Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

My relative gone through schizophrenia and never recovered fully to normal life. You're happy that you did. Don't blame yourself, you have no control over it, it just happens. Be careful with your work-life balance and keep visiting doctors as long as needed. You can never be sure that it won't get back some day but treating this situation before it gets dire makes everything easier.

Get a salaried job. Hopefully that will be less stressful than running a startup.

As for myself I can work hard day-night to get the job done for 3 months only. Either it will get done by that time. Else I will get burnt and have to take a large break before returning.

Limiting you exposure to coding 4 hours might help, but I was never able to limit it like that.

Yes, I have. No, it's not normal. Yes, it "just happens" to some people, where "some people" are the set of people with pre-existing undiagnosed problems.

I got treatment for it.

It means you've had an underlying issue. It probably wasn't entirely caused by the work-related stress.

After it happens, you know somethin's up, or could be up at any unpredictable time. My goal in therapy and with medication is to manage the episodes while being as much of myself as I can without a relapse.

To your point, I think psychological disorders are common in tech fields. PTSD or BPD, for example, frequently have "control compulsion" issues. Being compelled to control works very well if you are managing a fleet of 10,000 servers. It's been difficult to explain to my old friends why I would care about things like latency and GC STW events because a normal person without control issues doesn't find it emotionally appealing. Psychotic/hallucinatory/delusional features have short-term value in certain situations, like coming up with new product ideas or rapidly "pivoting" between market fits. I won't say it's normal, but I will say it's predictable.

Not an outlier. This start up thing can get best of some of us. People who try to be helpful would tell you that you are not alone, though you feel very much alone and isolated, even in the middle of family or social gathering. At the time it made me listen to Fade to Black all day long when I was alone and somehow it helped to get through the day. Then there is that lingering, crushing guilt, which I could definitely relate. Sincerely hope you can find forgiveness for yourself.

(CW OCD) Twice in my life I've become helplessly obsessed with a given topic to the point that nearly everything I saw, heard, or thought about would build a new association back to the topic, forming a feedback loop. The first time it lasted a year. No one could tell because I was just acting like a weird teenager to them, but it was hugely debilitating. I couldn't get off the ride. The second time, maybe fifteen years later, I had since researched the condition. I recognized it was recurring with a new topic and managed to stop it over several straight days of deliberate, flashy distraction. By that time I had sought and found professional help, from which I learned quite a lot more. As far as my coworkers knew, I just took a few sick days. They didn't know I was struggling for sanity. I've been in good mental health for many years now, and I'm prepared.

There are things no one can do for us and we must face ourselves. Only you can take a first step to seek help, or step back onto a known healthy path. Thanks for starting this conversation.