An unquiet mind
From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating and dangerous territory of this form of madness - a world in which one pole can be the alluring dark land ruled by what Byron called the "melancholy star of the imagination," and the other a desert of depression and, all too frequently, death. A moving and exhilarating memoir by a woman whose furious determination to learn the enemy, to use her gifts of intellect to make a difference, led her to become, by the time she was forty, a world authority on manic-depression, and whose work has helped save countless lives.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
7mentions
5people
2011–2016years
57% recommend43% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- No problem, if you're interested in reading about this I highly recommend the book An Unquiet Mind. It's a true story about a psychologist who finds out later in life she is bipolar. It's interesting and goes in depth into her manic episodes. I strongly recommend it.
- It seems like a day does not go by that i do not hear about some other wandering soul who decides to leave this crazy party on earth due to depression. It is a long battle, and one i am currently fighting, but in my experience our Waterloo Moments can often be avoided by the timely appearance of a willing listener and/or friend.
Suicide is a personal choice, and one for which others should not feel responsible, though who does not feel a twinge of missed opportunity when someone dear leaves us because of the place they are trapped in their minds? I know i am a stranger, but if you need to talk to someone, or just sit silently on the phone, or anything... I am here friend.
I leave you with a book recommendation, An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, and a quote from Hugo Wolf:
"To be sure, I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds."
- This is a dangerous article. A dangerous, slightly manic article.
Someone close to me is affected with bipolar, which drags me into that universe. People who self-medicate - such as the author - are very common with this disease. There are a million people who claim they've "overcome" it, some through alcohol or street drugs, some through nutrition and lifestyle changes. The danger is that when you're manic, you are your own blind spot - you're in no position to self-assess, you think things are great when they clearly aren't.
It's been three years since the end of his "challenge", and from the sound of it, three lovely years. Meeting a new love, getting married, positive things. How will the unmedicated author react when, say, a parent dies? Or the marriage ends?
There's nothing wrong with trying to understand the disease, its effects on your body, and the effects of alternative therapies - I commend the author for that. However, the claim that he's "overcome" bipolar this way is reckless and frankly dangerous. There are countless bipolar patients out there who struggle every day with their medications; the costs, the terrible side effects, and who fight a battle of willpower to stay on them despite feeling "cured". One article like this, one claim to the opposite, is all it takes to break them.
I'd love for this article to be true. I'd love it if my friend didn't have to spend thousands on medications that are slowly killing her, but somehow I doubt this is the answer.
Edit: What great feedback! It's interesting hearing people's different experiences with various forms of treatment. I think the lifestyle changes the author recommends are sane and sensible, helpful changes. They just aren't a "cure". You manage these diseases and you must be very careful when tweaking that management.
I highly recommend that anyone who's involved with - or interested in - a mood disorder read An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison. It gives you an excellent understanding of the subtleties and trickery this cunning disease exhibits.
- I think that the prevalence of manic-depressive (bipolar) illness among software entrepreneurs is many times greater than that of the general population. Many of the symptoms characterizing manic or hypomanic behavior are possibly extremely helpful for software entrepreneurs and I would argue that founders exhibiting manic-depressive characteristics have a higher rate of success than those without such traits.
However, success is really dependent on founders being careful to manage their symptoms to avoid the 'burn-out/depression' cycles that generally follow the manic and hypomanic cycles. It IS possible to have some measure of control or regulation of these cycles by some combination of medication, careful diet, proper sleep, CBT (Cognitive-Behavior Therapy) or Psychoanalysis. And there are lots of books on Amazon discussing these topics (but very very few reliable online websites). But this is more of an ART than a science and it can take a very very long time to figure out the proper balance.
The main main issue for all software entrepreneurs with manic-depressive illness is that they need to avoid having their entrepreneur lifestyle trigger their mania/hypomania episodes and run out of control.
And I would wonder if the caffeine-fueled programmer paradigm actually leads to stress-related brain damage that makes software entrepreneurs more susceptible to full-blown manic-depression. A kind of entrepreneur PTSD.
The article is good if it spurs people to do more research on their own and to seek out professional evaluations (from people very experienced with bipolar/manic-depression. not just anyone please...) if they have a sense that something about their moods just might be a bit off.
The average time from onset to diagnosis of manic-depression/bipolar is approximately 10 years. An entire decade lost. Greater awareness of manic-depressive illness and its causes might help entrepreneurs create companies that are more conducive towards promoting mental health. How many companies have utterly failed after a co-founder or key programmer hits a depressive cycle and is suddenly completely able to perform their jobs?
I'm speaking from my own experience here: I only sought out help after starting and having only marginal success with 3 startups. After a decade of these failures I had the sinking feeling that something was wrong with me and I couldn't justify placing the blame on my co-founders and poor market conditions. And then after eliminating sugar and white flour from my diet and take small doses of lithium I finally realized how off I had really been all this time.
I think it'll take a few more years at least before I have a full understanding of the illness and how to best manage it. It'll be expensive to see all these specialists, etc. but the alternatives are severe depressive, likely financial ruin and a high chance of eventual suicide.
A few books that helped me learn more about manic-depressive illness (and made me feel like there was actually hope...):
- Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Dr. Kay Jameson -- Documents how creativity and manic-depressive illness are linked, and discusses the prevalence of mood disorders among the most famous artists and writers in Western culture.
- An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Dr. Kay Jameson -- The author is a clinical psychologist and wrote this breakthrough memoir revealing her own battles against manic-depressive illness.
- Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder by Julie Fast -- This is extremely useful for founders who may have a member or their team or company that does have or seems to have manic-depressive illness. It helps explain how to communicate with manic-depressive friends/loved-ones in a way that they can hear you, particularly when they are in the midst of a manic/hypomanic cycle. And it will help you learn how to avoid triggering manic/depressive episodes.
Nutrition-related resources are a bit more complicated and if you have the resources I would suggest consulting with a professional with training in Orthomolecular Psychiatry. These types of people are MD's so they can prescribe medications and know a lot about medications, and they also know about nutrition and its interaction with medications and mental health. The combination of these skills is extremely important when you are dealing with serious medications like lithium and also changing your diet, since medication and diet interact with each other in complicated ways. But the people who possess both types of knowledge are very rare, and there aren't too many of them around. If you are in the Berkeley area I would recommend seeing Dr. Michael Lesser. If he doesn't have open appointment times he can probably refer you to reliable colleagues of his.
But in the meantime the basic advice that he gave me is:
- try and completely eliminate white sugar and white flour from your diet. -- Switch to using honey as a sweetener and 100% whole wheat bread.
- reduce caffeine intake to around 1 cup of coffee in the morning or switch to tea instead if that works for you.
- Make sure to get as much high-quality sleep as your body really needs. -- this is the hardest one for me... still working on it.
- Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson 11/10 Enemies Abroad by Luke Bencie ~2/10 An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison ?/10
- Third Edition of the HN Book Club. Past recommends: Where I Belong by Alan Doyle. Patterns of Enterprise Application Archetecture by Martin Fowler. Planning: Clean Code by Robert Martin. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. Just Mercy by Bryan Stephenson. Reinventing Fire by Amory Lovin. Short Stories (Kafka). Dover's* Abstract Algebra Paberback. Cambridge's Demosthenes Selected Private Speeches. Getting More by Stuart Diamond. Classic Myths to Read Aloud by William Russell. The Power of Positive Dog Training by Pat Miller. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by ???. Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson. Markets, Not Capitalism by Various Authors. The Known World by Edward P. Jones. The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. River of Gods by Ian MacDonald. Delivered From Distraction by Edward Hallowell. Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychodelic Sound by ???. Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. Shadow Chaser by Alexey Pehov. Masters of Doom by ???. An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jameson.
