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On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

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Re: On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

#31

Post by peteretep »

gcb0 wrote: post #17
viach wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> therapy is more useful than drugs, even if drugs are needed eventually. Is it your opinion based on... ?

says the whole world. almost every european country requires you to do minimum hours of therapy before and to keep with therapy during the drug usage. to begin with, I could refer you to the study the article is about. it correlates a social setting with high occurrence of depression. then it proceeds to promote the solution with medication. when the obvious solution is changing the social setting! that is the defini…

You are confusing therapy being the front-line treatment with it being the most useful treatment.

Re: On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

#32

Post by peteretep »

Noos wrote: post #25
gcb0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

says the whole world. almost every european country requires you to do minimum hours of therapy before and to keep with therapy during the drug usage. to begin with, I could refer you to the study the article is about. it correlates a social setting with high occurrence of depression. then it proceeds to promote the solution with medication. when the obvious solution is changing the social setting! that is the defini…

But you can have the best social setting, and mental illness will still happen and still affect you dealing with things. Depression makes it just as hard to get out of bed on nice days as foul ones.

Quite. Sadness, apathy and anxiety are all symptoms of mental illness. But they're symptoms of all sorts of things too -- including social setting etc, and so people tend to conflate the two.

Re: On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

#33

Post by vertex-four »

jokoon wrote: post #26
vertex-four wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, in other words, (at least some part of) the medical industry is driven by the neoliberal ideal that it's never anything else that's the problem, only yourself, and you're meant to deal with it with minimal impact on anyone around you? Work must never be an issue, or we might have to treat workers well. Society and societal structures must never be an issue, or we might have to care about each other on a more than…

> and then gaslights them into believing it's their fault for not coping with it. I don't understand why you say that. Are you saying therapy make people feel guilty of their own self?

No, society does that. Our society is, apparently, perfect, and if you have trouble living in it, it's your fault - says society. However, how we often approach mental healthcare - as something individualistic and separate from society - is one of the things that normalises it.

Re: On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

#34

Post by deckiedan »

amelius wrote: post #28
shubhamjain wrote: post #7

> For one thing, choosing writing as a way of making a living can nurture insecurity and doubt—especially for those, like myself, who are early in their careers. For me, at least, publishing a story is like handing in an exam essay, an invitation for strict judgment by both the intended audience and my peers. I think people in tech tend to underappreciate the benefits of being able to just do the job and enjoy a (com…

> Being a writer, or a musician, on the other hand, entails a perennial anxiety over the success of whatever you're doing. How will you ever know if your next thing will be liked or not? I'm sure most musicians don't care about that. It's big media that thinks this way, and coincidentally produces mostly stuff that real music-lovers find crap.

"Most" musicians (at least, all the ones I know personally) spend most of their time freelance teaching, doing relatively dull studio/session/gig work freelance (with all the stress and uncertainty that entails), practicing several hours a day just so they don't degrade, gig work at clubs/pubs/etc. and only occasionally managing to find time to do anything truly creative and new-new.

Re-arranging crappy piano scores so they fit a scratch band they've been asked to work with, figuring out how to stretch the tiny school budget into buying a less awful keyboard...

If they do have time and energy to put into 'green field' music production, there may be some stress over whether or not it's liked, but realistically they're mostly doing it because the concept of the album inspires them so they can't sleep at night because the melody is stuck in their head.

Re: On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

#35

Post by eeZah7Ux »

shubhamjain wrote: post #7

> For one thing, choosing writing as a way of making a living can nurture insecurity and doubt—especially for those, like myself, who are early in their careers. For me, at least, publishing a story is like handing in an exam essay, an invitation for strict judgment by both the intended audience and my peers. I think people in tech tend to underappreciate the benefits of being able to just do the job and enjoy a (com…

> no one is asked to build a product that succeeds in the market

Except startup owners and many others. Even in many large companies an unsuccessful product can lead to teams being let go or reassigned to do boring work. Also, stack ranking...

> Being a writer, or a musician ... perennial anxiety

That's the tradeoff for doing a really creative job. I love the creativity of development but nobody will read our code in public in 500 years from now.

> I won't suddenly cease to be a decent programmer

Burnout happens to do that.

Re: On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

#36

Post by akvadrako »

dan00 wrote: post #29
hycaria wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, maybe, but there's no proof so why assume it and make an article like this which doesn't even has any reserve about it (reread the paragraph I quoted if you doubt my claim) ? There's not even one "maybe" in his whole essay !

Ok, I'm really more bothered by the expected scientific rigorous from an essay like this. He's a writer and is experiencing the difficulties of his work and how it effects his emotional well being. It shouldn't then really surprise that he sees a strong connection between his work as a writer and the depressions he has. That doesn't mean he's telling an objective truth about a writer's life, but he's telling a subjec…

The suggestion that there are other kinds of valid thinking besides scientific thinking is way off.

No matter how obvious something feels, you can't know it's truth value. Humans can have auditory, visual and conceptual delusions that are completely convincing and completely opposite of what other humans experience.

The only conclusion you can draw from this essay is it's actually how the author says he thinks he feels. This may be a good starting hypothesis for a more rigorous study, but it says very little about life in general.

Re: On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

#37

Post by taneq »

shubhamjain wrote: post #7

> For one thing, choosing writing as a way of making a living can nurture insecurity and doubt—especially for those, like myself, who are early in their careers. For me, at least, publishing a story is like handing in an exam essay, an invitation for strict judgment by both the intended audience and my peers. I think people in tech tend to underappreciate the benefits of being able to just do the job and enjoy a (com…

> Programming is creative endeavour too, but, no one is asked to build a product that succeeds in the market; that's the job of management.

Really? Maybe in really large companies, but even then, management just decide what product to build. It's still the engineers that build it.

Re: On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

#38

Post by mr_overalls »

vertex-four wrote: post #19
gcb0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

says the whole world. almost every european country requires you to do minimum hours of therapy before and to keep with therapy during the drug usage. to begin with, I could refer you to the study the article is about. it correlates a social setting with high occurrence of depression. then it proceeds to promote the solution with medication. when the obvious solution is changing the social setting! that is the defini…

Or, in other words, (at least some part of) the medical industry is driven by the neoliberal ideal that it's never anything else that's the problem, only yourself, and you're meant to deal with it with minimal impact on anyone around you? Work must never be an issue, or we might have to treat workers well. Society and societal structures must never be an issue, or we might have to care about each other on a more than…

Maybe individual people have this attitude, but it is certainly not a tenet of medical/psychological practice.

Re: On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

#39

Post by [deleted] »

dan00 wrote: post #29
hycaria wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, maybe, but there's no proof so why assume it and make an article like this which doesn't even has any reserve about it (reread the paragraph I quoted if you doubt my claim) ? There's not even one "maybe" in his whole essay !

Ok, I'm really more bothered by the expected scientific rigorous from an essay like this. He's a writer and is experiencing the difficulties of his work and how it effects his emotional well being. It shouldn't then really surprise that he sees a strong connection between his work as a writer and the depressions he has. That doesn't mean he's telling an objective truth about a writer's life, but he's telling a subjec…

[deleted]

Re: On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness

#40

Post by kaybe »

akvadrako wrote: post #36
dan00 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'm really more bothered by the expected scientific rigorous from an essay like this. He's a writer and is experiencing the difficulties of his work and how it effects his emotional well being. It shouldn't then really surprise that he sees a strong connection between his work as a writer and the depressions he has. That doesn't mean he's telling an objective truth about a writer's life, but he's telling a subjec…

The suggestion that there are other kinds of valid thinking besides scientific thinking is way off. No matter how obvious something feels, you can't know it's truth value. Humans can have auditory, visual and conceptual delusions that are completely convincing and completely opposite of what other humans experience. The only conclusion you can draw from this essay is it's actually how the author says he thinks he fee…

For some definition of real, all these internal experiences are real. Not interpersonal, maybe, but they will have an effect on the person and on how they interact with the environment including other people.

Accounts like this also tell you what's possible. It might and probably won't be true for everyone, but nobody is unique enough that it won't be encountered again.

So even if it's just one author telling you about his internal world I'd say there is a little more to learn from this.

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