If Jeff says that he equates suicide with rage quitting a game, I'm prepared to believe that he believes it. But I don't and I don't even think it's a comparison that's useful.
Perhaps he means it sincerely, but my experience with someone close to me committing suicide and the research I have done since then--including research prompted by feedback from HN to posts I have written--is that it can be dangerous to try to "reason" with a suicidal person.
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into" is something I often say about bigots, sexists, and so on, but it applies to depressed people as well. You don't come back from the brink because of life lessons, or essays on the internet, or the love of a small child. Or this comment.
I won't even try to explain how being so depressed that you kill yourself is nothing like deciding that you don't want to "play the Internets" any more.
The metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress. I liken depression to AIDS of the emotional immune system.
When we're healthy, we have ways of handling stress. We have good days and bad days, but they fall within a certain manageable range because our body musters compensation for our emotions. The depressed person can be triggered by something bad and spiral into an extreme mood.
If we use my metaphor to explain why someone facing a lot of jail time would commit suicide, the jail time is like pneumonia: Something serious but beatable by a person with a healthy immune system and social support. But not beatable by someone with a compromised immune system, and deadly to someone whose immune system actually attacks himself in response to certain kinds of stress.
Long ramble here, but we can't talk people out of AIDS or Cancer or even the Common Cold. Good spirits and support have been proven to be very helpful, but not as a substitute for proper treatment or for understanding that if you are contemplating ending your own life, you are sick but what you have can be treated PROVIDED YOU AND YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK TREAT DEPRESSION AS A SERIOUS ILLNESS THAT CAN BE TREATED.
I am not telling Mr. Atwood to retract his remarks. But I am saying that I do not support trying to talk someone out of suicide by comparing it to rage quitting a game or walking away from the Internet.
I do support everything he is saying about the ridiculous injustice in the plea bargain system.
I agree: his is not a very useful comparison. I think David Foster Wallace gives the most accurate comparison I've read, and I always want to show it to those lucky souls who have never had to deal with this type of depression:
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
I had a blog post sitting in my drafts folder about Aaron Swartz and David Foster Wallace. It was waiting to make it perfect, but I don't think it ever will be. Thanks for this post, causing me to tidy it up and publish it.
I picked Infinite Jest up again about a month ago and had been wading through a lot of articles on DFW as a way of trying to understand his suicide. So that was the context in which Aaron's death came to me. I also saw the connection in Quinn's post and it had me wondering. Thanks for completing the post.
One thing people don't realise is that depression screws with your perception of the value of things, maybe a little, maybe a lot. Trying to logically balance things like a mathematical equation is not a useful way of looking at things when discussing depression.
The major characteristic of severe clinical depression is that it takes away enjoyment from all manner of activities that used to be enjoyable. People who haven't experienced it or who have never been close to someone in the depths of depression are unlikely to be able to comprehend it.
> I think David Foster Wallace gives the most accurate comparison I've read
I first bought a David Foster Wallace book last spring, I was on a lunch break, had entered a book-store, when I read on one of his books' back-covers that it had been written by a brilliant guy who had committed suicide. I wasn't thinking about suicide back then, I think I never did, I was just going through depression and I wanted to genuinely see what made people more depressed than me go the whole way. Suffice is to say that I was feeling like I knew the guy when reading his words, especially when he wrote about depression, like I seem to know and be familiar with all the people who describe what depression feels like.
And to go back to Jeff Atwood's piece, until you haven't experienced depression you cannot really understand what goes through a person's mind in moments like those, and even less so are you entitled to "accuse" the said person for "calling it quits" or whatever. Like I said, I never thought about suicide, but even in my mild depression I sort of could see the black light at the end of the tunnel and people who used to be like me not that long ago just giving it up and deciding to let go.
I like DFW's quote. I also like a point made by Nick Hornby in 'A long way down' that sometimes it is not because they don't want to live anymore, its because they want to live so much, but are being prevented from living by things beyond their control.
Yeah, my impression is it can (wrongly) seem like a rational choice among all the options. A friend of a friend recently jumped off the Bay Bridge. Before he did it, he explained that his schizophrenia meds made him mentally dull, bloated and unable to hold a job. In his mind, he was facing a life where either he constantly heard voices or couldn't live on his own, move out of his parents' house and so on. I hope researchers manage to solve this soon without the blunt hammer of current meds.
In other words, this is Atwood being Atwood: posting overly-simplistic, ignorant observations in a manner that manages to be only subtly wrong and hence dangerous. To a wide audience. That is receptive to his viewpoints.
It's harsh but over the last decade or so every, single damn time I read Atwood's blog I walk away shaking my head. The popular posts usually end up with him writing some sort of apology or retraction. Fortunately usually this is about something not nearly as serious an issue as suicide. (Though his posts on computer security are also notorious for causing proliferation of views that may actually cause real damage.)
When he posts stuff I don't think he intends these things but often I sadly see knowledgable people have to scramble and waste their time "cleaning up" after him by posting responses and getting those responses through the filter.
I would never post an over-simplistic, ignorant observation in a manner that manages to be only subtly wrong and thus dangerous. I go for completely wrong!
Ha. Well, if its any consolation, I don't see that post falling into the "dangerous" category. At worst you get nowhere at best you convince people to go work on diabetes software. Worst case for some of Atwood's posts is complete security breakdown at your favorite startup whose CTO is an avid reader of Coding Horror.
This is a great comment. If I could nitpick a little bit:
You wrote "the metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress."
As far as I can tell, this isn't a metaphor. I think is a pretty good description of what happens.
For those of you lucky enough to have gotten through your life so far without wanting to end it, it's probably hard to understand what suicidal ideation is like. Jesse Bering, a very well spoken evolutionary psychologist, wrote an article about what it feels like to want to kill yourself. This is far and away the best description of being suicidal I have ever read. As someone who's been on and off with suicidal ideation for the last decade, the words Atwood uses don't really resonate with me. This article really, really does.
Lastly, to anyone who deals with this: if at all possible, don't let the death urge win. Your depression lies to you. Don't trust it to have your best interests in mind.
As a person who very much was on the brink of suicide at one point (or rather many points) ... you very much do reason yourself out of it.
I decided that I'm simply too curious about what happens next to ever do it. Has helped ever since and eventually the thoughts faded away ... now suicide is merely a passing curiousity that momentarily pops into mind as a "Y'know, I wonder what it'd be like to just swerve into that truck coming down the opposite lane right now. There isn't actually anything stopping me from doing it ..."
I can't speak to your own experience. But I can advance another explanation for what those words may connote. Sometimes our body does something, and our brain tries to "make sense of it" by inventing a casual relationship where none existed.
For example, if we are cranky, we sometimes mistakenly explain our mood by saying that people around us are rude, or that drivers in traffic are selfishly blocking us. It is sometimes difficult to think that we're cranky "just because."
Some people have a biochemical explanation for their depression and their biochemistry changes over time. It could be that their brains fix themselves, and as they get better, their reason improves. But if you ask them, "what happened?" They say it was their reason.
In my own case, I have often claimed that I can improve my mood with endorphins through exercise and adrenaline sports like rock climbing. But others around me say that I have cause and effect backwards, that when I'm depressed I avoid exercise and when I get better, I start exercising again!
That's a good point. I was told that you first have to get better enough to decide to get better completely, or something like that.
Depression is a tricky thing. The most valuable skill I ever learned is being able to mentally catch it early and reverse the thought processes before they become a problem.
I think everything you're saying is right, and in fact you may have gotten yourself better through your mental habits. I have learned some "interventions" through practice, I think of them as habits like hand washing. You can't wash away a cold infection, but you can get it off your hands before you touch your face, so hand washing is an incredibly important way to fight the common cold.
All the little things help, from teaching yourself to intervene when a mood starts to swing negative, to challenging negative explanations and beliefs, to working on core beliefs, to drugs, endorphins, everything.
For me, reason has been a wonderful tool in continually circling me back to suicidal ideations. The worst part is when people who are not as strong as I am in logic and philosophy try to reason with me; usually they end up reluctantly agreeing, or worse, refusing to concede but obstinately arguing because they can't own up to it.
As of now, the most effective preventative measure for me has been focus. If I apply myself to thinking about something else, the problem goes away.
Based on the other article it sounds like you're not coping at all, but rather at step 5 of 6:
"What this cognitive shift to concrete thinking reflects, suggests Baumeister, is the brain’s attempt to slip into idle mental labor, thereby avoiding the suffocating feelings that we’ve been describing. Many suicidal college students, for example, exhibit a behavioral pattern of burying themselves in dull, routine academic busywork in the weeks beforehand, presumably to enter a sort of 'emotional deadness' which is 'an end in itself.' When I was a suicidal adolescent, I remember reading voraciously during this time; it didn’t matter what it was that I read—mostly junk novels, in fact—since it was only to replace my own thoughts with those of the writer’s. For the suicidal, other people’s words can be pulled over one’s exhausting ruminations like a seamless glove being stretched over a distractingly scarred hand."
> The metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress. I liken depression to AIDS of the emotional immune system.
As someone who has dealt with (and eventually overcame) clinical depression in the past, this is the metaphor that I use as well. Willpower a necessary tool any time you're trying to make a change to yourself; depression is an affliction of the will.
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into"
The metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress. I liken depression to AIDS of the emotional immune system.
This is a very profound way of thinking about depression, and I thank you for sharing it.
> But it is another thing entirely to play the final move and end your own life. To declare the end of this game and all future games, the end of ragequitting itself.
Thank you. This was a very insightful comment, and I'm glad you said it. Sorry if this is a little valueless, but this is a topic that touches my life and I feel I need to do something more than just upvoting you.
I think the metaphor is bad, but applicable in some cases. I remember a video (I won't link to it) in which a guy was arrested after a shoot-out with the police. In the police station the security camera shows him sitting alone at a table. He pulls out a gun from his baggy pants and shoots himself. That is really, really similar to a game-style ragequit. I don't think the guy was a typical depression case. He was cornered, screwed bad forever, and pressed "quit".
I'm glad (and hope you're right) that he doesn't understand it, because to me that means he wasn't really that far gone. He's got one hell of an active mind, as evidenced by how prolific he is. I think he may have been having an identity crisis of sorts.
Both of my children were extremely poor sleepers in infancy. My daughter still wakes up in the middle of the night. Everyone has this advice and that advice about how to get children to sleep, but none of it worked for us. In the end, we were sleep deprived for very long periods of time, and we both became very seriously depressed. When we started to sleep again, our moods improved.
It's ridiculous to toss guesses out into the Internet like talking heads on Fox News, but for the purposes of educating people who may find themselves in a similar situation, someone can easily become suicidal through post-partum depression, and it can affect both men and women. There are various risk factors, one of which is sleep.
Combined with health issues that can occur during birth (and a 9month spell of vomiting all day everyday), exactly the same here. Some things are worse, but the depression is lifting now, 2 years on.
Proper sleep is so important.
> For a long time we didn't talk about the case very much. He wanted to protect me and he wanted to cordon it off from the rest of his life. He was worried that I would be subpoenaed, or that his other friends would be subpoenaed, and so he kept it all to himself. He kept all of the stress and the anger and the fear to himself.
> In December there was a hearing that I went to with him -- the trial was delayed because another hearing at this hearing -- the decision was made to delay the trial until April. And afterwards I -- we came out of the courtroom and I tried to give him a hug, and he pushed me away. And he said, "Not in front of Steve Heymann. I don't want to show Steve Heymann that."
The obvious, reflexive assessment of Aaron's situation is that he faced (or believed he was facing) an unsurmountable sentence and challenge, and that that fear was enough to cause him to commit suicide. But there's likely more to it than that...it wasn't just the fear or the hopelessness, but the isolation and other inconveniences that was a part of the struggle. Maybe Aaron felt ready to face the consequences, as they existed on paper (the charges, trial, and possible jail sentence) but the unexpected load of paranoia and loneliness, as Taren describes it, was something that ended up being insurmountable.
Of course, from the outside, it's easy to say, "Well, he should've realized he really wasn't alone. And that others were willing to fight along with him." But it's always easier to make that rational assessment from the outside.
Does anyone know why Taren is consistently referred to as "partner"? I would have expected "girlfriend", which some sources do use, but I'm curious if there's some reasoning or decision behind the choice of term.
I'm the same with my 'partner' (hetrosexual relationship).
She finds the terms girlfriend / boyfriend a little uncomfortable for whatever reason.
I'm similar really. It's a holdover from my annoyance at people in school that used to say "me and my boyfriend blah blah blah", "my girlfriend told me blah blah blah", etc.
So now I use my partner's name whenever possible, otherwise introducing her as my partner in conversation. Not saying that's what the reason is here, but that's my personal reasoning.
Lots of people use "partner" for different reasons:
* solidarity with homosexual couples
* no plans for getting married, but plan to be together for years
* not monogamous
* 'girlfriend' sounds very high school
Of course, each couple will have a different reason, these are just the ones I've seen.
A friend of mine does that with her boyfriend as a sort of solidarity thing with same sex couples. Dunno if that's Aaron's reason, but that was what I thought of.
In some circles it's common to use the word in more formal or public settings when you are together for a long time (long enough that most couples would be married).
This, for me. Ironically, my "partner" regularly wonders why I don't call her my "girlfriend". Perhaps not coincidentally, she is quite a few years my junior.
At 40, I use girlfriend. Partner is a much more deliberately ambiguous word. Someone who I introduce as my partner might not even be romantically linked with me.
Commonly used for heterosexual couples in a long-term relationship that find the institution of marriage unnecessary/disagreeable, it is a shortening of "domestic partner".
I don't think he felt it was insurmountable as much as it completely suffocated and drown him as he cut his ties to everybody, trying to save everybody else but himself. In a sense, he killed himself long before he took his own life.
At some point in the next 50 years, society is going to learn that suicide deaths are morally comparable to deaths from leukemia or heart disease.
We're going to be embarrassed by things we wrote in 2013 that look at suicide from the vantage point of a "strategies" or personal choices.
It seems likely that things happened to Swartz that provoked his death. That's in the nature of the illness he suffered: a vulnerability to provocations to suicide. But those provocations are just as coercive as the genetic abnormalities that allow environments to coerce living cells into cancer. Swartz's death was nobody's choice; "nobody" includes Aaron Swartz.
This scares me. How do you draw the line between someone having no choice to kill themselves and other actions that some majority might not consider to be choices?
Yes, death is final. I still feel it's my choice, other's disagree. What makes their view more valid than mine?
(I don't necessarily believe in a free will, but if it exists it's hard to tell who has with concern to what decisions.)
The Buddhist monks who killed themselves to protest the South Vietnamese government were probably not suffering from a mental illness. Most suicides are not monks protesting repressive governments. There is very little evidence to suggest that Swartz died in a deliberate act of protest, and much to suggest that he died of a terrible illness.
I'm sure Aaron was aware of that his suicide would bring a lot of attention to his causes and this will have played a part in his, as I consider it, decision. He was also aware of the practical problems, including depression, he faced including that there is a chance of them getting worse and that he could prevent that.
I'm not against curing depression and investing more resources into getting better at it. My worry is that people with depression are portrayed as slaves to disease, as opposed to healthy people who are free to make decisions based on their interests.
That encourages limiting the choice ill people can make. Aaron is no longer suffering from a mental illness. For him, ignoring others, it was a rational decision that he benefitted from.
>I'm sure Aaron was aware of that his suicide would bring a lot of attention to his causes and this will have played a part in his, as I consider it, decision.
There's no algorithm. We're learning things about the brain that, essentially, society isn't ready for.
What should give one pause is the experience of many people who were suicidal at one point, who later can hardly believe / articulate what they were thinking. I.e. it seemed to make perfect crystal-clear sense at the time, but now the reasoning sounds absolutely stupid.
I believe there's a parallel to over-constrained problems in engineering. One common pattern of depression and suicidal thinking is the feeling that there are no other options. People become trapped in seemingly unsatisfiable constraints, and the only option that appears to remain is to cease to live.
Remove one or two of those apparent constraints, and all of a sudden the problem becomes satisfiable, and life can continue.
Well, that depends, if you willingly chose not to treat yourself when you were able to, you might have had a choice.
Just like when you have cancer and willingly choose not to undergo treatment.
There's the choice. of course it's not an easy choice, treatments are still lousy enough in both cases to be worth thinking about whether or not to take them.
A vulnerability to suicidal provocation doesn't predetermine your fate any more than a vulnerability to sodium predetermines your death by heart disease.
Unfortunately, our ignorance of mental illness allows us to chalk deaths from suicide up to "personal choice", when a more complete understanding would allow people who suffer from depression to work with doctors to craft mitigations to the stimuli and circumstances that create suicidal impulses.
Instead, we're like "well, you can spend the week in an in-patient facility, or here are some pills and go try to figure it out on your own."
Exactly. I was just pointing out that even in these early days there are some choices and people can get treatment, and said treatment does work in some cases.
Just saying "it wasn't his fault, he had nothing to do with it" is probably not the best message to send, even if it's actually true when the victim is actually pulling the trigger or jumping off the bridge.
Complementing it with something like "I wish he had had the opportunity to get better" is probably more humane.
When it comes to the idea of treatment, there is an interesting hiccup. I can't find the statistic right now unfortunately, but I've heard it in many instances that somewhere near half of mentally ill individuals don't believe they are mentally ill. I've been through the situation myself, I struggled with dysthymia (a form of chronic depression) and anxiety for more than a decade, and had been near suicide before, but to my absolute core didn't believe that there was something wrong with me. I thought that this was just what life looked like to everyone and I was just too weak to handle it. Such is the nature of mental illness at times, that the disease itself is working to convince you that it doesn't exist. It wasn't that I chose not to treat myself, it was that I didn't know the option existed.
Yes, that's true. Though there's a minute where (some) mentally ill people get lucid enough to realize they can do something about it. I know some cases where people from that point could pull out on their own, and other people that looked for treatment.
The long story follows:
It was complicated, at some point I developed this odd rational understanding that there was probably something wrong with me, that it wasn't normal to be this "moody", but I simultaneously believed that I was just being "whiny", and I had no reason to be depressed and that to ask for help would just be admitting that I'm a weak individual and it would be insulting to people that actually had problems. I've been in treatment for a while now and that second voice, it never quite went away and I still have moments of doubt, but I am now able to recognize that that is the voice of the disease. And thats the thing, at the times that I was at my "sickest", I also felt I was the healthiest, I never would have acknowledged that there was anything wrong with me, even when I was on the brink of suicide, because those were also the times I hated myself the most and I felt this was just a personal failing of mine.
It took years to come to that point when I recognized that I needed treatment and it came one evening during a period that I had been doing much better, but I had an "episode" one evening when something inconsequential had made me incredibly upset, and I was in this deep spiral of being upset, then being angry at myself for being upset (since I recongized it was inconsequential), and then being angry at myself for being angry and so on. And I was walking home from school (I was in grad school at the time) and bawling my eyes out and hyperventilating and scratching at my arms to the point that they were bleeding rather distinctly and I was crossing the street, and I saw headlights coming towards me, and I had this very distinct thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to just get hit and die? Then I wouldn't have to feel anymore". And this scared the crap out of me, because I was just healthy enough to recognize that this wasn't normal, and I was finally at the point when I couldn't really deny it anymore.
I ended calling the schools mental health services the next day and I got into therapy (which was one of the more difficult things I've ever had to do and I hated every minute of it, but I credit it with probably saving my life), and got on some drugs for a while. And I'm not really "better" in that its gone, its still something I deal with all the time, and there are still plenty of times I struggle with that internal voice but therapy taught me to be able to identify it and separate it from myself.
Did Jeff just admit to considering ending his life? Jeff, I'm glad that you made the right decision. Don't give up. I've been in that place when I was younger. However viable it may seen in a moment, giving up IS the wrong decision.
Your podcasts (among others) got me through a lonely phase of my life (migrating to a new country.. having few friends.. and still learning the language). For that I'm grateful. I'm sure that you've had a similar positive effect on far more strangers.
It's funny, but you tend to see these thoughts in the empathic, idealistic types. I'm one of them. But you know what? There's nothing wrong with being idealistic. It's a strength. It's positive. It's energetic. It inspires people. Accept it. Embrace it. Know your weakness, and you can defend against those who'll try and abuse it. And you will win.
Mandela didn't quit. Ghandi didn't quit. MLK didn't quit. More close to reality: Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij haven't given up. Manning hasn't given up.
If Aaron's case has taught us anything, it's that we need to stand behind these people. If we believe that what they're doing is "right", then we need to support them. Publicly. Privately. They need to know that they're not standing alone. To quote Liverpool FC's theme song: "You'll Never Walk Alone" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youll_Never_Walk_Alone.
This is a delicate topic with a lot of factors. I don't know if I would call a suicide due to depression 'ragequitting.'
Quitting, in general, is a healthy and normal action. It's why we all ended up doing what we're doing today (we had to quit something to stop being the proverbial male ballerina). Jeff himself leads the article with what he quit a year ago, and I interpret his view of that decision positively.
It seems like Jeff believes that there are 'ok' ways to quit and 'not ok' ways. Great. But, who is he to decide what is ok and not ok for others? I'm certainly not equipped to say so, and I don't believe Jeff is either. He is judging Aaron. When I was brought up, I was told that telling others what to do in absolute terms was also a form of immaturity. It's all a matter of perspective.
Aaron's death is a tragedy for many reasons and due to causes and circumstances I will never understand. I can't pretend to proscribe any decisions Aaron made. I appreciate Jeff using his articulate and otherwise entertaining writing to help express what he is feeling.
It's open writing like this that helps our community grieve; I just don't agree with Jeff.
Agreed, I can't judge Jeff. This seems to really hit close to home with him. It's really brave of Jeff to admit he contemplated suicide.
I was taken aback at Jeff for being angry that Aaron's death has become an effective martyrdom. Quite frankly, if anything can be salvaged from this man's death, salvage it. If he is making the argument others will commit suicide to become martyrs like Aaron, then I would consider his argument. Any positive effect of Aarons suicide don't make his actions right, but I welcome them just the same.
While I respect Jeff Atwood's comments, and I suspect he's leaning on the side of being inspirational, I think equating suicide with "ragequitting" (directly or indirectly) is unfair. The consequences are so different, it sort of trivializes suicide.
But also, I must admit that I am a little disappointed in Aaron. I understand that depression is a serious disease that can fell any person, however strong. But he chose the path of the activist long ago. And the path of the activist is to fight, for as long and as hard as it takes, to effect change.
I never knew Aaron, but I know that while one can choose to be an activist, one can't choose whether they have clinical depression. It is a serious illness that is hard to fight. And by all accounts I've read, Aaron put up quite a fight trying to deal with the extreme pressure he was put under. In that light, I think Jeff's comment is harsh.
> I posted this as a comment on Coding Horror but it will probably get buried. I'm not sure if I'm missing his point but this is what I took away from the article.
I enjoyed this article, the romanticized idea of martyrdom and ragequitting in terms of 'infocide' like the cases mentioned seem to fit well, but Aaron's case was not a 'ragequit'. It was a response to a serious mental condition.
"But do not, under any circumstances, give anyone the satisfaction of seeing you ragequit. They don't deserve it. Play other, better moves – and consider your long game."
Depression and suicide is about hopelessness and constant pain. It isn't about sticking it to anyone and depression by its very nature makes 'considering the long game' impossible. For people plagued by it, there is no future, only the black dog looking back at you.
There are many conversations coming out of Aaron's death, copyright, information freedom, the overreach of the law, predator prosecutions but an important one that is being overlooked, in my opinion, is mental health. Programmers, activists, and in Aaron's case a person of extremely high intelligence, all seem to be more susceptible to mental illness.
Maybe, even if nothing else comes out of Aaron's death. No changes to copyright, no prosecutor's getting fired, no open data. Maybe at least we can all take the feeling's of the people around us a little more seriously. Look a little harder for the people that are hurting. And try to help them.
I disagree. Whenever I have suicidal fantasies, the sense of hopelessness is always accompanied by some twisted form of "that'll show them". "Them" is usually either my employer or a girl I adore. I'm deeply ashamed that that's the case, but it's the truth.
I can relate mate. There is so much self-shame in those thoughts but like with all mental illness, we can't generalize. I'm sure some people have those feelings, I know there have been times when my own episodes have even included them so maybe I shouldn't have written it off so quickly.
I had never heard this term before. I agree with Jeff in general but there are very legitimate reasons beyond immaturity. One is maturity in the sense of picking your battles in life and knowing when your current activities are incongruent with your principles. There are many situations when the best course of action for everyone involved is to walk away. The result is not always having given up forever, but an opportunity to step back, reflect and reevaluate your approach. It is unfortunate that people do "rage quit" and give up entirely. Resilience is not always a function of maturity.
I'm uncomfortable with the comparison to ragequitting. However, a few points resonated quite strongly with me.
we should have been outraged. I am gutted that I did not contribute to his defense in any way, either financially or by writing about it here. I blindly assumed he would prevail, as powerful activists on the side of fairness, openness, and freedom are fortunate enough to often do in our country. I was wrong.
I too was wrong about this. While I don't know how much my support would have mattered, I didn't do much to support him. I can and will offer support to others.
The idea that Aaron killing himself was a viable strategy, more than going on to prevail in this matter and so many more in his lifetime, makes me incredibly angry.
My thoughts on this are still developing and I can't articulate anything finer than what Jeff wrote.
Depression is a monster, and it is more common than we think in the startup pressure-cooker. And nobody talks about it because you have to put up a facade of invincibility to woo investors, employees, and the press.
I had one startup friend confide that he had sought professional help for the stress he was under, and I thought he was very wise for doing so. Why, when I was heading into a dark depression while building a previous startup did I not seek help?
We need to support each other and destigmatize seeking help.
Atwood's suggestion that anybody who "chooses the path of the activist" should be prepared to face the consequences does not even begin to address the challenges of being so engaged in such a thankless fight for so long, and then having to bear the weight of these insane charges with almost no publicity for your cause or public support.
Not to mention the weight of a wide swath of people not even understanding the problem Aaron was trying to solve in the first place.
Activism, especially on nearly invisible issues like this one, and most especially when you're on the opposite side of entrenched interests with shitloads of cash, is really hard work. It's also hard work for the people on the other side, except in exchange for their hard work they're earning millions of dollars.
I used to volunteer for the Samaritans (phone based suicide "hotline" in the UK). I cannot pretend to know the physical causes / manifestations of depression or suicide - but I do know that people I talked to, some whom I / we could not save, were intelligent rational people who could discuss quite normally and naturally ending their lives.
It is not quitting, in a rage or not, to take ones own life. It is rational, even if most people on the planet cannot possibly agree or follow the reasoning.
One of the most important lessons many programmers should learn is to "not give up". One of the obvious reasons that comes to mind is not giving up on releasing your product. However, there are many more things that one should never give up on, like your Internet life or even your life. Sometimes it happens, but I think those people only did it because they were in extremely terrible situations.
Anyways, I am happy Jeff is not ragequitting. I'm not ragequitting either!
I know it's boilerplate, but it's jarring to have this section immediately below an otherwise emotionally moving article:
[advertisement] Stack Overflow Careers matches the best developers (you!) with the best employers. You can search our job listings or create a profile and even let employers find you
Comparing suicide to quitting a game seems kind of offensively trivializing to me; similar to comparing killing people in a video game to having to kill people in war. I guess it's just a metaphor, but still.
(Also, sad to see Jeff Atwood was also contemplating suicide at one point. If you factor in "quality of life years", suicide is an even bigger problem than a lot of other health issues, since it disproportionately affects the young, and affects other people.)
May not be the most sympathetic piece, but it nails the thing that has been nagging me: this reaction has been glorifying suicide. The suicide victim has been remembered in glowing terms much greater than he ever received alive and his "enemies" are having their heads called for by a large crowd. I don't know if any of it is wrong objectively but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
> stripped of the most fundamental citizenship right, the ability to vote
That is not entirely true. In the US, every state except Maine and Vermont prohibits felons from voting while in prison. Nine other states disenfranchise felons for various lengths of time following the completion of their probation or parole. Two states, Kentucky and Virginia, continue to impose a lifelong denial of the right to vote to all citizens with a felony record.[1]
However, it is entirely possible that he would never have been able to own a firearm or serve on a jury ever again. Everyone can probably form their own opinions on how much those matter to you.
> Play other, better moves – and consider your long game.
And when your long game appears to be sentenced to prison until you're 60 or being becoming a felon (with the reduced rights that are associated with that label), what then?
When being a felon of computer related crimes would result in limiting your access to your entire livelyhood (and your source of activism as well), what then?
In the best case, you spend 6 months in prison, away from your family and loved ones, are denied access to computers and the internet thereafter, you're financially destroyed, and many employers will not hire you due to your felony record... what would _your_ game plan be?
One way or the other, Aaron's life was destroyed. It sucks that he didn't survive that destruction, but I'm not completely sure I would either.
Really alarmed & surprised (I know I shouldn't be) to hear of Jeff Atwood's - apparently recent - struggles with depression & suicidal thoughts... he appears (to me, observing from afar, via podcasts, blogs) to have a robust, upbeat personality... never would guessed he'd be susceptible to any kind of unshakeable mental or emotional gloom. Scary that people can look like they have it together in every respect, when they are secretly researching their suicide. So glad Jeff was able to pull himself back from the brink.
[This post may or may not be related to the issue at hand, but I think this is something worth noting in a thread like this.]
Whether or not they directly play into the two particular cases mentioned, I think we need to be aware of ourselves and how we can affect/worsen/underline these decisions. Every week there are "Why I quit HN"/"Lessons I learned from HN" and other posts on how someone felt after being thrown under the bus here, particularly if they didn't submit it themselves (and sometimes consciously so).
Despite Jeff's notion that Aaron would have prevailed indefinitely, HN threads on the matter were much more bleak. It is normal to be skeptical of your own success and possibly inundate yourself with thoughts of failure, and it is another to see the community you are a part of dismiss you and your purpose as well. Unfortunately we see that here a lot, especially considering some of these projects are people's honest attempts at making a better person of themselves or trying to find sources of income in a time where so many are still hurting.
I don't know whether or not Aaron's pain would have been quelled in any way had everyone rallied behind him. In my own experiences, the entire universe could be behind you and it probably still wouldn't make much of a difference/you'd still feel like a lone wolf. Still, there are people like Eugene Sprague in the documentary The Bridge who walked the span of the Golden Gate for over 90 minutes waiting for just one person to smile at him. No one did, so he went through with it.
There's two separate claims in Atwood's essay that I don't agree with.
First, a lot of social networking involvement is a waste of time and is emotionally exhausting. A lot of times it can be highly addictive and participation becomes dysfunctional. People quit communities all the time when they recognize that things are just not working out. There is nothing wrong with that and it's a good thing. When other members feel they have to defend the community to the point of attacking others just for leaving, using divisive and derogatory terms such as "ragequitting", then it is no longer a community or social board, but is a cult. Cults defame members who leave simply because they have left, which is perceived as an act of betrayal and heresy. Communities do not.
Second, Aaron didn't quit anything. He picked a meaningful date to end his life. Aaron was highly rational and carefully thought things through, it's clear in his writings. He knew he could have handled six months or 7 years in prison. This was an act of self-immolation, the ultimate protest of injustice. It is a time honored and effective last resort message used only in extreme situations of injustice, which is certainly the case of the judicial system in the US which has in recent years descended into a police state like system interested in power and control but not justice. Self-immolators almost never leave suicide notes. There is no need to since it is obvious to all why they have committed their protest. This is clear here, just looking around people are upset and they know and understand exactly why he did this and it has to do with the Federal Prosecutor, not a chemical imbalance in his brain. No one in Tunisia was talking about chemical imbalances in Mohammed Bouazizi's brain, it was obvious that his act was a protest as well.
Additionally, regarding depression, Aaron wrote he was glad he had insurance to allow him to see someone, and his family has stated Aaron has never been diagnosed with depression and was not depressed. Those claiming his action was because of suicidal depression have only weak circumstantial support for their case based on blog entries, and have to completely ignore all the circumstances of what was going on. Blogging that you sometimes feel depressed is not evidence of mental illness. Seeing a therapist is not evidence of mental illness. Occasional depression itself is not evidence of mental illness. It is a normal part of the human condition. Remote medical diagnosis here by the general public is similar to the remote lawyering in the commonly made but unproven claims that he did anything at all criminal other than misdemeanor trespassing. An indictment is not a conviction. Violations of terms of service do not rise to the level of criminality according to the Drew appeal decision, so the whole basis of the case is very questionable.
Calling it "rage quitting" when someone is no longer interested in playing a game you want them to play is an intimidation tactic. It's really none of your business to tell someone what they must play and when and how.
In more civilized times it was called "conceding defeat" not "rage quitting."
Depends on context. I sometimes think of the connotation as the person taking the ball away is the one making unreasonable demands and using the threat of spoiling the game for everyone to get their way.
"ragequitting" is a (bogus) term used to describe a user trying to break havoc by removing all the content he created from the sites he's quitting. Or even performing vandalism by modifying questions / answers (eg randomly adding or removing not to sentences, changing their meaning to say the opposite of what was meant).
But it is indeed an intimidation tactic when stackexchange says: "Don't even think about ragequitting, you can't do it, we'll revert your rage changes".
Because real ragequitting ain't about vandalism. Real ragequitting is about spreading the word out, on sites / blogs / forums they don't control about their unacceptable behavior.
I find it ironic that Atwood complains about martyrdom being effective, then turns around in the next paragraph and complains that Swartz didn't fulfill Atwood's idea of what 'activist' is.
"But do not, under any circumstances, give anyone the satisfaction of seeing you ragequit. They don't deserve it. Play other, better moves – and consider your long game."
I agree. Do not ragequit SO. They're not worth it. Simply ignore them on SO and never ever help them anymore by posting content there.
But do "rage" everywhere else you can: on Twitter, on /., on G+, on blogs. Wherever you can. Certainly do not try to fight your case on meta: meta is the problem, not the solution. Fight your case on another medium, where they cannot silence you (nor reverse your "rage").
There are just too many issues with SO that have been unadressed.
I did "silentquit" a 7.7 K account (probably more now) gained by mostly helping others. And now everywhere the topic comes out I point out that there are seriously bad moderators issue on SO and that meta is mostly pointless.
The one thing that pissed me off were crazy mods that did "team up" on new users and refuse to see their wrongdoings on meta. This made me sick and I quit. "Silentquit" on SO. "Ragequit" on the big bad Internet.
And, no, I won't "post this meta" or "link to the discussion or it didn't happen".
The very reason I'm posting this here is because, you SO mods and (co)-founders have no say in here. Here it's other people who are voting and they're not all pom-pom girls fighting your cause.
I'm not in a hurry. Usenet is still there (slowly dying, but still here). There are others resources like Quora and EE.
And others will listen to all these high-rep users who did ragequit (or silentquit) SO and address their very real concerns and, one day, we'll have something better than SO.
Uh... Yeah. When I "silentquit" SO, I went and did stuff that made me happy. Improved my baking skills. Took care of stuff around the house.
If you're so fed up that you can't stand to use it anymore, why wouldn't you just... Go do something that made you happy? Rage or silent, if you're gonna quit, quit.
Otherwise, you're just making yourself a slave to your own misery. That ain't gonna end well.
Perhaps he means it sincerely, but my experience with someone close to me committing suicide and the research I have done since then--including research prompted by feedback from HN to posts I have written--is that it can be dangerous to try to "reason" with a suicidal person.
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into" is something I often say about bigots, sexists, and so on, but it applies to depressed people as well. You don't come back from the brink because of life lessons, or essays on the internet, or the love of a small child. Or this comment.
I won't even try to explain how being so depressed that you kill yourself is nothing like deciding that you don't want to "play the Internets" any more.
The metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress. I liken depression to AIDS of the emotional immune system.
When we're healthy, we have ways of handling stress. We have good days and bad days, but they fall within a certain manageable range because our body musters compensation for our emotions. The depressed person can be triggered by something bad and spiral into an extreme mood.
If we use my metaphor to explain why someone facing a lot of jail time would commit suicide, the jail time is like pneumonia: Something serious but beatable by a person with a healthy immune system and social support. But not beatable by someone with a compromised immune system, and deadly to someone whose immune system actually attacks himself in response to certain kinds of stress.
Long ramble here, but we can't talk people out of AIDS or Cancer or even the Common Cold. Good spirits and support have been proven to be very helpful, but not as a substitute for proper treatment or for understanding that if you are contemplating ending your own life, you are sick but what you have can be treated PROVIDED YOU AND YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK TREAT DEPRESSION AS A SERIOUS ILLNESS THAT CAN BE TREATED.
I am not telling Mr. Atwood to retract his remarks. But I am saying that I do not support trying to talk someone out of suicide by comparing it to rage quitting a game or walking away from the Internet.
I do support everything he is saying about the ridiculous injustice in the plea bargain system.