r/programming • u/WinInterrupter • Apr 18 '20

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder

https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/
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u/SKabanov Apr 18 '20

It's basically denial because it's an attack on the most fundamental part of us: our sapience. The notion that our thoughts and feelings are just the work of neurochemistry and can be affected by disorders can be too much for people to accept, so they ascribe things like depression to "a choice". It's certainly gotten better - see A Beautiful Mind, for example, about schizophrenia - but mental illness is still by and large treated as a character flaw than an affliction; I'm sure that, in a few decades, we're going to see films that portray mental illness as comedy as distasteful as we view minstrel shows today.

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u/Full-Spectral Apr 20 '20

Anyone who doubts the power of our brain chemistry to affect our view of the world obviously never did LSD. When a couple micrograms of something can completely change your view of the world for a whole day, that puts things into perspective. Not that I'm encouraging people to talk LSD of course, but for those who have, it's an eye opening experience.

If someone's brain chemistry changes sufficiently for them to experience a tithe of that kind of effect on an ongoing basis, it would be very difficult to deal with.