
What Killed My Sister?  - jamesbritt
http://theamericanscholar.org/what-killed-my-sister/?key=55917458
======
phren0logy
Psychiatrist here; glad to see this near the top of HN.Schizophrenia is a
serious illness, and often misunderstood as "split personality." It is a
constellation of delusions, hallucinations, and scrambled thoughts that is
often (though not always) pretty devastating to work, school, relationships,
etc. For some reason, because we have no blood test or genetic test for it,
the diagnosis is still met with skepticism from many in the public, even
though everyone seems to accept the diagnosis of migraine headaches which
similarly has no clear-cut lab or imaging findings.

What most people don't consider is the change in life span:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21741216](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21741216)

Life expectancy as about 17 years less for those with the diagnosis, which is
worse than most cancers. It's mentioned in the article, but worth repeating.

~~~
vacri
In the mid-90s, I remember hearing that in my state, cancer research received
$150/hospital bed, heart disease received $100/bed, and schizophrenia received
$7/bed. My amateur theory on that was that the first two affect old, wealthy
people, whereas the third affects young people with no power.

~~~
smacktoward
Here in Virginia, we recently had a pretty striking demonstration of what
you're talking about. One of the leading politicians in the state, state
senator Creigh Deeds, was attacked with a knife and nearly killed by his own
son, Austin, who was 24. [1] After the attack, the son killed himself with a
self-inflicted gunshot wound. Deeds was in dire condition, but survived.

It came out afterwards that Deeds' son, who had been diagnosed in the past
with bipolar disorder, had undergone a psychiatric evaluation the day before
the attack, and as a result of that evaluation had been placed under an
emergency custody order. But Virginia law only gives mental health authorities
six hours to find a bed to put the patient into in such cases; and in this
case no bed could be found in that time, so Austin Deeds was sent home. [2]

This has naturally provoked a great deal of concern in these parts, both about
how so little resources are available for mental health patients that a
potentially violent one could be turned away for lack of an available bed, and
about the ridiculously short 6-hour limit on how long such patients can be
held. And rightly so -- if help had been available for Austin Deeds when he
needed it, he might still be alive today, and his father might never have
suffered such a horrific experience.

Deeds has recovered now, and upon his return to the legislature announced that
he would be pushing hard for mental health reform in the state, garnering wide
support. But it's telling that the issue had to strike at a political leader
for anyone in the political class to care about it overmuch. One wonders how
many other families in Virginia have suffered their own horror stories, their
own tragedies, in total silence -- just because, since they weren't rich or
powerful, nobody in a position to fix things could be bothered to care.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/virginia-state-
sen...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/virginia-state-senator-
injured-in-home-another-person-found-dead-
inside/2013/11/19/3e419ac4-512c-11e3-9fe0-fd2ca728e67c_story.html)

[2] [http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Va-Senator-
Recalls-S...](http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Va-Senator-Recalls-Sons-
Attack-Mental-Illness-242231141.html)

~~~
Spooky23
It's a complex issue. De-instiutionalization was driven both by cost concerns
and advocacy for keeping the mentally ill in the community. At one time, the
cops would use "searching for a bed" to detain people for excessive periods of
time.

That advocacy was driven by the horrific conditions that became common. Google
Willowbrook.

------
swalkergibson
This hits me particularly hard because I lost my sister to mental illness not
but three months ago.

Perhaps our society will one day treat those with mental illness the same way
we treat those with cancer or ALS, with compassion and love, instead of with
insults and shame. I hope that I am alive to see such an enlightened society.

~~~
primitivesuave
My condolences for the loss of your loved one.

------
malbs
My brother has the illness. Every ounce of self-doubt I have, I worry is the
beginning manifestation of Schizophrenia in my own mind. It's not a good place
to be - that worry that every time you "hear voices", it's some sort of
announcement about your own mental state? The worst for me is mishearing
people, or muffled conversations, where I fill in the gaps with extremely
negative content, causing a downwards spiral in emotion. I'm sure it's
nothing, and I'm perfectly normal though.

~~~
marvin
What you're describing here could just be compulsive thoughts since you're
worried about getting schizophrenia. If you do get it, it will probably be
quite obvious, and you are at an advantage since you are already on the alert.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about these thoughts?

~~~
GalacticDomin8r
> If you do get it, it will probably be quite obvious

What? Do you mean "If you do get it, it will probably be quite obvious to
those around you"? Given the rest of your sentence, I believe not. You should
count yourself out on counseling.

~~~
marvin
Thanks, but no thanks, GalacticDomin8r. Obviously this was not professional
advice, but I have many years of experience both from the inside of the mental
health system and from helping others navigate it. I stand by what I just
said. A skilled therapist would be able to see things that GP doesn't, so that
would act as a counterweight if GP was to ever get sick and unable to see it
for himself.

------
DanBC
People tend to minimize the lethality of mental health problems. There's an
assumption that completed suicide is the only cause of death for mental health
problems. But people with MH problems suffer weird sub-optionalities in health
care, even in England where we have the National Health Service.

Young people with a mental health problem will especially suffer from poorly
funded treatment, often being sent many miles to get treatment.

Off topic: For any Googlers reading this article contained an advert that
minimized Google Chrome and opened the App Store. That must be a bug. It is
horrible horrible behaviour. Please can you poke the appropriate team and ask
them to do something?

~~~
swalkergibson
> People tend to minimize the lethality of mental health problems.

My sister fatally overdosed on heroin in January of this year. She suffered
close to a decade of a progressively worsening bipolar/depression/substance
abuse loop, even after spending over a year in voluntary, in-patient treatment
centers. Serious mental illness is no different than cancer. The trouble with
mental illness is that it manifests itself in socially undesirable behavior.
Drinking, drugs, erratic actions, not a visible tumor hanging off of an organ.
The lack of compassion for those people with mental illness is one of the
greatest tragedies of our society.

~~~
orionblastar
I agree, I got schizoaffective disorder. I had too much stress in June 2001
and got sick, had a stroke, ended up in a hospital and got diagnosed with
schizoaffective disorder. It is a rare mental illness that has part
schizophrenia and part bipolar in that it has schizophrenic, depressed, manic,
and normal cycles lasting about two weeks each.

Every time I tried to post about mental illnesses and startups here, I always
got downvoted and flagged. I think that the high stress causes some people to
develop these serious mental illnesses. Because there is no compassion or
empathy for the mentally ill, they have to hide it and go untreated and this
is why there are so many suicides in the startup community as well as the
banking industry and financial industry with the youth.

[http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624](http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624)

[http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-
ill-o...](http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-ill-out-of-
work-programmer-down-on-his-luck)

I post about this on Slashdot and all other tech news sites. It seems nobody
actually wants to care enough to help out a mentally ill person such as myself
work on side projects and startup my own company or even join their startup or
even help write a blog.

So I had made my own website and tried to do things with it. Nobody still
cares enough to help.

I was told I would not live to see 40, I am 45 now. I hope to live a long
time, but been out of work since 2002 because nobody cares.

~~~
np422
We are all nothing but data-points on a distribution curve.

If you end up just a little bit outside of the very narrow band where the
majority of people can be found, welcome to the land of the lost and ignored.

If you are lucky medical science has put a name on that part of the
distribution curve and maybe they can help to move you closer to the peak of
the distribution curve.

Myself and rest of mankind, please take a note.

Room for improvement: how we treat and interact with other people that didn't
have the same luck in the big lottery of life..

Orionblaster, I want you to have better times ahead in your life than what
you've seen so far. At least I can offer you my best wishes over the internet.

~~~
orionblastar
Thank you, I am a few standard deviations from normal I guess? Whatever normal
is, I don't know.

------
danieltillett
Schizophrenia is such a hard disease to study in the same way that cancer is a
hard disease to study - it not a disease with a common cause (like AIDS for
example), but a collection symptoms used for diagnosis purposes. At least with
cancer we have recognised that it is not one disease (Cancer is thousands of
different diseases with thousands of causes), but with schizophrenia we seem
to still be looking for the "cause".

------
Mz
Excerpt:

 _Epigenetics—the way genes switch on and off—is another area of intense
interest for schizophrenia researchers. Every nonreproductive cell in our body
contains our entire genome, and in every cell, some genes are properly
switched on and others off. We inherit our genes, but environment strongly
affects the switching mechanisms. This was dramatically demonstrated in a
study of persons born during the “Dutch Hunger Winter” of 1944–1945—a famine
the Nazis created in the Netherlands by cutting off food supplies in
retaliation for Dutch participation in the resistance. Infants born during the
famine to half-starved mothers, a cohort now turning 70, have higher rates of
all kinds of pathology, including schizophrenia._

I am super tired today, fall out from my own struggles with getting well in
the face of a genetic disorder and doctor pronounced sentence of death. I feel
pretty apathetic. I don't know how much is chemical, how much is situational.
I get so tired of being treated like a loon by the world.

The disease, malnutrition, epigenetics, inflammation -- all that stuff is
stuff I have worked on to deal with my own issues. I flail about, unable to
find a way to speak of it. I have mostly moved on to trying to figure out how
to make money instead of how to help other people.

I don't quite know what to say. Inflammation is rooted in acidity and promotes
infection. Infection promotes malnourishment. Malnourishment does all kinds of
wonky things to the brain.

I am not having a great week, physically, and it has a track record of
impacting my mental functioning and mood. My only known auditory
hallucinations are related to an overdose of decongestants. I have no reason
to believe schizophrenia runs in my family but the article hits a nerve in
some important ways.

~~~
pradocchia
_Inflammation is rooted in acidity and promotes infection._

Do you have any more on this? I have stumbled across the notion before.
Someone typically counters with "but the body maintains a constant pH" and the
conversation dissolves.

Stay well.

~~~
Mz
I dismantled my website due to ugly public attacks and moved it twice. I kept
the info but it is currently not published.

The body does not maintain a constant ph. The body maintains the BLOOD at a
very narrow range of ph because if your blood leaves that very narrow range of
ph, you die. But if you watch crap about dinosaurs and stuff, you learn that
not only are bones necessary to support your mass when you leave the ocean,
they are necessary to mediate your blood ph. You can have sharks and
invertebrates in the ocean because the mineralized sea water maintains their
blood balance. When you leave the ocean, your body strips the bones of calcium
to maintain blood ph when the body is in crisis. This is consistent with the
fact that my condition is known to promote acidity of the tissues and also
known to cause early onset osteoporosis, as early as the teens.

If you develop acute acidosis (example:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetic_Ketoacidosis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetic_Ketoacidosis)),
they hospitalize you because you can die within 72 hours if it is not
successfully treated. But then for my condition, they don't even treat the
acidosis that they know it causes.

So whoever told you the body maintains a constant ph is full of shit. It isn't
true. The body maintains a constant _blood_ ph, a very different answer. I
think blood tests are likely not a very good indicator of subtle or early
problems because your body places a real high priority on keeping your blood
in homeostasis in order to not die. I suspect we would really need to do
tissue samples to genuinely track some things in a meaningful way. So I
tracked things symptomatically since a lot of the tests the doctors ran said
there was "nothing wrong with me" yet I was dying.

Feel free to email me if you want to discuss it further.

------
zenbowman
Has there been any research about the prevalence of schizophrenia in
communities with strong social bonds (multigenerational families under one
roof, closeness with neighbors, etc) versus modern urban communities (nuclear
families or singlehood, relative disconnectedness with the physical world,
lots more disembodied communication (Internet, phone, SMS) as opposed to
traditional face-to-face communication)?

Edit: Turns out there is -
[http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/184/4/287.long](http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/184/4/287.long)

I was asking because I definitely notice that if I am in a situation where I
am living alone, I am just flat out less happy than when my wife is home. And
I'm one of those people who is actually even happier when both my wife and
mother-in-law are home, basically, the more people living under my roof, the
happier I am. I was wondering whether it was the same for others.

~~~
jnbiche
Actually, schizophrenia appears to be one of the few mental illnesses -- maybe
the only one -- to affect all cultures almost equally. Schizophrenics can be
found in small African villages, Chinese industrial centers, Tibetan mountain
villages, and of course in the West.

There's some variation in the respective prevalence of certain symptoms across
cultures (catatonia is more common in non-western cultures, for example), but
the cluster of symptoms defined as schizophrenia in the DSM has been found in
almost every culture known to man (I believe symptoms of schizoprenia have
even been found among some people from the Yamomamo indigenous tribe of the
Amazon).

My knowledge of this comes from graduate and undergrad psychology,
neuroscience and global public health courses -- I'm definitely not a
psychologist or psychiatrist. But I am somewhat skeptical of the study you
posted. I suppose it's possible that prevalence of schizophrenia might be
_somewhat_ higher in urban environments, but there's pretty overwhelming
evidence that schizophrenia occurs across cultures in similar proportions.

There have been many, many published studies on this phenomenon. Here's one:

[https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/journal-of-health-
scien...](https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/journal-of-health-
sciences/issues-2/vol-6-no-2-july-2012/cross-cultural-variance-of-
schizophrenia-in-symptoms-diagnosis-and-treatment/)

~~~
onnoonno
I am curious: Is there a difference in the problems that show up with regards
to the country that people look at?

------
mleonhard
> This parasite messes with the brain, causing rats, for instance, to feel a
> fierce attraction to its predator, the cat.

This is wrong. The parasite causes rats to lose their natural fear of cat
smells, not gain an attraction to cats. The author mis-read the research:

"Infected rodents show a reduction in their innate aversion to cat odors;
while uninfected mice and rats will generally avoid areas marked with cat
urine or with cat body odor, this avoidance is reduced or eliminated in
infected animals. Moreover, some evidence suggests this loss of aversion may
be specific to feline odors: when given a choice between two predator odors
(cat or mink), infected rodents show a significantly stronger preference to
cat odors than do uninfected controls."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodent_behavior](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodent_behavior)

~~~
riggins
I'm not sure I'd trust wikipedia as the final word

[http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/253802.php](http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/253802.php)

 _For example, rats infected with the parasite lose their fear of cats, and
are even attracted by their scent, making them easy prey_

The Violinists Thumb,

 _Toxo does even stranger things to rodents. Rodents that have been raised in
labs for hundreds of generations and have never seen a predator in their whole
lives will still quake in fear and scamper to whatever cranny they can find if
exposed to cat urine; it 's an instinctual, total hardwired fear. Rats exposed
to Toxo have the opposite reaction. They still fear other predators' scents,
and they otherwise sleep, mate, navigate mazes, nibble find cheese, and do
everything else normally. But these rates adore cat urine, especially male
rates. In fact they more than adore it. At the first whiff of cat urine, their
amygdalae throb, as if meeting females in heat_

I haven't read the source research myself but the author isn't the only one
drawing the conclusion that toxo-infected rodents are actually attracted to
cat urine.

------
dpatrick86
> Every nonreproductive cell in our body contains our entire genome, and in
> every cell, some genes are properly switched on and others off.

Not entirely accurate:
[http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=6...](http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=647)

~~~
acjohnson55
Fascinating. There's so much we're only just beginning to learn about genetics
and epigenetics.

------
paul_f
An amazing story. And so sad. It could affect any of us. I don't know how to
react other than to be thankful it has not struck anyone in my immediate
family. Hopefully we will make progress in better understanding schizophrenia
and work towards a better way to manage it.

------
NAFV_P
Deranged nutter here, glad to see mental illness being discussed in a mature
manner on any website.

Ignorance of mental illness is widespread, but what is becoming more popular
is abusing the terms to describe your own problems. When the term "bipolar"
starts to be used to describe someone's mere eccentricity, it indicates
awareness of the condition has increased, but the level of ignorance has
remained the same.

A good example of ignorance related to depression:

Many people who suffer from depression have problems with anger. From my
experience being diagnosed as a loony correlates with an increase in
aggression among your fellow humans that is mainly directed towards yourself.
I don't see how subjecting someone with anger management problems to more
anger and aggressive behaviour is going to help them.

A diagnosis of mental illness is a diagnosis, not an answer to or explanation
of a problem, which is usually how it is interpreted. Appropriate action will
help the problem, as opposed to thinking that a prescription of escitalopram
or fluoxetine will just make the problem fizzle away.

One more point: people with mental health problems dislike being talked to and
treated like naughty children. That is the quickest way to lose their respect.

------
tokenadult
A very interesting submission. If you like long-form videos of scholarly
conferences, there is an amazing video of a public presentation by two
identical twin sisters who are discordant for schizophrenia.[1] As you can
imagine, the sister who didn't have schizophrenia thrived much better in life,
and indeed is a psychiatrist.

I am privileged to know Irving Gottesman,[2] one of the world authorities on
schizophrenia research (he was the consultant credited by the author of the
John Nash biography _A Beautiful Mind_ ). He used to be one of the few
researchers on the topic who thought that there were genetic influences on
schizophrenia, which is now established medical knowledge. In the bad old days
of Freudianism, schizophrenia was thought to develop solely from
"schizophrenogenic mothers," whose bad parenting caused their children's
suffering. It was adoption studies in several countries that conclusively
showed that genes matter more than parenting in early childhood in triggering
schizophrenia.

And yet environmental factors of various kinds plainly matter too, as the
cases of monozygotic ("identical") twins not having identical disease course
in schizophrenia make undeniably clear. Gottesman and most other researchers
on schizophrenia believe that there are a variety of genetic vulnerabilities
that people may or may not have that increase risk for schizophrenia, and then
stressors in the environment (and it is not excluded that some of those
stressors may be purely psychological, influenced by interactions with other
people) trigger the expression of full schizophrenia symptoms. This is called
the diathesis-stress model of schizophrenia, and the same model is believed to
a helpful research hypothesis for study of depression and suicide.[3] So if
you know someone who suffers from schizophrenia, the compassionate thing to do
is to help the person find current medical treatment (which has improved
enormously over the course of my adult life) and to cope with day-by-day life
stresses.

EDIT ADDED AFTER AN HOUR:

Several other comments here involve participants who have close family members
with related diseases, or who have related diseases themselves. That's rough.
I hope Hacker News is always a compassionate community where you can share
your experiences and then encounter empathy and helpful advice. We should
support one another here.

[1] Video hosted on YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI)

Transcript of presentation:

[http://www.virginia.edu/uvanewsmakers/newsmakers/spiro.html](http://www.virginia.edu/uvanewsmakers/newsmakers/spiro.html)

[2]
[http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/facultyprofile.php?UID=gotte...](http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/facultyprofile.php?UID=gotte003)

[3]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK107203/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK107203/)

------
tim333
I found the 2010 Discover Magazine article, I believe referenced in the
American Scholar article (the stuff about Torrey and HERV-W), fascinating. A
couple of excepts:

"One, published by Perron in 2008, found HERV-W in the blood of 49 percent of
people with schizophrenia, compared with just 4 percent of healthy people."

... "In the past few years, geneticists have pieced together an account of how
Perron’s retrovirus entered our DNA. Sixty million years ago, a lemur like
animal—an early ancestor of humans and monkeys—contracted an infection. It may
not have made the lemur ill, but the retrovirus spread into the animal’s
testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and once there, it struck the jackpot: It
slipped inside one of the rare germ line cells that produce sperm and eggs.
When the lemur reproduced, that retrovirus rode into the next generation
aboard the lucky sperm and then moved on from generation to generation,
nestled in the DNA. “It’s a rare, random event,” says Robert Belshaw, an
evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England. “Over the last
100 million years, there have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has
gotten into our genome and proliferated.”"

And then our bodies reaction to HERV-W seems to be involved in most
schizophrenia. It's odd to think of modern problems like that being down to an
ancestor getting a virus millions of generations ago.

[http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-
virus](http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus)

------
Kronopath
The link in the article about the neural network developing schizophrenia is
broken, leading to the UTexas homepage instead. I've tracked the linked
article down to here:
[https://www.utexas.edu/news/2011/05/05/schizophrenia_discern...](https://www.utexas.edu/news/2011/05/05/schizophrenia_discern/)

More info: [http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.ca/2011/04/schizophrenic-
comput...](http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.ca/2011/04/schizophrenic-
computer.html)

Publication abstract:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21397213](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21397213)

And the full scholarly article:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105006/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105006/)

------
trhway
>A model 1987 longitudinal study of 269 patients suffering from severe
schizophrenia and released from the Vermont State Hospital between 1955 and
1960 found that one-half to two-thirds of them had significantly improved or
fully recovered. These were the most hopeless back-ward cases. These patients
had benefited from social workers and therapists and employment counselors—an
extensive support system continuing over several years and consisting of one
essentially unchanging professional team. By the time of the study, a
significant number of them had reintegrated into the community.

i always suspected something like this. Looking at the obviously mental ill
homeless people, i always feel some guilt that we, as a society, are just
leaving them behind by not mustering the necessary support and help.

------
orionblastar
Sorry I cannot reply to every thread.

My condolences to everyone who had a family member or friend die of
complications caused by schizophrenia or some other mental illness. I myself
have schizoaffective disorder since 2001 which is like schizophrenia and
bipolar mixed together and less than 1% of the population gets it and it is
very rare and misunderstood.

I have lost friends I worked with and went to high school with to mental
illnesses and they killed themselves. I've been suicidal myself in my life in
the past. But I vowed I would not try suicide ever again and work to improve
myself so that one day I can return to work and earning a living.

You have my deepest sympathies, empathy, compassion, and love. I really care
about mentally ill people and their families and friends, even ones that
passed on.

------
klunger
" Two University of Texas computer scientists programmed a voice-recognizing
computer with neural networks and taught this artificial brain simple stories.
They then simulated a hyped-up dopaminergic system by reducing its ability to
forget or ignore. This unfortunate computer became delusional. It made up
wild, disconnected stories, even claiming credit for a terrorist bombing. If
computers can go crazy, can they be cured? If computers can be cured, can we
be cured?"

I would like to know how they drove the computer "crazy" (and how this maps to
human neurology, if at all).

------
gadr90
If you are currently helping someone go through this disease - or suffering
from it - all I can say is: hang on there.

Dealing with irrationality is one of the most frustating feelings out there.
You will get very tired sometimes. You will get overwhelmed. Nevermind. They
are having the worst of it.

Keep going. You owe it to them to comfort them, no matter how many times.
Remember two things: It's not their fault, and it will get better.

------
kimonos
Nice story especially that the infos here could be of great help for people
who are suffering from the illness.

------
hellbreakslose
I think I am having schizophrenia right now !

------
deviltreh
No one gives a damn about your sister, only self righteous pricks who will
still do nothing just "care". Caring, so usefull...

~~~
GalacticDomin8r
At least caring presents a better statistical outcome on action than simply
praying.

~~~
srl
More to the point, it gives a better statistical outcome than not caring.

------
ngcat
Is this really... Hacker News? Edit: Note to self: read guidelines first.

~~~
jamesbritt
I posted it because I've known a bunch of smart, creative people who happen to
have some sort of mental illness.

My guess is that many people on HN are in the same boat, or suffer from a
mental illness, or both.

It frustrates me that it's still often quite hard to have sensible discussion
about mental illness. If you have a physical illness people are instantly
sympathetic. But you have a metal illness, well, to many people you're just
crazy.

~~~
smoyer
I think everyone knows people with a variety of mental health disorders. It
seems that we're just now getting comfortable with the idea that we can
discuss these problems publicly.

I'd also say that since the "nerd" personality types (at least from a Myers-
Briggs [1] perspective) tend to be over-represented here, we would probably
also find a larger than average percentage of us with Aspberger's Syndrome [2]
(now removed from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"
[3] and considered an autism-spectrum disorder).

[1] - [http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-
bas...](http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/)

[2] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome)

[3] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders)

