
Why mental health idealism might not overcome the market - DanBC
http://thenewmentalhealth.org/?p=81
======
jayhuang
As someone who has, and still is struggling a lot with mental health issues,
it’s immediately obvious how big the gap is between the impact of mental
health, and the amount of attention it gets in the media/social circles. The
social stigma of mental illnesses are so strong that you rarely hear sufferers
of depression, anxiety, bipolar, etc speak out about it, which is exactly the
opposite of what needs to happen.

Making it known that you have a mental illness is simply not the same as
having a physical handicap (please note I am not trying to downplay the pains
of physical handicap or any other illnesses). People simply do not know how to
react to mental illness. Or they’re incapable of understanding. Many people
would like to help their friends in these situations but without proper
understanding, it’s arguably worse than being a bystander. Comments like
“cheer up!”, “just get over it!”, “it’s not that bad” often are not that
helpful at all. Even if their struggles seem reasonable to an outsider, the
pain that the sufferer feels is very real, and to them, insurmountable. Never
mind the fact that the social stigma often means speaking up about these
issues means social or professional suicide, resulting in most of us not
speaking out about it and feeling hopeless.

Posts about mental health show up on the HN frontpage every once in a while
(or more frequently, in /ask), which is a step forward because there is simply
not enough awareness on these issues that are so prevalent, especially among
the HN demographics. But we still have a lot of work to do.

Side note: Greg Baugues started a community called devpressed[1] for
developers struggling with mental illness a while back, and also gave a talk
on the topic[2]

[1] [http://devpressed.com/](http://devpressed.com/)

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

~~~
lettergram
I had the pleasure of listening to a talk by Greg Baugues over a year ago.

It actually triggered the idea for my startup:
[http://synaptitude.me/](http://synaptitude.me/)

Essentially, the goal is to provide mental health help/treatment without the
need to go to an office, thus reducing the barrier to get help.

Obviously, that's not exactly what you are talking about, but the end-goal, is
to build a community around this form of treatment, and remove much of the
stigma. The system/program/app we built also makes it really clear to people
what issues are, and how to improve them. The clear way our website shows
progress/issues helps remove a lot of the mystery and can help users express
issues and show progress with loved ones.

We are also looking for people to enter our trial (which we are in the process
of organizing): [http://synaptitude.me/blog/now-accepting-trial-
participants/](http://synaptitude.me/blog/now-accepting-trial-participants/)

~~~
DrScump
<We are also looking for people to enter our trial>

Given that a mere nudge of the mouse on this page pushes you to a "Subscribe"
overlay before the reader even gets to read the whole page (with no stated
opt-out), I think your response will be a tad muted. (Workaround: click
elsewhere on the greyed-out part of the page)

------
salmonet
>Prejudice, stigma and loss of earning potential meant that the people who
experienced mental health difficulty were shunted to the margins of society
where we became a social problem to be solved by others spending on our
behalf.

It's unfortunate that sharing first hand experience with mental illness
incriminates you. A big contributor to the negative stigma has to be that
there is little upside and huge downside to being open about personal
experience with it (unless you are using it as an excuse for a crime).

~~~
bpchaps
Incredibly unfortunate.

I have to constantly keep myself in check to make sure that I don't reveal too
much about my mental health. The biggest example I can think of is one from
recent times where I left a company for what amounted to being made fun of for
being "weird" or "crazy". At no point during that employment would there have
been an acceptable time to bring up the issues I was having to the folks doing
the teasing. It actually got to the point of me going to HR about it, where
the head of HR had no idea what bipolar is, despite having a degree in
psychology. When I quit, I discussed with my boss and her boss (effectively
the CTO) about the problems.. they told me to "grow thicker skin". I then told
why it wasn't so simple, to which they took 40 steps back and apologized in,
"it was just a joke" fashion.

Fast forward to interviewing, where the question of "Why'd you leave your
previous company so soon?" comes up. What am I supposed to say? I can give
some well thought out BS reasons, but nothing about that feels right. The
situation is unbearably tough and is only getting tougher. I wish there was a
way around it, but when competition is built around vapid shallowness, a
solution is nowhere in sight.

I try my best to talk about it my own experience with mental health on HN, yet
every now and then, I hesitate about how much it'll affect future prospects
and end up deleting it, despite good intentions. It's fucking frustrating.

~~~
jamble
I'm sorry you had to go through that. That is extremely unfair. I also hate
writing about mental health but in lieu of your last comment... I will not
delete this in hopes it helps - at the very least please know you are not
alone.

I personally had an employer issue where 'short term disability' could never
be approved from insurance for mental health, unless I was at risk of hurting
myself or others. So I had to use my PTO for mental health days, according to
HR. I was assured by my bosses that I'd be given the same protection as
"someone on the team who had cancer", but I suppose that was not true as I was
soon let go for running out of time-off when I had to go to a trauma group
therapy session. I'm not sure if how they let me go was legal ... but I
digress.

I can definitely relate to your post, and my advice would be to tell new
employers the truth: you had / have some [chronic] health issues, and
unfortunately had to quit to place your health first for some time. I
understand a hiring decision or social factors may be affected by this. The
fact that 1) we have to evaluate that as a risk in the first place, or 2)
anticipate explaining details of our health, is outright ridiculous and you
have my sympathy.

if your employer/HR seems clueless or is not giving you the feedback you'd
expect, perhaps explain how your symptoms affect your job instead of only
telling them a diagnosis. (Edit: It does sound like you'd tried that with your
boss, sorry if this is not good advice.) Diagnosis are thrown around so much
in the media, after all, who knows what thoughts about "depression" or
"bipolar" are conjured in different people?

I hope that in time the stigma will change so people like you and I can have
more acceptance, less teasing, and more reliable rights in the workplace (and
in general, really).

~~~
bpchaps
Genuinely appreciated. I feel you, man.

When I spoke to HR, it was a very serious conversation. Essentially, the
conversation was essentially me asking for help in avoiding distractions.
There were tons at that place, so my request was just for some tiny
modifications of the team with some hope that there would be an understanding.
I explained how bipolar worked, what it did, etc. Apparently she never
actually talked about it with anyone besides her boss. When I left, I was
strongly considering filing a discrimination suit, but eventually decided not
to as my mood stabilized.

Thing is, though, it seems that these problems are entirely systemic. Every
place I've worked at has been like this. New social groups I've been a part of
have been the same way. It's frustrating, but the silver lining is that the
groups that I get a long with, I get along with /very/ well. Perhaps more so
than other social groups I've seen.

I don't want to say it gets better. It won't. All we can do is take our
medicines, understand how our mental processes work and act accordingly.
Considering this is all we have, we can't give up and can only work on
improving ourselves, despite our own push back.

~~~
jamble
> the conversation was essentially me asking for help in avoiding
> distractions.

> All we can do is take our medicines, understand how our mental processes
> work and act accordingly.

I definitely know that feel. I do think that things will get better socially
over time, but perhaps I'm too much an optimist, who knows :)

------
maxander
My impression is that there's a fairly vicious catch-22 at work here; there
isn't a substantial dialog in our culture about mental health issues "from the
inside," and as a result, people with said issues aren't accustomed to
identifying as "people with mental health issues" in the same way as they
might identify as "person with non-standard sexual orientation" or "person
into such-and-such sport." And as a result, there's no one to have a dialog
about mental health issues from an insider standpoint, and around we go again.

I would guess that a print magazine is not an agile enough platform to jump-
start such a dialog effectively. Obvious comparison; tumblr, among its
multitude of various unusual communities, hosts a thriving little culture of
mental illness thought, almost entirely derived from the freely available
writing of non-professionals with first-person experience living with such
conditions. A zero-buy-in medium is much friendlier to people with little
initial commitment to the subject; a decentralized medium with no gatekeepers
is able to fluidly adapt to the changing opinions of its user-base.

------
JulianMorrison
If there's no market in the gap, consider building it up from small, using
Patreon or similar. Avoid anything that gives you one burst of money up front
and then goes away, whether it's the government or Kickstarter. Monthly
subscription, or monthly donation, mean that you can match your expenditure to
your income. It will also mean starting zine/indie/volunteer and not big and
shiny. The upside of this is that you can grow credibility the slow way.

