilty about finding your situation stifling and soul-crushing. (If that's horribly millenial, well, perhaps millenials have managed to see the matter clearly. Every insight starts in some generation.)

were you chained to your desk or something? what do you mean 10 minute breaks?

I know exactly what you mean. I felt the same way with my first job as a developer out of college. I'd always considered myself a mentally stable person until _that job_. Like you, I had the feeling that my complaints were those of "millennials" but I couldn't keep myself there. I eventually left and I'm glad I did.

I'm leaving in ten months. I have $60k in disposable savings (i.e. this excludes retirement) and a pickup truck. I will travel the world for at least a year, then do who knows what. Maybe I'll become a programmer.

Gen-Xer here... you would be surprised to learn how many of us wholeheartedly agree with you.

Even working at a "change the world startup" can beat you down after a while. Working under a high level of stress for long periods of time, wearing 10 different hats and doing the work of 5 people while not knowing for sure if the investor who promised to cut you a check next week will actually come through.

The problem is, as the article indicates, image. While what you say is often the reality, the image many of these companies portray to the outside world, particularly those outside the SV bubble, is much different. I understand completely where AdmiralAsshat is coming from, because I resemble that remark. Way too strongly. I'm never satisfied with myself. Constantly second-guessing my past decisions. Feeling that I am inferior in some way. Forcing myself to start side projects because that is what "good" engineers do, even if I don't particularly want to do them.

I have by all accounts a great life and a solid career. That doesn't stop me from obsessing over not being better, from beating myself up for not having put myself into the position I fell like I should be in.

I've spent a lot of time in both worlds, there's nothing really glamorous about the startup space. You're in such a hurry and requirements change so frequently that whatever you build ends up being a godawful mess and you just have to live with it. It kills me because I used to take so much pride in writing (what I considered) beautiful code, but now things are always so rushed that I slap stuff together as well as I can given time constraints. There are some components of my codebase that I try to avoid looking at because it just puts me in a bad mood. All I know is that it works and seems to be relatively bug free, but it's gnarly as all get out. My core project is around 60k lines of Python, I have no doubt that I could rewrite the whole thing in less than 10k lines if I had time to refactor, but there's little chance of that ever happening.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that once you're burned out and forever trying to cram 20 hours of work into a 10 hour day there's little chance that anything you do would be what "good engineers" do, so don't beat yourself up about it. I was an engineer for a fortune 500 consulting company at my previous job, the work was somewhat boring but you had the resources to produce extremely high quality work if you were so inclined. I sort of miss that.

I know what the reality is, and I know me feelings are irrational. Of course, depression usually is irrational.

Honestly, it depends on what frame of mind I happen to be in on a given day. Sometimes I look back on my ten years at a defense contractor and think how great it was to work on a complex radar power supply and on complex signal processing software with some seriously crazy platform constraints. Other times, I look back on that same period and see the two years of misery at the end of my tenure as I repeatedly tried and failed to find a new job to get me out of miserable working conditions, all while being told repeatedly from outside how hot software engineering was and figuring it must mean I was a defective doomed to my existence.

Where do you live? Location is everything, you shouldn't take it personally if someone in san fran or austin can find a job easily, those markets are on fire. It's a different story if you live in Kansas or Arkansas, you definitely shouldn't take it personally.

Some of the crappiest engineers I know have a plethora of offers coming in on a weekly basis, just because the supply/demand curve for tech workers is completely out of whack here in Dallas. Geography makes a big difference.

How funny. I'm in Dallas. I did finally end up getting out to a small local company here, but as I said it took two years. I didn't apply much locally, though, since I couldn't find much that wasn't enterprise CRUD work. Except for my current company, those I did apply to (Lockheed, General Dynamics, CapitalOne, Gearbox, a few others I have forgotten) never contacted me over my resume.

But yes, I know geography matters. That only helped the rational part, though.

Working in one of those sorts of jobs I sometimes feel "depressed" when frequenting sites like HN. On the other hand, I specifically chose my job because anxiety (for me) leads to depression, and the last time I experienced that I almost didn't come out alive. There's something to be said for the "boring" jobs. For me, they give me a good paycheck and haven't usually required overtime. So I can still have a life outside of work while guaranteeing that I will leave my home 5 days out of the week (necessary for me, I have to be around other people to get an escape from my own mind for a while, it's that or something that'll numb my mind like alcohol or video games or something and that's a bad route). Grad school, startups, I'd like to be able to do those things, but I can't while also maintaining my sanity (I've tried).

95% of startups are nowhere near world changing.

...and the other 5% aren't all necessarily changing it for the better.

Not every startup is trying to "change the world" or "become a millionaire" - some just want to create a stable, profitable business with a reasonable paychecks for the employees.

There is a discussion forum specifically for this: http://devpressed.com/ Please check it out, and also any of the talks [1] by its founder, Greg Baugues. It's from a ruby conference, but is applicable to all developers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFIa-Mc2KSk)

I'm very worried about the destruction of our environment. Not one to be into spiritual things like 'Spiritual Ecology' but I think there is some truth to it: we all have some connection to the earth and nature. What we eat is our most profound expression of our connection to the physical world. But it goes further of course, to how we treat nature, wildlife, etc. As the environment becomes more polluted with toxins, light, noise -- as it becomes more scarce - I think many of us will realize the hard way how important it is to our psychological well being.

The following has worked very well for me, I hope others benefit also:

* running 45min-1hour each day high intensity (80% HRM) (on the trails of course, away from concrete and civilization) * playing in the dirt (1) * being around animals / Farm Therapy * make sure you treat your microbiota well * if depression has neuroinflammation as a cause, consider Tumeric, possibly one that will cross the blood brain barrier (2) * getting good sleep

(1) http://modernfarmer.com/2014/08/dirt-make-us-happy-getting-h... (2) http://truttmd.com/curcumin-caveat-emptor-not-all-brands-are...

Just a warning about running that much: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-much-running-tied-to-shorter...

They say it's the first five minutes per day that give the most benefits: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-five-min...

Maybe you should consider trading some of that running for walking instead.

It's surprising that one would be depressed working 10hr+ days for little to no pay chasing what, as time goes on, seems to be a dubious dream to make someone else very rich.

Seems to me like there's plenty of help around if you're a founder, but not very much if you're just a programmer, especially a relatively new one. I don't have many contacts for career advice and frequently have to kick myself to maintain my drive - it seems to ask for help would be to invite a bunch of people to tell me my skills are shit.

Greg Baugues from Twilio gave a powerful talk titled "Devs and Depression" at Laracon this year. He talks about his personal experience, and about breaking out from the underneath the stigma of mental health issues for developers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6x9wmlFz_c

Certainly depression in tech is real and people suffering deserve help (and can hopefully get it given their station in life).

But when you strive for hyper-ambitious outcomes, whether it be selling your company for $2B, trying to change the world, or training to become a world champion fighter, you're likely going to suffer some injuries that you might not fully recover from.

I feel for all the people who are depressed AND struggling to find their next meal--working in fast food or in factories, being treated as if they were less-than-human.

I find it super-hard to get worked up when we founders and startup employees get to have health insurance, good salaries, free food and education, and a chance to win the lottery.

You have perspective

People who are suffering from clinical depression may not have. The pain will be the same irrespective of their position in society.

I know what you mean, many of my (adult) students are doing a couple of minimum wage jobs, looking after children and/or parents and trying to study. Not easy.

> You have perspective. People who are suffering from clinical depression may not have.

You're using "perspective" in an unclear way here, as though it means optimism or a long view. In fact, studies show that depressed people often have better, more accurate, perceptions of reality than non-depressed people. This state of being even has an associated theory or school of thought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism

Quote: "Although depressed individuals are thought to have a negative cognitive bias that results in recurrent, negative automatic thoughts, maladaptive behaviors, and dysfunctional world beliefs,[2][3][4] depressive realism argues not only that this negativity may reflect a more accurate appraisal of the world but also that non-depressed individuals’ appraisals are positively biased."

If this idea turns out to have scientific merit (which it doesn't at the moment), I would find that depressing.

So you're saying its not a real problem because startup people have resources?

Are there any good online or real world assessment tools out there to identify people who may be suffering from depression / more predisposed to be depressed?

There's also a strong positive correlation between incidence of depression and intelligence.

True. Also depression seems to be an illness human beings may inherit.

Physical exercises are known to help depression. Sitting in front of a computer screen all day long without much social interaction seems to make it worse (at least for me).

Of the serious mental illnesses, they're almost always inherited.

"Tech circles" == "startups"?

A fair number of VCs perform back-channel references (references the candidate didn't provide) and the main reason for that is to filter out anyone who's ever suffered from depression or anxiety.

Large firms are in on this discrimination, too. It's illegal to ask about these disorders when hiring, but if you acqui-hire from investors who legally can probe into those questions, it's a nice little loop-hole.

I don't think it really does any good, because all else being equal, I'd want to a person of good character who fought a mental disability and beat it. That's not easy to do. Beating depression or bipolar or panic disorder is way harder (and says more about a person's fortitude) than building Snapchat. The truth is that many people with mental illnesses are far above normal in functionality when not affected.

Still, this is just another thing that is changing in Silicon Valley. The old Silicon Valley (HP, not Snapchat) driven forward by passionate, creative people and many had these illnesses. The new one (Snapchat, Clinkle) is all about image management and favors low-variance, reliable mediocrities.

You assume the VCs are good at spotting depression and anxiety. It doesn't seem obvious to me that this is the case.

I don't assume that they're good at it. I know that they try to do it, and what their methods are. I think their methods are, at best, modestly effective and, even with that, it's not clear that selecting against low-level (and usually manageable with age) mental health issues has any value, and it just might be counterproductive (antifragility argument here).

Warren Buffett's partner Charles Munger says it best in this interview (time linked). He's talking about wall street executives, and the envy they have over one anothers' successes, but the same applies to tech founders.

"If somebody makes a lot of money, or reports a lot of money... Let them!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6RS_PqudxU#t=1460

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