Be also offers PowerPC support for their BeIA internet appliance platform, which is rather intelligent considering that a powerpc is a much better choice for an embedded platform like an internet appliance (consumes less power).
See the bottom of BeIA Introduction at the bottom under hardware requirements where is says:
Processors: x86 (Pentium class or better), PowerPC (all)
PowerLogix, vendor of G3 and G4 upgrade boards that go into both 7500/8500 class PowerMacs, as well as G4 ZIF upgrades for the G3 macintoshes, is working on a dual G4 upgrade card:
The advantages of the Apple machine are that it will run with a faster system bus and faster memory than an 8500 that has been upgraded with one of these cards, which has to access main memory at the same speed as the conventional 604 does in the original machine.
The advantage of the upgrade card is that you can run it with older system software - note that when Apple releases new machines, usually they require the latest system to run them so they're not a lot of help to developers wanting to maintain application compatibility with old systems.
And what's really cool is that it's possible that the BeOS will run on the cards, and BeOS applications and the whole BeOS system are pervasively multithreaded and so should take great advantage of these cards.
Note that the reason Be can't make the BeOS run on PowerMac G3 and G4 machines is not because of their processors but because Apple won't give Be the specs for the proprietary chips on the motherboards of the new machines. This is not a problem for an upgraded 8500 and in fact many people are currently using 8500's with G3 upgrade cards.
You can be sure Linux will work on the cards because PowerLogix includes a copy of LinuxPPC with each card they ship.
Sadly, a Be employee who bought a PowerLogix card for his Power Computing home machine found that it didn't work to run the BeOS - he's very happy with it on the MacOS. Many other G3 cards do work with the BeOS though.
I have very enthusiastically urged PowerLogix to support the BeOS in their cards and offered to beta test for them on my 8500.
They also have a USB/Firewire card that allows older mac owners to take advantage of all those spiffy peripherals and video editing software that's available for the new machines. I'm waiting until the dual G4 ships to purchase an upgrade but I'll be getting the rapidfire card so I can use an HP Deskjet USB printer on my mac.
If you're manic depressive and would like to aid in the understanding of the illness, and something that would massively aid in the rational design of drugs for it, please consider participating in the Genomic Study of Bipolar Disorder. They are specifically seeking volunteers where two or more siblings in the same family have the illness.
They'll interview and ask for a sample of your blood. If you can't go to their site, they can interview you over the phone and have a local physician or blood lab take the sample and mail it in.
That class was 15 years ago. The study you describe may have been done a long time ago - a great deal of more recent research refutes your argument.
It may well be true that we tolerate eccentricity greater in the more intelligent people, but the book Touched with Fire quotes a number of substantive studies that I believe effectively prove the link between mental illness and creativity.
If you think there isn't such a link, I suggest you read the book, then read the studies quoted, and then maybe use the science citation index to look for followup studies and discussion in the psychiatric technical literature.
(There seems to be a massive bug in the HTML processor on slashdot now). The preview is all screwed up, the "Allowed HTML" note below is empty.
It depends greatly on where you are. In the US, most states have public mental health services which are free or low-cost with a sliding scale. The service isn't all that great but you can see a psychiatrist and get medication and such things as lithium level blood tests for free.
I did this for years through the Santa Cruz County Mental Health Department, but there were two big problems - only one 20-minute session a month with a doctor (so if I was having trouble there wasn't a lot I could do), and the antidepressant they wanted me to take caused a immediate and severe anxiety attack (I was warned this might happen). The one I ended up taking as an alternative, ludiomil, worked great for me but the state wouldn't pay for it because the cheaper one that caused the bad anxiety was available.
(I understand the Alliance for the Mentally Ill had to sue the state of New York to cover the $9000/year it costs to treat a schizophrenic with clozapine - many cheaper drugs are available but clozapine works for many people where no other drug will and has had miraculous effects on about 30% of those who take it. But it's an expensive drug and even more expensive because it has a rare but fatal side effect and weekly blood tests are required by the FDA for everyone who takes it).
If you are a college student, you may be able to see a doctor for free through your campus. I did at UC Santa Cruz and CalTech. There may be a limit on the number of sessions and the medication won't be covered.
If you live in an enlightened country like Canada, psychiatric sessions are completely free, although finding a doctor and getting an appointment may be hard. (Only M.D.'s are paid for, not psychologist or non-M.D. "talk therapists"). Also medication is not covered. Lithium's pretty cheap and so are most antidepressants but some things are real expensive, my risperdal runs me well over $100 a month and I only take a tiny dose.
If you live in a place with publicly funded medicine where there is no prescription drug coverage, you would do well to apply immediately for supplemental insurance that does. A friend in Canada gets blue cross for CDN $30 per month - and besides covering her psychiatric medicine at a couple hundred per month it also paid for a $700 two-week ulcer antibiotic treatment (to kill H. Pylori bacteria).
I'm afraid in the vast majority of the world there is little public support for psychiatry, if you can find a doctor at all. But in many of those countries, you can buy medication without a prescription - pretty dangerous yes and I wouldn't suggest it without actually seeing a doctor but at least you wouldn't have to keep seeing one to get refills.
I used to correspond with a very nice woman who was married to a Greek diplomatic corps member who worked in western europe at some European Community official post.
When her bipolar husband got sick and couldn't work anymore, he wanted to move back to Greece. There is psychiatric treatment available there but what he got was clearly not competent.
I was able to help them out somewhat on suggesting medications to his doctor, and for a little while things got better.
The fellow got physically ill, I think it was heart trouble or something, and he went into the hospital. But at the same time he was sufferring from life-threatening heart problems he was manic.
They figured he was just crazy and didn't take his physical ailment particularly seriously so they just sent him home after a day or so.
He had a heart attack and died three days later.
This man was a diplomat for Christ's sake. He used to hold a position of significant importance to his nation's and Europe's well being.
But because he was manic the folks in Greece just let him die.
Think about that the next time you shy away from a homelessly mentally ill person. For the homeless mentally ill, generally they don't want your spare change - they want maybe just a flash of eye contact, a nod of the head. They want validation of their own existence as a member of human society - and I know very well from quite painful personal experience that that is the hardest barrier to overcome.
I've taken the homeless out to lunch in restaurants a few times. Had coffee with a schizophrenic woman who had trouble seeing me because the hallucinations got in her way and she had to keep brushing them aside with her hands. She could hardly express a complete sentence (she spoke in "word salad") but honestly she was and still is a very kind and decent human being.
There's been a lot of advances in medicine for schizophrenics since we had coffee that time - the "atypical antipsychotics" such as the risperdal I take and the clozapine that enabled Lori Schiller to come out of her darkness.
They don't help everyone and yes they can screw you up (clozapine can kill you from agranulocytosis and requires frequent blood tests to prevent sudden death) but the next time I ran into this lady on the street in Santa Cruz a few years later we walked together for a few blocks and had a nice chat. She was on her way to meet her husband and had kids. Seemed like a very good wife and mother. She was studying the arts at Cabrillo College.
Something I really try to emphasize, my shrink took years emphasizing this to me against incredible resistance on my part, is that each of us who suffer has to take individual responsibility for our own lives.
Psychiatrists who recognize and teach that and put the power in the patient's hands do their job well.
But yes there are plenty of psychiatrists who don't and do their patients a disservice. How many programmer's do you know who write bad code? And how many of them are convinced that their bad code really is just fine? Same with shrinks. Gotta be choosy. Insist on quality service.
I can't speak for anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I do know both from my own experience and from statistics that manic depression strikes people of all races and economic backgrounds.
30% of the homeless are mentally ill. A substantial portion of those homeless are manic depressive. Not very suburban to be sleeping on a steam grate in new york city.
Manic depression also strikes people in other cultures and has been written about for millenia. What do you think the word "maniac" actually means?
I've met people of many races who were manic depressive. Some of those people were fellow patients in psychiatric hospitals. Others were folks who called me up when I was volunteering for the Santa Cruz Suicide Prevention Service.
If someone's standing at a payphone holding a loaded gun because he's lost his job and his wife's left him because she can't take it anymore, and when he was high a month ago he got arrested for breaking into an airplane cockpit (a friend of a friend did this), isn't it reason to believe it's a real illness?
Here's something I've learned and used in my life that is a fundamental fact of existence. Please try to understand and take this with you if you take nothing else from this discussion.
This applies to everyone, not just the mentally ill or computer geeks, but all humans, even people from other cultures, and animals too. Even if you choose not to apply this to your own life, knowing this and understanding it will help you to deal with other people, especially difficult people who don't make sense or who don't understand you.
Most people feel that reality is something that just sort of happens to them. In fact the vast majority of people believe this so deeply that they don't even know that they believe it or ever consider the question of whether it could be otherwise. Things that are, just are because they happen that way.
But that's simply not true. There is an objective, absolute physical reality, but it is too vast, too complex for any living being to comprehend. This objective reality is also devoid of any significance and meaning.
The reality we experience is something we make. We do not have complete control over it, but everyone has influence over its general course, and it can be changed with time. Further, in conducting our construction of reality, we are constantly making choices, usually unconscious, and there is constant opportunity to choose, far more than most people would believe without really spending some time contemplating it.
Many people are satisfied with their lives, but many aren't, but believe they have no choice to have it any other way. Some people struggle constantly to improve their lot but consistently fail and live miserable lives - it's not for lack of trying, it's because they live in a reality that is not effective for them and they do not see the way to change it or even know that's what they should do.
I didn't invent this concept - I learned about it in an anthropology course at UC Santa Cruz. It has been "discovered" repeatedly over the ages and written about by many people, and the concept is expressed and taught in many different ways, and understood differently by many people. But however it is expressed the fundamental idea is common and widespread and very old.
I'll describe it the way it was taught by Prof. Stuart Schlegel in Anthropology of Religion, where we concentrated on studying the world views of some other cultures - and the social and mental processes by which they constructed them.
The objective physical reality I mentioned was termed Nouminal Reality by Emmanuel Kant. Nouminal reality is the physical universe in its entirety and complexity. There is no conscious perception of nouminal reality because it is both too detailed, too complex and our senses are physically incapable of perceiving it - most light is to long or short in wavelength to see or feel, much sound too quiet or lost in noice, most objects to small to see or too large to comprehend.
Nouminal reality is all there is, and it is completely true and absolute, but it is also meaningless.
For example, in nouminal reality there is no boundary between physical objects. Where one thing stops and something else starts is an artificial concept; in physical reality the quantum wavefunctions of almost all particles in the universe decay exponentially into infinity but never fully reach zero, although the wavefunction may have zero points it will almost always (except in a black hole) come to a non-zero value on the other side.
In the nouminal world there are events (too numerous to imagine) but they have no significance. The Kennedy assassination and the atomic bombings of Japan occurred but were no more important then events in some nearly-evacuated patch of empty space out between the galaxies somewhere. At best they could be described as complex particle interactions, and the events did have consequences but the consequences were only more particle interactions.
Nouminal reality is the raw, unfiltered and unformatted data that we use as a raw material to sample, filter, interpret and distort the information that we actually experience.
Subjective Reality is what we actually experience happening to us. A lot goes on in the process of transforming nouminal reality info subjective reality.
Reality construction is a layered protocol, like a TCP/IP stack. You might get a sense of nouminal reality by wiring an audio speaker into an Internet backbone cable; subjective reality is the formatted web page with styled text and nice JPEGs and maybe some streaming audio. It looks pretty automatic to the naive user but we all know the decades of process and engineer-millenia that went into making a web page happen.
And protocols can change. And you can choose what web pages you're going to look at. Some parts of it are easy, but significant change is a difficult process in life, as in standards development and implementation.
The first layer in subjective reality construction is physical selection. We can only experience the things our senses are sensitive to - we see a limited range of light wavelengths and hear in a narrow spectrum of audio frequencies. We can only see things that occupy a solid angle in our visual field wide enough to resolve in our physical eyes.
There are evolutionary and biological selections and interpretations applied. Part of the processing of visual signals in the nerve from the eye to the brain transform visual pixels into edge information and movement - our vision is much more sensitive to distinct edges and motion than to broad, stationary featureless fields.
I'm sure a lot of this filtering results from evolutionary processes not just to make us see well but to allow us to survive to reproduce. Loud or high-pitched noise, bright lights and flashes get our attention quickly because through most of history they've signaled danger or injury.
Once we've constructed a vision of an object we have to choose which objects to pay attention too and what to consider significant. Look at the room around you. See the objects in it. Now try to see all the objects all at once in their entirety. Pretty difficult, isn't it - a mental strain at best and not something you can do for any length of time.
The choice of what to see, and what significance these things have start with our culture. Us geeks will walk into an office and see computers.
A Tiruray on Mindanao in the Philippines will walk into the forest and see homes for spirits, and take care not to walk to close to any tree lest they disturb the spirit. This isn't just their belief - this is their reality, their universe. They'd see one of our offices and probably be thrown right into a panic or severe depression.
We have significance applied by our upbringing and by our personal preferences. You're friends and loved ones capture your attention much more reaidily than random strangers on the street - and we see humans in general much more readily than animals or plants because we attach such importance to other humans.
A whole lot of selection, filtering, whittling down and built-up significance is applied before a sensory perception is spit into our conscious mind for us to think about consciously. The part we normally get to consider consciously is only a small part of the object and most of what we experience is created by our own minds.
The most important thing to understand is that during the vast majority of those filtering processes, choices are being made - choices as to what to point your eyes towards, what sounds to focus on, and most importantly what significance to apply to the things we perceive.
This process exists for purely internal experience too, and this is particularly important for people who are unhappy with their lives. If you can come to understand the processes by which experience is created, both external experience and in your own mind, you can alter it in a way that will tend to be more positive and effective.
It's also important to understand that biology has a vast influence over what you construct. You can choose consciously to absorb a new trait into your personality, but there are things about being human that are too deeply wired into our brains to be able to alter through conscious will.
That is why I, as a manic depressive, choose to medicate myself with psychotropic drugs. Manic depression's sympoms have too profound an effect on me to be able to control them through better living, but I can choose to affect the biological component with medication.
The choices made in subjective reality construction are mostly automatic and unconscious - but they are still choices. They have to be automatic because there are too many choices to make for your conscious mind to be able to keep up with them all. But you can decide to alter the process and make a conscious decision to change your experience and then there are processes by which this decision can be implemented in the subconscious over some time, sort of like pushing a new STREAMS object down on the stack, or removing one.
I'm not going to go into how this is done. I can recommend some reading later. But this is basically the process taught to psychiatric patients in mental hospitals. It's not usually couched in these terms but I've found that the shrinks are quite comfortable discussing it this way with me when I bring it up.
The problem for mental patients is that they are in a very difficult and desperate position when they are asked to effect this change. They don't have the tools any more - it's like working with a stone chisel that's been smashed to bits. But there really is no choice and it is a long and difficult process to create the mental and emotional tools needed to do this and to heal.
If you're having an argument with someone who just doesn't seem to grasp your point, consider that they may have more than a different opinion, they may live in a different world. Jack Valenti doesn't just think DVD hackers are vandals - they are sapping the very foundations of his world. That may help you to understand the desperation of some people who work to oppose you.
And understanding these processes, and the process by which changes to reality construction are effected, may allow you to live a more satisfied life and to be more effective in gaining the support of people who might otherwise oppose you.
I've been pretty much a couch potato most of my life. Baseball teams in school that picked me always got to pick an extra player to make up for having me on the team.
But when I was in the hospital for six weeks during a pretty severe manic episode (the time I was finally diagnosed), I pretty much passed the time by doing push ups.
Not real frantic rapid pushups or anything. And I took breaks. But I pretty much did pushups all day long. Just about the only thing I could do on my own that made me feel the least bit normal.
Michael D. Crawford
Relationship between manic depression and geekness
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Manic Depressive Geeks
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· Score: 2
Someone suggested today there really wasn't any link between manic depression and creativity, or mental illness and creativity. I posted a response that discussed this in some detail, with anecdotes about students and professors at CalTech as well as links to more substantive literature by medical researchers who study manic depression.
Someone responded that it should be moderated up. Not to toot my own horn or anything.
(I had a classmate in physics at UCSC who is chinese. Pretty quiet, nice guy. Hadn't seen him for months, until one morning I was awakened by him standing by my bed in my room. "Is my head cut off?" he asked. The Tianmien Square massacre had just happened and he thought they were just killing chinese people everywhere, and in fact they had already killed him and he was walking around with a bleeding neck where his head used to be.
Spent a lot of time with him keeping him company until his family could come up and put him in a psychiatric hospital. He eventually disappeared and I believe he is either one of the homeless mentally ill or dead now.)
Back in the bad old days, people used to try to tell me sometimes that I wasn't sick. One friend said "You're not crazy, you're just special". Or they would say I was a round peg in a square hole, marching to the beat of a different drummer, or maybe should try herbs or something.
Let me tell you brother, until you have experienced it, you have no idea what this is like. The extreme stages of mania and depression are profoundly altered states of reality. I am quite convinced that there is no physical pain that is as bad as being psychotically depressed.
You might look at a manic-depressive's behaviour and say they're just acting different than is commonly expected by society. But you're not experiencing the world inside the manic depressive's mind. It is a powerful experience, it is extraordinarily frightening and it takes real work just to survive.
And it's really weird. It makes no sense at all how one day one cannot imagine how anyone at all can have any reason to live (let alone oneself) and on another day one is a pleasantly productive member of society, and on another day one has a personal chat with God.
If you don't think it real, try this, it's been done: get some dead manic depressives and put their brains in a blender. The ones who died of suicide will have dramatically lower levels of neurotransmitters in their brains than is normal for the human population, and the ones got themselves killed while manic will have an overabundance of neurotransmitters.
If you don't think that serotonin, norepinephrine or dopamine affect your experience in a real way, why don't you eat a sheet of acid or a few peyote buttons and post a summary back here?
At least the trippers get to come down at the end of the night. Imagine a hallucinogenic trip that just went on for weeks on end.
I wore the wrong shirt for my photo in the Metro article.
I wore my BeOS Master's Award polo shirt that I won (honorable mention) for porting Spellswell from MacOS to the BeOS
(It uses a protocol called Word Services that links word processors and email clients to spellers and other text services (including text encryption); the award was as much for bringing Word Services to the BeOS as for Spellswell itself. I plan to do the same for Linux soon, possibly through the CORBA techniques they use in Gnome - http://www.gnome.org seems to be down or I'd link to the relevant page there.)
I'm pretty active in the Be developer community.
I'm also pretty critical of Be because of their complete lack of any sense as far as managing the business and handling developer relations and I have no qualms about making my views known to them and other developers, both in public and in private discussions.
I've always been a shy and quiet person but there's something about living through experiences such as I've had that makes such things as speaking up in public about mere work matters pretty easy in comparison.
Remember my sig: Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. Words I live by.
I thought it would provoke quite a lively response to post the link to the Metro article to BeUserTalk and BeDevTalk. I got a couple private responses and one public one. I was very glad to get the responses I did get though.
On the other hand, I submitted this article to Slashdot but figured it wouldn't get posted, considering the dozens of articles I've submitted that I think were more directly relevant to open source programming, privacy, free speech, encryption and so on, but this is the one that gets on.
The real problem here in the US is the lack or recognition that mental illness is a real disease.
I don't remember where I found this, but I read in some usually reliable place that the US Food and Drug Administration does not consider bipolar depression an illness distinct from unipolar depression.
Even though the two illnesses are wildly different and should be treated dramatically different, they do have one large thing in common - periods of intense depression. But drugs that are appropriate for bipolars generally have no effect on unipolars and it is extremely dangerous to give a bipolar antidepressants without also prescribing a mood stabilizer (antidepressants can lead to psychotic mania if not administered properly)
The problem is getting funding for drugs solely designed for manic depression and getting the drugs tested and approved. The FDA, I understand, simply will not license a drug that has been tested only on manic depressives (even if the drug has no effect on other illness), and often antidepressants get approved without being tested on manic depressives at all.
Although there are a number of new mood stabilizers, lets look at where they came from:
Lithium Carbonate - naturally occurring salt; took 25 years to get approved because there was no profit in manufacturing a common compound
Tegretol - originally used as a neurological medicine, just happens to help bipolars
Depakote (valproic acid) - epilepsy medicine
Neurontin - epilepsy and neuralgia medicine.
Those are the most common ones. There are other mood stabilizers that are being found to help, but in every case that I know of, the drug was developed and licensed for some other purpose having nothing to do with manic depression.
I do disagree with one thing you said; people in manic phase generally won't rob banks etc in the manic stage if they're normally law-abiding citizens. Mania (as well as depression) is a change in affect, not in impulses. Like you said on your web page, there are millions of manic depressives in America, and I doubt there's been a true "manic" individual in recent history that has tried to rob a bank.
While outright bank robbery is not very common among manic people, it does happen. One gentleman drank 18 bottles of beer held up a bank at gunpoint, took a bunch of money in a paper bag, walked across the street and sat in some bushes until the police arrived.
When I was in the hospital, a fellow patient told me that a Los Angeles transit bus driver got the idea quite suddenly to drive his bus to San Francisco. He drove all the way up the coast in his stolen bus, expecting cheering crowds and a hero's welcome upon his arrival; instead he was arrested.
While manic depression generally is largely a change in affect, in the extreme manic phase there is overwhelming impulsivity and at the same time a very unfortunate lack of regard for the consequences. Ideas just shower from the sky and one acts on them the instant they strike, with no sense at all.
Probably the best advice one can give to someone who's getting manic, aside from getting treatment (it's not always immediately available, and the hospitals usually won't take you until you're a severe case because they're overcrowded, and the medicine takes a couple weeks to take effect, etc.) is to just sit tight and do nothing at all - probably the most difficult thing you could ask of someone in such a condition.
If you suspect that you have depression, I strongly recommend that you consult a competent mental health professional.
If you cannot afford one, you may be able to get help for free through government-provided mental health agencies in your community.
Even in the US which doesn't have free medicine, most places have some semblance of free psychiatric care that are funded by the states. You don't get a lot but it's better than not getting any help at all.
If you're in college you may be able to get treatment through your school.
Bringing it up with your parents may be a very difficult issue. In the long run it's best to involve your whole family in your treatment, but actually bringing that about may be very embarrassing and at worst they may have a very negative reaction. What's most important in the short term is that you share your feelings with someone you can trust who you think would be likely to be supportive and understanding - a close friend, teacher, minister, etc.
Definitely do get informed. There are a lot of good books, browse around the psychology and self-help section of your local bookstore. The main manic-depressive website is Pendulum and from there you can find links to sites on regular "unipolar" depression and other mental illnesses.
Heh... took me all this time to find the reply button so I could actually post a new topic rather than replying to an existing one...
First, I'd like to thank all the people who have written to me at michael@geometricvisions.com regarding their experiences with manic depression. I'm afraid I'm getting a lot of mail today so I'm going to have to wait until tomorrow to respond to most everyone.
But if you're thinking of writing, please be assured that I take the confidentiality of people who write to me regarding this very seriously. If you like you can encrypt your mail with my PGP key
I want to respond to a number of things that have been posted here and also clarify a few things that were written in Kelly Luker's article about bipolar high-tech workers in the Metro San Jose.
A number of people have posted some very negative things about mental illness or about the mental health profession. While there are instances of bad doctors and certainly a long history of bad science and outright abuse in the history of mental health, there is no doubt that manic depression is a real illness.
This is evidenced by positron emission tomography scans of bipolar patients during various phases. PET scans measure the consumption of radioactive sugar in various parts of the brain.
Manic patients have strong positron emissions from the right hemisphere of the brain, showing that the right hemisphere is very active - suggesting a physical reason for the feeling of creativity and the overabundance of new ideas.
Depressed people have a reduced level of positron emissions relative to a normal patient.
A bipolar patient who is neither manic nor depressed will show a normal level of sugar metabolization.
The illness is thought to be genetic in origin, but the genetic nature of it is not well understood. Several times researchers thought they'd discovered the gene for manic depression but the discovery turned out to be wrong.
It happens that manic depression tends to run in families, but not always. It can appear spontaneously in a family, and after it does it will tend to be passed to successive generations and get worse with each generation.
I don't understand fully why but this is thought to suggest that the disease is caused by a certain morphology of mutation rather than a certain genetic sequence, and that this kind of mutation tends to get worse over generations. Apparently this sort of mutation is understood for other illnesses that do this so they think bipolar depression may work this way too. I'm afraid I don't have a lit reference but I expect I can get some.
Manic depression usually responds to medication. However it is very difficult to treat effectively. The illness varies quite widely in the severity and frequency of its symptoms among individuals, and each individual responds quite differently to the different medications.
It took about twelve years to find the right combinations of medications for me. I didn't work continuously to find the right combo, and in fact I went several years without medication - but it's important for any bipolar reading this to understa nd that you can go years with good health and become profoundly manic or depressed quite suddenly, as I did when I was hospitalized during graduate school during a manic episode.
Another problem is that doctors are often lazy or ill-informed about proper treatment. I was first prescribed lithium and nothing else, even though my most prevalent symptom was depression and I went years with fairly continuous suicidal feelings and no treatment at all for it.
Early on the only direct treatment for manic depression was lithium, so the mental health community seemed to have gotten this idea that lithium was therefore completely effective for everyone. The Only Choice!=Effective Treatment
Another problem is that antidepressants tend to provoke manic episodes, especially if they are given without mood stabilizers like lithium, depakote or tegretol. Quite often the new patient's only complaint is depression and the doctor doesn't ask questions that would determine a history of manic behavior, so they prescribe antidepressants without anything to prevent mania, and the patient then has a psychotic episode, as happened to me when I was first given antidepressants and I spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital.
The doctors then overreact and refuse to prescribe antidepressants at all, and the result is either a miserable life or maybe suicide.
Things are somewhat better now than when I was first diagnosed. Over time it was discovered that a number of epilepsy medications are effective mood stabilizers, and once the first such was found (tegretol) a large number of others followed (I take depakote, or valproic acid). This means that there is a choice for those who either cannot tolerate lithium (as I can't) or for who it is ineffective - lithium only reduces hospitalizations by about 50% overall.
The wide range of medicine and I imagine the overall advances in biology and medical research have combined to yield an understanding of how manic depression actually works in the brain. This understanding has only come about in the last five years or so, so now I understand drugs are under development that effect the processes of bipolar depression directly, by rational drug design.
Most of the existing medications were found to be effective by chance and no one ever understood how they worked.
I understand lithium was discovered because someone noticed that lithium salts made guinea pigs less active so he just fed a bunch of lithium to all the patients in a psychiatric hospital and the bipolar patients happened to get better - most likely the reaction of the guinea pigs resulted from lithium's potent toxicity; regular blood tests are required when one starts taking it because the effective dose is pretty close to the toxic dose.
But basically what got me better isn't just the medication, it was taking responsibility for and control of my treatment. Your doctor only sees you for an hour a week (or 20 minutes a month if you're in a typical state mental health program) while you get to experience your illness every waking moment (plus nightmares during sleep).
So really, if you suffer from this, what you need to do is get informed and get the right treatment. What form that may take I cannot really tell you, but for almost everyone, there is an effective treatment which is not debilitating. If your current medications don't work for you, work with your doctor to find better medications; just give time for the new ones to fully take effect before switching again.
I want to comment on the link between manic depression and creativity. Kelly Luker, the author of the Metro San Jose article, really didn't seem to get it when I explained to her that becoming manic was not a desirable thing. I really did take pains to explain it to her clearly.
Yes, the early stages of mania, or mild mania (called hypomania) do feel pleasurable so she really thought this was something to be desired and all us bipolar programmers were all fired up on our jobs while going through manic episodes.
But that's really not how it is. Mania is a profoundly psychotic state. One goes days on end without sleeping. Thoughts race and crowd the mind so fast that one is able to complete a concept in ones own mind - let alone say a complete sentence to another person. Manic people make extremely poor judgements and often act on them without any regard to the consequences - which all too often come to roost once the manic episode is over and depression sets in.
Hypomania can be a happy and productive time but only in short bursts; it can't be maintained. And for me, severe depression invariably follows any manic phase whether it is mild or severe, so I work very hard to avoid getting manic.
The important thing to understand is that while one feels creative while manic, true creativity only comes during the balanced times (I hesitate to say "normal"), and the work of the manic depressive to heal, as I have over the years in 14 years of psychotherapy, is to learn to live a balanced life without mania or depression.
The link between manic depression and creativity is extensively (and authoritatively) discussed in Kaye Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire. She gives case studies of many famous poets and writers who were thought to be manic depressive (because of suicides, or manic behaviour) or actually known to be, and also quotes such studies as one about a prestigious writer's workshop, many of the attendees of which went on to commit suicide.
Dr. Jamison kept her own illness largely a secret during her training and career as a psychologist. But she discusses her own (and her father's) manic depression in her biography An Unquiet Mind
The subject of my letter Programming and Madness wasn't about how programming drove me nuts - it was about how it made me sane.
After I cracked up and left college I had no way to support myself, I was broke, hungry, miserable, sick, clinically depressed - not just sad but yearning to kill myself almost continuously, sleeping twenty hours a day.
I needed to find a place for myself in the world where I could live contentedly as the geek I had always been. My first love was, always will be physics (I did research on the 60" and 200" telescopes at Palomar Mountain, and did my senior thesis work for UC Santa Cruz at the particle accellerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland). But for some reason I've never been able to survive in the world of physics.
Working with computers, on the other hand, and in the community of computer programmers, I do very well.
It's my experience that there are a lot of other people in the computer industry, and in the scientific and technical world in general, who suffer from mental illness. "Unipolar" depression is most common but manic depression is quite widespread too. I know this both because I see it in others and sometimes we come out of our closet and, at work or on the net, we share our experience with each other. It's been a really long and complicated process for me to get where I am, and a big problem I faced when I first came down with it was a lack of good information. I'm trying to do something about it.
Imagine the day when you could ask a random stranger why the sad face and he'd feel perfectly safe in telling you "I'm clinically depressed". People will tell strangers about a lot of medical conditions, but mental illness still brings up images of Bedlam in a lot of people. And I'm afraid some of the worst stigma is actually self imposed; meaningless comments on the topic of mental illness can often have a devastating effect on someone who suffers from it, causing them to retreat far from the world of light for fear of exposing themselves when often their worst fears are mostly imagined.
I've used this sig for many years, I take it very seriously. Generally only my good friends understand the painful irony in it. I started using it shortly after getting on antidepressants after my first suicide attempt:
The guy who wrote that linked piece about being bipolar sounds schitzophrenic, not bipolar. Bipolars don't hear voices or think the CIA is bugging their telephone. That's much more severe than bipolar disorder...
Very observant of you. Stricly speaking, I have been diagnosed as schizoaffective, which is more of a catch-all category than a properly identified disease or diagnosis. (I think I do give the correct diagnosis on my web page somewhere)
It means one has the symptoms of both manic depression and schizophrenia; but in me the bipolar symptoms predominate, I only get the schizoid symptoms when I'm heavily manic
There's quite a range to schizoaffective disorder. Lori Schiller, the author of The Quiet Room is also schizoaffective but has a much heavier predominance of schizoid symptoms.
I do have an issue with some of the things the author of the article, Kelly Luker said in her story.
The fact is, I did in fact tell her (and I've long held this to be true) that I can work effectively while sufferring fairly severely from the symptoms of manic depression.
That's why I said that I can work effectively even when I'm wigging.
I've been in offices programming late at night, doing up some C code in emacs, while being unable to bring myself to look out the window because I had an overwhelming sense that Nazi panzer divisions were having maneuvers in the parking lot.
The first few years I was a programmer, I sufferred pretty heavily from symptoms of manic depression and I did pretty well both at teaching myself to be a programmer and at actually producing working code, in terms of shipping products.
But one thing Ms. Luker really didn't seem to understand is that it is not desirable to be manic.
A manic episode is a profoundly psychotic state. It is extremely frightening to experience. It can be very frightening for other people, especially those who really don't understand what is going on (hence my desire to educate by writing web pages and slashdot articles). It is physically exhausting - I've gone as long as a week without sleeping, and the lack of sleep escalates the mania in a vicious spiral. Really the best one can hope for is that a caring friend or watchful doctor will get the sufferer to a psychiatric hospital before something really bad happens.
People who are manic:
Make abrupt changes to their college major, as I did, from physics to literature.
Get married to strangers
Have abrupt and ultimately deeply regretted sexual affairs
Blow their life savings on items that have no real value to them
Start massive projects and abandon them the next day
Rob banks, when they are otherwise law-abiding citizens
I could go on but basically I really want to emphasize that being manic is a profoundly altered state and not something to be desired, any more than being manic is.
Because mania has a pleasurable feeling, and people in manic states tend to bubble over with new ideas, Ms. Luker really seemed to have the idea that it was really great to be manic. She seemed quite taken aback when I pointed out to her that mania was really about the worst thing that one could experience, short of maybe actually committing suicide. But that emphasis did not make it into the article.
I do say on my website (and I said to Ms. Luker) that manic depressive people tend to be very creative - but not while they are manic.
There is a distinct difference between having racing thoughts and bubbling over with new ideas and being able to create.
What really is good about being manic depressive is the creativity one gains from it. And there is a definite link between manic depression and creativity as evidenced in Kaye Redfield Jamison's book Touched with Fire
But what I've always emphasized, what it took me years to learn in the early days and what a lot of manic depressive do not understand until they've been through years of therapy (this is something that the medication which directly treats the symptoms doesn't help with), is that the real creativity comes when you have achieved a balance.
You see, the manic depressive is most creative when he or she is "normal".
It's important to understand that, in the US at least, people with autism, manic depression and other disabilities are specifically protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
If you feel you have been discriminated against because of your condition, I would encourage you to consult the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about it, who may well sue your employer on your behalf.
I do know that the EEOC has filed some of these lawsuits for people with mental illnesses and won.
The kind of employers who would discriminate against someone because they have a debilitating illness are not the sorts to be enlightened by educated posts on Slashdot and helpful web pages.
No, for them we have the heavy hand of governments, the justice system and lawsuits.
(Gotta trust Slashdot to provoke some colorful discussion...)
Being a geek has a lot to do with mental illness. There's more to me than being manic depressive; I was always a social outcast growing up and quite long before I came down with manic depression I had plenty of problems with traditional psychological disorders, of the sort that are effectively treated with "talk therapy" (as was done with me as an adult).
In my case as a child my illnesses, both physical and emotional, drove me into the extremes of intellectual inquiry that leads to such scientific and technical achievements as attending CalTech as first an astronomy major, then a physics major, then (while manic) switching to literature.
I did research on the 200" and 60" telescopes at Palomar Observatory. For my senior thesis at UC Santa Cruz I did some numerical analysis and particle detector shift work at CERN in Geneva.
You could say I was just one mentally ill person who happened to be smart, but I know I'm definitely not alone. I remember from CalTech that there were a number of people that I consider now to likely have been manic depressive (why did we have a full-time staff psychiatrist for such a small school?) at least one person who was schizophrenic, and a substantial portion of the campus sufferred from major depression.
I know one guy who attempted suicide while I was there and eventually succeeded after leaving school, and I once hitched a ride from a pasadena paramedic who commented on the large number of particularly bizarre suicide attempts that he responded to at the school. I heard about the case of an astronomy professor who wrecked his sports car driving to palomar observatory. So he bought another the next day - cash. It was in that car that he killed himself on the way to the observatory. He held a speed record for the drive from campus to the observatory.
Of course this is all just anecdotal evidence. More substantial arguments are given in the book Touched with Fire by Kaye Redfield Jamison, a psychologist who specializes in manic depression. The book gives case studies of many, many creative people who are known or thought to be manic depressive, people who committed suicide or exhibited manic behaviour during their lives, as well as statistical studies such as the attendees at a professional writers workshop many of whom killed themselves later.
Jamison's own study quoted in the book involved some british academics who had been awarded some high academic honor, and also who had sought psychiatric help far out of proportion to the general population.
(Jamison also coauthored the standard medical textbook on manic depressive illness and mostly kept her own illness quiet through her training as a psychologist and most of her career until she wrote a biography that emphasizes her and her father's manic depression, An Unquiet Mind
Something else I want to point out is, I've been around in the mental health game for a long time, been in lots of therapy groups, mental hospitals and such, and I've met people with many disorders. Everyone who wasn't manic depressive could be considered an average person; while I have known a couple unusually intelligent schizophrenics they weren't the usual case. On the other hand, I have yet to meet a manic depressive who wasn't extremely intelligent. This is not to say they are successful; often we are misdirected or we live in poverty because of our illness, but I don't know of a single manic depressive person who isn't really bright.
But what I was really trying to get at though in my letter Programming and Madness is not that programming makes one crazy; it is precisely programming that made me sane. A huge part of my healing process involved finding a place for myself in the world where I could still live happily as a geek. Sadly I've never been able to do that in physics, my first love. But learning to program turned me from a world of sickness and desperation to a life of joy and prosperity.
I still encounter mentally ill people in my work. I've worked in silicon valley companies where I met other manic depressives on the same hall. So in volunteering for the Metro article and posting this on Slashdot I'm trying to make life a little better for others who suffer as I do (and I still do, although not as bad - manic depression is treatable but not curable).
One more factoid. Some study a few years ago found that manic depression was not as common in the scientific community as it was among the artistic and humanities communities. But that is not my experience; the study was done on career members of the communities (college professors in the case of the scientists). It did not include students. My experience of students is that mental illness is just as prevalent as it is among artists and writers. I think one doesn't find so many mentally ill scientists either because they are rejected by the community or because they are successful in hiding their illnesses. I think that is a shame and I'd like to do something to change it.
My friend Andy Green developed a cross-platform library over the past five years he plans to release as open source soon. Before he does he wants a small number of experienced C++ programmers to give it a good going-over to work the remaining kinks out of it.
I've been using it for the past four months for a simultaneous Mac and Windows development project and I think his API is the best I've used on any platform, even including single platform API's. I vastly prefer it to Java or Mac PowerPlant or even the Be Application Kit.
His API supports XWindows/Posix, MacOS, Windows, and BeOS. It's written in C++. It offers:
Multithreading
GUI with a really intriguing layout management system
Platform appropriate UI renderers (so it looks like Windows when used on Windows, looks like Mac when used on Mac).
Single-file database API suitable for small data or large (like serving multimedia over a network)
There's probably more that I haven't mentioned. If you have a serious interest in evaluating Andy's code, and preferably if you're using two or more of the above GUI platforms, drop a note to me at crawford@goingware.com and I'll send you the URL and a login password.
I should caution that the XWindows implementation needs some work at present; it has worked well in the past but it has fallen behind changes to the internal API and is being updated right now. So it doesn't currently build on XWindows. But it will before we complete the beta test, and having some input from some X folks would be helpful.
Michael D. Crawford
Where to get drivers for BeOS
on
BeOS For Linux!
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· Score: 4
The BeOS comes bundled with a limited number of drivers, but there are some third party drivers available.
I thought there was a 3c509 driver available but a quick search didn't find it. I suggest you ask on BeUserTalk.
But to find drivers and third-party software for the BeOS, I suggest you try:
Also, while technical support is not available from Be, Inc. for the personal edition, the BeUserTalk mailing list is very good; many BeOS engineers and experienced users frequent it and answer questions.
I have the Xerces library for SAX and DOM access to XML files starting to work on the MacOS, built with Codewarrior Pro 5.3. So you don't need to move up to MacOS X to use XML (or you can use Xerces as a fallback if your application needs to run on earlier systems).
I will be submitting my changed to the Xerces folks at http://xml.apache.org but a little more work is needed before I do. Until then, email me privately at crawford@goingware.com if you want to try it out.
I haven't got it working yet, but I'll also be building the IBM International Components for Unicode (ICU) library on MacOS.
When I worked at Medior, Inc., they used GPL'ed code for graphics effects like screen dissolves, wipes, and so on in their multimedia CDROMs. They just went and took the code and never considered releasing the source code.
The CDROM's were usually document retrieval CD's full of sales lit for such large corporations as Tandem, Northern Telecom and FedEx. I couldn't really tell you which CD's got the GPL'ed code and which didn't; but because we tended to just reuse all the source to all the previous CD's on the next CD, the chance are pretty good that the graphics effects got rolled into an awful lot of programs even when it wasn't actually used.
They also did some consumer titles such as the 2Market Home Shopping catalog CD (with such catalogs as the sharper image with products on the CD) and the CD Version of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus.
I was pretty angry about them using the GPL'ed code but I really wasn't in a position to do anything about it. It was during a pretty low time in my life and I just needed to keep working.
Medior is defunct now as an independent corporation, but it was purchased by a small networking outfit you may have heard of - America Online who renamed it AOL Productions. AOL inherited all the assets of the company, the source code, rights to everything, most of the engineers and executives. I left just before the buyout.
Eventually AOL Productions was shut down and sucked into AOL. But a lot of Medior people are still working for AOL, including former Medior President and Founder Barry Schuler who is now AOL's President of Interactive Services.
You might drop him a line and ask for the source code for all the CD's that included the GPL'ed graphics effects libraries.
Slashdot Mirror
Only the free version doesn't run on a PowerPC.
Be also offers PowerPC support for their BeIA internet appliance platform, which is rather intelligent considering that a powerpc is a much better choice for an embedded platform like an internet appliance (consumes less power).
See the bottom of BeIA Introduction at the bottom under hardware requirements where is says:
Processors: x86 (Pentium class or better), PowerPC (all)
PowerLogix Announces First Dual G4 Upgrade Card
The advantages of the Apple machine are that it will run with a faster system bus and faster memory than an 8500 that has been upgraded with one of these cards, which has to access main memory at the same speed as the conventional 604 does in the original machine.
The advantage of the upgrade card is that you can run it with older system software - note that when Apple releases new machines, usually they require the latest system to run them so they're not a lot of help to developers wanting to maintain application compatibility with old systems.
And what's really cool is that it's possible that the BeOS will run on the cards, and BeOS applications and the whole BeOS system are pervasively multithreaded and so should take great advantage of these cards.
Note that the reason Be can't make the BeOS run on PowerMac G3 and G4 machines is not because of their processors but because Apple won't give Be the specs for the proprietary chips on the motherboards of the new machines. This is not a problem for an upgraded 8500 and in fact many people are currently using 8500's with G3 upgrade cards.
You can be sure Linux will work on the cards because PowerLogix includes a copy of LinuxPPC with each card they ship.
Sadly, a Be employee who bought a PowerLogix card for his Power Computing home machine found that it didn't work to run the BeOS - he's very happy with it on the MacOS. Many other G3 cards do work with the BeOS though.
I have very enthusiastically urged PowerLogix to support the BeOS in their cards and offered to beta test for them on my 8500.
They also have a USB/Firewire card that allows older mac owners to take advantage of all those spiffy peripherals and video editing software that's available for the new machines. I'm waiting until the dual G4 ships to purchase an upgrade but I'll be getting the rapidfire card so I can use an HP Deskjet USB printer on my mac.
They'll interview and ask for a sample of your blood. If you can't go to their site, they can interview you over the phone and have a local physician or blood lab take the sample and mail it in.
michael@geometricvisions.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow
Michael D. Crawford
It may well be true that we tolerate eccentricity greater in the more intelligent people, but the book Touched with Fire quotes a number of substantive studies that I believe effectively prove the link between mental illness and creativity.
If you think there isn't such a link, I suggest you read the book, then read the studies quoted, and then maybe use the science citation index to look for followup studies and discussion in the psychiatric technical literature.
michael@geometricvisions.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow
Michael D. Crawford
It depends greatly on where you are. In the US, most states have public mental health services which are free or low-cost with a sliding scale. The service isn't all that great but you can see a psychiatrist and get medication and such things as lithium level blood tests for free.
I did this for years through the Santa Cruz County Mental Health Department, but there were two big problems - only one 20-minute session a month with a doctor (so if I was having trouble there wasn't a lot I could do), and the antidepressant they wanted me to take caused a immediate and severe anxiety attack (I was warned this might happen). The one I ended up taking as an alternative, ludiomil, worked great for me but the state wouldn't pay for it because the cheaper one that caused the bad anxiety was available.
(I understand the Alliance for the Mentally Ill had to sue the state of New York to cover the $9000/year it costs to treat a schizophrenic with clozapine - many cheaper drugs are available but clozapine works for many people where no other drug will and has had miraculous effects on about 30% of those who take it. But it's an expensive drug and even more expensive because it has a rare but fatal side effect and weekly blood tests are required by the FDA for everyone who takes it).
If you are a college student, you may be able to see a doctor for free through your campus. I did at UC Santa Cruz and CalTech. There may be a limit on the number of sessions and the medication won't be covered.
If you live in an enlightened country like Canada, psychiatric sessions are completely free, although finding a doctor and getting an appointment may be hard. (Only M.D.'s are paid for, not psychologist or non-M.D. "talk therapists"). Also medication is not covered. Lithium's pretty cheap and so are most antidepressants but some things are real expensive, my risperdal runs me well over $100 a month and I only take a tiny dose.
If you live in a place with publicly funded medicine where there is no prescription drug coverage, you would do well to apply immediately for supplemental insurance that does. A friend in Canada gets blue cross for CDN $30 per month - and besides covering her psychiatric medicine at a couple hundred per month it also paid for a $700 two-week ulcer antibiotic treatment (to kill H. Pylori bacteria).
I'm afraid in the vast majority of the world there is little public support for psychiatry, if you can find a doctor at all. But in many of those countries, you can buy medication without a prescription - pretty dangerous yes and I wouldn't suggest it without actually seeing a doctor but at least you wouldn't have to keep seeing one to get refills.
michael@geometricvisions.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow
Michael D. Crawford
When her bipolar husband got sick and couldn't work anymore, he wanted to move back to Greece. There is psychiatric treatment available there but what he got was clearly not competent.
I was able to help them out somewhat on suggesting medications to his doctor, and for a little while things got better.
The fellow got physically ill, I think it was heart trouble or something, and he went into the hospital. But at the same time he was sufferring from life-threatening heart problems he was manic.
They figured he was just crazy and didn't take his physical ailment particularly seriously so they just sent him home after a day or so.
He had a heart attack and died three days later.
This man was a diplomat for Christ's sake. He used to hold a position of significant importance to his nation's and Europe's well being.
But because he was manic the folks in Greece just let him die.
Think about that the next time you shy away from a homelessly mentally ill person. For the homeless mentally ill, generally they don't want your spare change - they want maybe just a flash of eye contact, a nod of the head. They want validation of their own existence as a member of human society - and I know very well from quite painful personal experience that that is the hardest barrier to overcome.
I've taken the homeless out to lunch in restaurants a few times. Had coffee with a schizophrenic woman who had trouble seeing me because the hallucinations got in her way and she had to keep brushing them aside with her hands. She could hardly express a complete sentence (she spoke in "word salad") but honestly she was and still is a very kind and decent human being.
There's been a lot of advances in medicine for schizophrenics since we had coffee that time - the "atypical antipsychotics" such as the risperdal I take and the clozapine that enabled Lori Schiller to come out of her darkness.
They don't help everyone and yes they can screw you up (clozapine can kill you from agranulocytosis and requires frequent blood tests to prevent sudden death) but the next time I ran into this lady on the street in Santa Cruz a few years later we walked together for a few blocks and had a nice chat. She was on her way to meet her husband and had kids. Seemed like a very good wife and mother. She was studying the arts at Cabrillo College.
Something I really try to emphasize, my shrink took years emphasizing this to me against incredible resistance on my part, is that each of us who suffer has to take individual responsibility for our own lives.
Psychiatrists who recognize and teach that and put the power in the patient's hands do their job well.
But yes there are plenty of psychiatrists who don't and do their patients a disservice. How many programmer's do you know who write bad code? And how many of them are convinced that their bad code really is just fine? Same with shrinks. Gotta be choosy. Insist on quality service.
michael@geometricvisions.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
Michael D. Crawford
30% of the homeless are mentally ill. A substantial portion of those homeless are manic depressive. Not very suburban to be sleeping on a steam grate in new york city.
Manic depression also strikes people in other cultures and has been written about for millenia. What do you think the word "maniac" actually means?
I've met people of many races who were manic depressive. Some of those people were fellow patients in psychiatric hospitals. Others were folks who called me up when I was volunteering for the Santa Cruz Suicide Prevention Service.
If someone's standing at a payphone holding a loaded gun because he's lost his job and his wife's left him because she can't take it anymore, and when he was high a month ago he got arrested for breaking into an airplane cockpit (a friend of a friend did this), isn't it reason to believe it's a real illness?
Michael D. Crawford
This applies to everyone, not just the mentally ill or computer geeks, but all humans, even people from other cultures, and animals too. Even if you choose not to apply this to your own life, knowing this and understanding it will help you to deal with other people, especially difficult people who don't make sense or who don't understand you.
Most people feel that reality is something that just sort of happens to them. In fact the vast majority of people believe this so deeply that they don't even know that they believe it or ever consider the question of whether it could be otherwise. Things that are, just are because they happen that way.
But that's simply not true. There is an objective, absolute physical reality, but it is too vast, too complex for any living being to comprehend. This objective reality is also devoid of any significance and meaning.
The reality we experience is something we make. We do not have complete control over it, but everyone has influence over its general course, and it can be changed with time. Further, in conducting our construction of reality, we are constantly making choices, usually unconscious, and there is constant opportunity to choose, far more than most people would believe without really spending some time contemplating it.
Many people are satisfied with their lives, but many aren't, but believe they have no choice to have it any other way. Some people struggle constantly to improve their lot but consistently fail and live miserable lives - it's not for lack of trying, it's because they live in a reality that is not effective for them and they do not see the way to change it or even know that's what they should do.
I didn't invent this concept - I learned about it in an anthropology course at UC Santa Cruz. It has been "discovered" repeatedly over the ages and written about by many people, and the concept is expressed and taught in many different ways, and understood differently by many people. But however it is expressed the fundamental idea is common and widespread and very old.
I'll describe it the way it was taught by Prof. Stuart Schlegel in Anthropology of Religion, where we concentrated on studying the world views of some other cultures - and the social and mental processes by which they constructed them.
The objective physical reality I mentioned was termed Nouminal Reality by Emmanuel Kant. Nouminal reality is the physical universe in its entirety and complexity. There is no conscious perception of nouminal reality because it is both too detailed, too complex and our senses are physically incapable of perceiving it - most light is to long or short in wavelength to see or feel, much sound too quiet or lost in noice, most objects to small to see or too large to comprehend.
Nouminal reality is all there is, and it is completely true and absolute, but it is also meaningless.
For example, in nouminal reality there is no boundary between physical objects. Where one thing stops and something else starts is an artificial concept; in physical reality the quantum wavefunctions of almost all particles in the universe decay exponentially into infinity but never fully reach zero, although the wavefunction may have zero points it will almost always (except in a black hole) come to a non-zero value on the other side.
In the nouminal world there are events (too numerous to imagine) but they have no significance. The Kennedy assassination and the atomic bombings of Japan occurred but were no more important then events in some nearly-evacuated patch of empty space out between the galaxies somewhere. At best they could be described as complex particle interactions, and the events did have consequences but the consequences were only more particle interactions.
Nouminal reality is the raw, unfiltered and unformatted data that we use as a raw material to sample, filter, interpret and distort the information that we actually experience.
Subjective Reality is what we actually experience happening to us. A lot goes on in the process of transforming nouminal reality info subjective reality.
Reality construction is a layered protocol, like a TCP/IP stack. You might get a sense of nouminal reality by wiring an audio speaker into an Internet backbone cable; subjective reality is the formatted web page with styled text and nice JPEGs and maybe some streaming audio. It looks pretty automatic to the naive user but we all know the decades of process and engineer-millenia that went into making a web page happen.
And protocols can change. And you can choose what web pages you're going to look at. Some parts of it are easy, but significant change is a difficult process in life, as in standards development and implementation.
The first layer in subjective reality construction is physical selection. We can only experience the things our senses are sensitive to - we see a limited range of light wavelengths and hear in a narrow spectrum of audio frequencies. We can only see things that occupy a solid angle in our visual field wide enough to resolve in our physical eyes.
There are evolutionary and biological selections and interpretations applied. Part of the processing of visual signals in the nerve from the eye to the brain transform visual pixels into edge information and movement - our vision is much more sensitive to distinct edges and motion than to broad, stationary featureless fields.
I'm sure a lot of this filtering results from evolutionary processes not just to make us see well but to allow us to survive to reproduce. Loud or high-pitched noise, bright lights and flashes get our attention quickly because through most of history they've signaled danger or injury.
Once we've constructed a vision of an object we have to choose which objects to pay attention too and what to consider significant. Look at the room around you. See the objects in it. Now try to see all the objects all at once in their entirety. Pretty difficult, isn't it - a mental strain at best and not something you can do for any length of time.
The choice of what to see, and what significance these things have start with our culture. Us geeks will walk into an office and see computers.
A Tiruray on Mindanao in the Philippines will walk into the forest and see homes for spirits, and take care not to walk to close to any tree lest they disturb the spirit. This isn't just their belief - this is their reality, their universe. They'd see one of our offices and probably be thrown right into a panic or severe depression.
We have significance applied by our upbringing and by our personal preferences. You're friends and loved ones capture your attention much more reaidily than random strangers on the street - and we see humans in general much more readily than animals or plants because we attach such importance to other humans.
A whole lot of selection, filtering, whittling down and built-up significance is applied before a sensory perception is spit into our conscious mind for us to think about consciously. The part we normally get to consider consciously is only a small part of the object and most of what we experience is created by our own minds.
The most important thing to understand is that during the vast majority of those filtering processes, choices are being made - choices as to what to point your eyes towards, what sounds to focus on, and most importantly what significance to apply to the things we perceive.
This process exists for purely internal experience too, and this is particularly important for people who are unhappy with their lives. If you can come to understand the processes by which experience is created, both external experience and in your own mind, you can alter it in a way that will tend to be more positive and effective.
It's also important to understand that biology has a vast influence over what you construct. You can choose consciously to absorb a new trait into your personality, but there are things about being human that are too deeply wired into our brains to be able to alter through conscious will.
That is why I, as a manic depressive, choose to medicate myself with psychotropic drugs. Manic depression's sympoms have too profound an effect on me to be able to control them through better living, but I can choose to affect the biological component with medication.
The choices made in subjective reality construction are mostly automatic and unconscious - but they are still choices. They have to be automatic because there are too many choices to make for your conscious mind to be able to keep up with them all. But you can decide to alter the process and make a conscious decision to change your experience and then there are processes by which this decision can be implemented in the subconscious over some time, sort of like pushing a new STREAMS object down on the stack, or removing one.
I'm not going to go into how this is done. I can recommend some reading later. But this is basically the process taught to psychiatric patients in mental hospitals. It's not usually couched in these terms but I've found that the shrinks are quite comfortable discussing it this way with me when I bring it up.
The problem for mental patients is that they are in a very difficult and desperate position when they are asked to effect this change. They don't have the tools any more - it's like working with a stone chisel that's been smashed to bits. But there really is no choice and it is a long and difficult process to create the mental and emotional tools needed to do this and to heal.
If you're having an argument with someone who just doesn't seem to grasp your point, consider that they may have more than a different opinion, they may live in a different world. Jack Valenti doesn't just think DVD hackers are vandals - they are sapping the very foundations of his world. That may help you to understand the desperation of some people who work to oppose you.
And understanding these processes, and the process by which changes to reality construction are effected, may allow you to live a more satisfied life and to be more effective in gaining the support of people who might otherwise oppose you.
michael@geometricvisions.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
Michael D. Crawford
But when I was in the hospital for six weeks during a pretty severe manic episode (the time I was finally diagnosed), I pretty much passed the time by doing push ups.
Not real frantic rapid pushups or anything. And I took breaks. But I pretty much did pushups all day long. Just about the only thing I could do on my own that made me feel the least bit normal.
Michael D. Crawford
That article is here
Someone responded that it should be moderated up. Not to toot my own horn or anything.
(I had a classmate in physics at UCSC who is chinese. Pretty quiet, nice guy. Hadn't seen him for months, until one morning I was awakened by him standing by my bed in my room. "Is my head cut off?" he asked. The Tianmien Square massacre had just happened and he thought they were just killing chinese people everywhere, and in fact they had already killed him and he was walking around with a bleeding neck where his head used to be.
Spent a lot of time with him keeping him company until his family could come up and put him in a psychiatric hospital. He eventually disappeared and I believe he is either one of the homeless mentally ill or dead now.)
Michael D. Crawford
Let me tell you brother, until you have experienced it, you have no idea what this is like. The extreme stages of mania and depression are profoundly altered states of reality. I am quite convinced that there is no physical pain that is as bad as being psychotically depressed.
You might look at a manic-depressive's behaviour and say they're just acting different than is commonly expected by society. But you're not experiencing the world inside the manic depressive's mind. It is a powerful experience, it is extraordinarily frightening and it takes real work just to survive.
And it's really weird. It makes no sense at all how one day one cannot imagine how anyone at all can have any reason to live (let alone oneself) and on another day one is a pleasantly productive member of society, and on another day one has a personal chat with God.
If you don't think it real, try this, it's been done: get some dead manic depressives and put their brains in a blender. The ones who died of suicide will have dramatically lower levels of neurotransmitters in their brains than is normal for the human population, and the ones got themselves killed while manic will have an overabundance of neurotransmitters.
If you don't think that serotonin, norepinephrine or dopamine affect your experience in a real way, why don't you eat a sheet of acid or a few peyote buttons and post a summary back here?
At least the trippers get to come down at the end of the night. Imagine a hallucinogenic trip that just went on for weeks on end.
Yours,
Michael D. Crawford
I wore my BeOS Master's Award polo shirt that I won (honorable mention) for porting Spellswell from MacOS to the BeOS
(It uses a protocol called Word Services that links word processors and email clients to spellers and other text services (including text encryption); the award was as much for bringing Word Services to the BeOS as for Spellswell itself. I plan to do the same for Linux soon, possibly through the CORBA techniques they use in Gnome - http://www.gnome.org seems to be down or I'd link to the relevant page there.)
I'm pretty active in the Be developer community.
I'm also pretty critical of Be because of their complete lack of any sense as far as managing the business and handling developer relations and I have no qualms about making my views known to them and other developers, both in public and in private discussions.
I've always been a shy and quiet person but there's something about living through experiences such as I've had that makes such things as speaking up in public about mere work matters pretty easy in comparison.
Remember my sig: Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. Words I live by.
I thought it would provoke quite a lively response to post the link to the Metro article to BeUserTalk and BeDevTalk. I got a couple private responses and one public one. I was very glad to get the responses I did get though.
On the other hand, I submitted this article to Slashdot but figured it wouldn't get posted, considering the dozens of articles I've submitted that I think were more directly relevant to open source programming, privacy, free speech, encryption and so on, but this is the one that gets on.
And my manic depression page, which grew to get 3000 hits last month (it's linked from some bipolar sites and the bipolar category on Yahoo), has gotten 4800 hits in ten hours.
No, I should have worn my Release Your Inner Nerd t-shirt that I bought from the Slashdot booth at the Linuxworld Expo in San Jose a while back.
(Wore it shopping for wedding supplies with my fiance the other day :-) ).
Michael D. Crawford
I don't remember where I found this, but I read in some usually reliable place that the US Food and Drug Administration does not consider bipolar depression an illness distinct from unipolar depression.
Even though the two illnesses are wildly different and should be treated dramatically different, they do have one large thing in common - periods of intense depression. But drugs that are appropriate for bipolars generally have no effect on unipolars and it is extremely dangerous to give a bipolar antidepressants without also prescribing a mood stabilizer (antidepressants can lead to psychotic mania if not administered properly)
The problem is getting funding for drugs solely designed for manic depression and getting the drugs tested and approved. The FDA, I understand, simply will not license a drug that has been tested only on manic depressives (even if the drug has no effect on other illness), and often antidepressants get approved without being tested on manic depressives at all.
Although there are a number of new mood stabilizers, lets look at where they came from:
- Lithium Carbonate - naturally occurring salt; took 25 years to get approved because there was no profit in manufacturing a common compound
- Tegretol - originally used as a neurological medicine, just happens to help bipolars
- Depakote (valproic acid) - epilepsy medicine
- Neurontin - epilepsy and neuralgia medicine.
Those are the most common ones. There are other mood stabilizers that are being found to help, but in every case that I know of, the drug was developed and licensed for some other purpose having nothing to do with manic depression.Michael D. Crawford
While outright bank robbery is not very common among manic people, it does happen. One gentleman drank 18 bottles of beer held up a bank at gunpoint, took a bunch of money in a paper bag, walked across the street and sat in some bushes until the police arrived.
When I was in the hospital, a fellow patient told me that a Los Angeles transit bus driver got the idea quite suddenly to drive his bus to San Francisco. He drove all the way up the coast in his stolen bus, expecting cheering crowds and a hero's welcome upon his arrival; instead he was arrested.
While manic depression generally is largely a change in affect, in the extreme manic phase there is overwhelming impulsivity and at the same time a very unfortunate lack of regard for the consequences. Ideas just shower from the sky and one acts on them the instant they strike, with no sense at all.
Probably the best advice one can give to someone who's getting manic, aside from getting treatment (it's not always immediately available, and the hospitals usually won't take you until you're a severe case because they're overcrowded, and the medicine takes a couple weeks to take effect, etc.) is to just sit tight and do nothing at all - probably the most difficult thing you could ask of someone in such a condition.
Michael D. Crawford
If you cannot afford one, you may be able to get help for free through government-provided mental health agencies in your community.
Even in the US which doesn't have free medicine, most places have some semblance of free psychiatric care that are funded by the states. You don't get a lot but it's better than not getting any help at all.
If you're in college you may be able to get treatment through your school.
Bringing it up with your parents may be a very difficult issue. In the long run it's best to involve your whole family in your treatment, but actually bringing that about may be very embarrassing and at worst they may have a very negative reaction. What's most important in the short term is that you share your feelings with someone you can trust who you think would be likely to be supportive and understanding - a close friend, teacher, minister, etc.
Definitely do get informed. There are a lot of good books, browse around the psychology and self-help section of your local bookstore. The main manic-depressive website is Pendulum and from there you can find links to sites on regular "unipolar" depression and other mental illnesses.
Other sites are:
- http://www.depression.org
- http://www.depression.com
- National Depressive and Manic Depressive Association
MikeMichael D. Crawford
First, I'd like to thank all the people who have written to me at michael@geometricvisions.com regarding their experiences with manic depression. I'm afraid I'm getting a lot of mail today so I'm going to have to wait until tomorrow to respond to most everyone.
But if you're thinking of writing, please be assured that I take the confidentiality of people who write to me regarding this very seriously. If you like you can encrypt your mail with my PGP key
I want to respond to a number of things that have been posted here and also clarify a few things that were written in Kelly Luker's article about bipolar high-tech workers in the Metro San Jose.
A number of people have posted some very negative things about mental illness or about the mental health profession. While there are instances of bad doctors and certainly a long history of bad science and outright abuse in the history of mental health, there is no doubt that manic depression is a real illness.
This is evidenced by positron emission tomography scans of bipolar patients during various phases. PET scans measure the consumption of radioactive sugar in various parts of the brain.
Manic patients have strong positron emissions from the right hemisphere of the brain, showing that the right hemisphere is very active - suggesting a physical reason for the feeling of creativity and the overabundance of new ideas.
Depressed people have a reduced level of positron emissions relative to a normal patient.
A bipolar patient who is neither manic nor depressed will show a normal level of sugar metabolization.
The illness is thought to be genetic in origin, but the genetic nature of it is not well understood. Several times researchers thought they'd discovered the gene for manic depression but the discovery turned out to be wrong.
It happens that manic depression tends to run in families, but not always. It can appear spontaneously in a family, and after it does it will tend to be passed to successive generations and get worse with each generation.
I don't understand fully why but this is thought to suggest that the disease is caused by a certain morphology of mutation rather than a certain genetic sequence, and that this kind of mutation tends to get worse over generations. Apparently this sort of mutation is understood for other illnesses that do this so they think bipolar depression may work this way too. I'm afraid I don't have a lit reference but I expect I can get some.
Manic depression usually responds to medication. However it is very difficult to treat effectively. The illness varies quite widely in the severity and frequency of its symptoms among individuals, and each individual responds quite differently to the different medications.
It took about twelve years to find the right combinations of medications for me. I didn't work continuously to find the right combo, and in fact I went several years without medication - but it's important for any bipolar reading this to understa nd that you can go years with good health and become profoundly manic or depressed quite suddenly, as I did when I was hospitalized during graduate school during a manic episode.
Another problem is that doctors are often lazy or ill-informed about proper treatment. I was first prescribed lithium and nothing else, even though my most prevalent symptom was depression and I went years with fairly continuous suicidal feelings and no treatment at all for it.
Early on the only direct treatment for manic depression was lithium, so the mental health community seemed to have gotten this idea that lithium was therefore completely effective for everyone. The Only Choice != Effective Treatment
Another problem is that antidepressants tend to provoke manic episodes, especially if they are given without mood stabilizers like lithium, depakote or tegretol. Quite often the new patient's only complaint is depression and the doctor doesn't ask questions that would determine a history of manic behavior, so they prescribe antidepressants without anything to prevent mania, and the patient then has a psychotic episode, as happened to me when I was first given antidepressants and I spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital.
The doctors then overreact and refuse to prescribe antidepressants at all, and the result is either a miserable life or maybe suicide.
Things are somewhat better now than when I was first diagnosed. Over time it was discovered that a number of epilepsy medications are effective mood stabilizers, and once the first such was found (tegretol) a large number of others followed (I take depakote, or valproic acid). This means that there is a choice for those who either cannot tolerate lithium (as I can't) or for who it is ineffective - lithium only reduces hospitalizations by about 50% overall.
The wide range of medicine and I imagine the overall advances in biology and medical research have combined to yield an understanding of how manic depression actually works in the brain. This understanding has only come about in the last five years or so, so now I understand drugs are under development that effect the processes of bipolar depression directly, by rational drug design.
Most of the existing medications were found to be effective by chance and no one ever understood how they worked.
I understand lithium was discovered because someone noticed that lithium salts made guinea pigs less active so he just fed a bunch of lithium to all the patients in a psychiatric hospital and the bipolar patients happened to get better - most likely the reaction of the guinea pigs resulted from lithium's potent toxicity; regular blood tests are required when one starts taking it because the effective dose is pretty close to the toxic dose.
But basically what got me better isn't just the medication, it was taking responsibility for and control of my treatment. Your doctor only sees you for an hour a week (or 20 minutes a month if you're in a typical state mental health program) while you get to experience your illness every waking moment (plus nightmares during sleep).
So really, if you suffer from this, what you need to do is get informed and get the right treatment. What form that may take I cannot really tell you, but for almost everyone, there is an effective treatment which is not debilitating. If your current medications don't work for you, work with your doctor to find better medications; just give time for the new ones to fully take effect before switching again.
I want to comment on the link between manic depression and creativity. Kelly Luker, the author of the Metro San Jose article, really didn't seem to get it when I explained to her that becoming manic was not a desirable thing. I really did take pains to explain it to her clearly.
Yes, the early stages of mania, or mild mania (called hypomania) do feel pleasurable so she really thought this was something to be desired and all us bipolar programmers were all fired up on our jobs while going through manic episodes.
But that's really not how it is. Mania is a profoundly psychotic state. One goes days on end without sleeping. Thoughts race and crowd the mind so fast that one is able to complete a concept in ones own mind - let alone say a complete sentence to another person. Manic people make extremely poor judgements and often act on them without any regard to the consequences - which all too often come to roost once the manic episode is over and depression sets in.
Hypomania can be a happy and productive time but only in short bursts; it can't be maintained. And for me, severe depression invariably follows any manic phase whether it is mild or severe, so I work very hard to avoid getting manic.
The important thing to understand is that while one feels creative while manic, true creativity only comes during the balanced times (I hesitate to say "normal"), and the work of the manic depressive to heal, as I have over the years in 14 years of psychotherapy, is to learn to live a balanced life without mania or depression.
The link between manic depression and creativity is extensively (and authoritatively) discussed in Kaye Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire. She gives case studies of many famous poets and writers who were thought to be manic depressive (because of suicides, or manic behaviour) or actually known to be, and also quotes such studies as one about a prestigious writer's workshop, many of the attendees of which went on to commit suicide.
Jamison is a coauthor of the standard medical text on manic depression.
Dr. Jamison kept her own illness largely a secret during her training and career as a psychologist. But she discusses her own (and her father's) manic depression in her biography An Unquiet Mind
The subject of my letter Programming and Madness wasn't about how programming drove me nuts - it was about how it made me sane.
After I cracked up and left college I had no way to support myself, I was broke, hungry, miserable, sick, clinically depressed - not just sad but yearning to kill myself almost continuously, sleeping twenty hours a day.
I needed to find a place for myself in the world where I could live contentedly as the geek I had always been. My first love was, always will be physics (I did research on the 60" and 200" telescopes at Palomar Mountain, and did my senior thesis work for UC Santa Cruz at the particle accellerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland). But for some reason I've never been able to survive in the world of physics.
Working with computers, on the other hand, and in the community of computer programmers, I do very well.
It's my experience that there are a lot of other people in the computer industry, and in the scientific and technical world in general, who suffer from mental illness. "Unipolar" depression is most common but manic depression is quite widespread too. I know this both because I see it in others and sometimes we come out of our closet and, at work or on the net, we share our experience with each other. It's been a really long and complicated process for me to get where I am, and a big problem I faced when I first came down with it was a lack of good information. I'm trying to do something about it.
Imagine the day when you could ask a random stranger why the sad face and he'd feel perfectly safe in telling you "I'm clinically depressed". People will tell strangers about a lot of medical conditions, but mental illness still brings up images of Bedlam in a lot of people. And I'm afraid some of the worst stigma is actually self imposed; meaningless comments on the topic of mental illness can often have a devastating effect on someone who suffers from it, causing them to retreat far from the world of light for fear of exposing themselves when often their worst fears are mostly imagined.
I've used this sig for many years, I take it very seriously. Generally only my good friends understand the painful irony in it. I started using it shortly after getting on antidepressants after my first suicide attempt:
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
Michael D. Crawford
Very observant of you. Stricly speaking, I have been diagnosed as schizoaffective, which is more of a catch-all category than a properly identified disease or diagnosis. (I think I do give the correct diagnosis on my web page somewhere)
It means one has the symptoms of both manic depression and schizophrenia; but in me the bipolar symptoms predominate, I only get the schizoid symptoms when I'm heavily manic
There's quite a range to schizoaffective disorder. Lori Schiller, the author of The Quiet Room is also schizoaffective but has a much heavier predominance of schizoid symptoms.
Michael D. Crawford
The fact is, I did in fact tell her (and I've long held this to be true) that I can work effectively while sufferring fairly severely from the symptoms of manic depression.
That's why I said that I can work effectively even when I'm wigging.
I've been in offices programming late at night, doing up some C code in emacs, while being unable to bring myself to look out the window because I had an overwhelming sense that Nazi panzer divisions were having maneuvers in the parking lot.
The first few years I was a programmer, I sufferred pretty heavily from symptoms of manic depression and I did pretty well both at teaching myself to be a programmer and at actually producing working code, in terms of shipping products.
But one thing Ms. Luker really didn't seem to understand is that it is not desirable to be manic.
A manic episode is a profoundly psychotic state. It is extremely frightening to experience. It can be very frightening for other people, especially those who really don't understand what is going on (hence my desire to educate by writing web pages and slashdot articles). It is physically exhausting - I've gone as long as a week without sleeping, and the lack of sleep escalates the mania in a vicious spiral. Really the best one can hope for is that a caring friend or watchful doctor will get the sufferer to a psychiatric hospital before something really bad happens.
People who are manic:
- Make abrupt changes to their college major, as I did, from physics to literature.
- Get married to strangers
- Have abrupt and ultimately deeply regretted sexual affairs
- Blow their life savings on items that have no real value to them
- Start massive projects and abandon them the next day
- Rob banks, when they are otherwise law-abiding citizens
I could go on but basically I really want to emphasize that being manic is a profoundly altered state and not something to be desired, any more than being manic is.Because mania has a pleasurable feeling, and people in manic states tend to bubble over with new ideas, Ms. Luker really seemed to have the idea that it was really great to be manic. She seemed quite taken aback when I pointed out to her that mania was really about the worst thing that one could experience, short of maybe actually committing suicide. But that emphasis did not make it into the article.
I do say on my website (and I said to Ms. Luker) that manic depressive people tend to be very creative - but not while they are manic.
There is a distinct difference between having racing thoughts and bubbling over with new ideas and being able to create.
What really is good about being manic depressive is the creativity one gains from it. And there is a definite link between manic depression and creativity as evidenced in Kaye Redfield Jamison's book Touched with Fire
But what I've always emphasized, what it took me years to learn in the early days and what a lot of manic depressive do not understand until they've been through years of therapy (this is something that the medication which directly treats the symptoms doesn't help with), is that the real creativity comes when you have achieved a balance.
You see, the manic depressive is most creative when he or she is "normal".
Mike
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow
Michael D. Crawford
If you feel you have been discriminated against because of your condition, I would encourage you to consult the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about it, who may well sue your employer on your behalf.
I do know that the EEOC has filed some of these lawsuits for people with mental illnesses and won.
The kind of employers who would discriminate against someone because they have a debilitating illness are not the sorts to be enlightened by educated posts on Slashdot and helpful web pages.
No, for them we have the heavy hand of governments, the justice system and lawsuits.
Michael D. Crawford
Being a geek has a lot to do with mental illness. There's more to me than being manic depressive; I was always a social outcast growing up and quite long before I came down with manic depression I had plenty of problems with traditional psychological disorders, of the sort that are effectively treated with "talk therapy" (as was done with me as an adult).
In my case as a child my illnesses, both physical and emotional, drove me into the extremes of intellectual inquiry that leads to such scientific and technical achievements as attending CalTech as first an astronomy major, then a physics major, then (while manic) switching to literature.
I did research on the 200" and 60" telescopes at Palomar Observatory. For my senior thesis at UC Santa Cruz I did some numerical analysis and particle detector shift work at CERN in Geneva.
And I taught myself programming because I was too sick to continue school and eventually started my own software consulting company
You could say I was just one mentally ill person who happened to be smart, but I know I'm definitely not alone. I remember from CalTech that there were a number of people that I consider now to likely have been manic depressive (why did we have a full-time staff psychiatrist for such a small school?) at least one person who was schizophrenic, and a substantial portion of the campus sufferred from major depression.
I know one guy who attempted suicide while I was there and eventually succeeded after leaving school, and I once hitched a ride from a pasadena paramedic who commented on the large number of particularly bizarre suicide attempts that he responded to at the school. I heard about the case of an astronomy professor who wrecked his sports car driving to palomar observatory. So he bought another the next day - cash. It was in that car that he killed himself on the way to the observatory. He held a speed record for the drive from campus to the observatory.
Of course this is all just anecdotal evidence. More substantial arguments are given in the book Touched with Fire by Kaye Redfield Jamison, a psychologist who specializes in manic depression. The book gives case studies of many, many creative people who are known or thought to be manic depressive, people who committed suicide or exhibited manic behaviour during their lives, as well as statistical studies such as the attendees at a professional writers workshop many of whom killed themselves later.
Jamison's own study quoted in the book involved some british academics who had been awarded some high academic honor, and also who had sought psychiatric help far out of proportion to the general population.
(Jamison also coauthored the standard medical textbook on manic depressive illness and mostly kept her own illness quiet through her training as a psychologist and most of her career until she wrote a biography that emphasizes her and her father's manic depression, An Unquiet Mind
Something else I want to point out is, I've been around in the mental health game for a long time, been in lots of therapy groups, mental hospitals and such, and I've met people with many disorders. Everyone who wasn't manic depressive could be considered an average person; while I have known a couple unusually intelligent schizophrenics they weren't the usual case. On the other hand, I have yet to meet a manic depressive who wasn't extremely intelligent. This is not to say they are successful; often we are misdirected or we live in poverty because of our illness, but I don't know of a single manic depressive person who isn't really bright.
But what I was really trying to get at though in my letter Programming and Madness is not that programming makes one crazy; it is precisely programming that made me sane. A huge part of my healing process involved finding a place for myself in the world where I could still live happily as a geek. Sadly I've never been able to do that in physics, my first love. But learning to program turned me from a world of sickness and desperation to a life of joy and prosperity.
I still encounter mentally ill people in my work. I've worked in silicon valley companies where I met other manic depressives on the same hall. So in volunteering for the Metro article and posting this on Slashdot I'm trying to make life a little better for others who suffer as I do (and I still do, although not as bad - manic depression is treatable but not curable).
One more factoid. Some study a few years ago found that manic depression was not as common in the scientific community as it was among the artistic and humanities communities. But that is not my experience; the study was done on career members of the communities (college professors in the case of the scientists). It did not include students. My experience of students is that mental illness is just as prevalent as it is among artists and writers. I think one doesn't find so many mentally ill scientists either because they are rejected by the community or because they are successful in hiding their illnesses. I think that is a shame and I'd like to do something to change it.
Michael D. Crawford
I've been using it for the past four months for a simultaneous Mac and Windows development project and I think his API is the best I've used on any platform, even including single platform API's. I vastly prefer it to Java or Mac PowerPlant or even the Be Application Kit.
His API supports XWindows/Posix, MacOS, Windows, and BeOS. It's written in C++. It offers:
- Multithreading
- GUI with a really intriguing layout management system
- Platform appropriate UI renderers (so it looks like Windows when used on Windows, looks like Mac when used on Mac).
- Single-file database API suitable for small data or large (like serving multimedia over a network)
- Platform-independent C++ networking API
- Debugging (debugging allocator, leak detection, deadlock detection, etc.)
There's probably more that I haven't mentioned. If you have a serious interest in evaluating Andy's code, and preferably if you're using two or more of the above GUI platforms, drop a note to me at crawford@goingware.com and I'll send you the URL and a login password.I should caution that the XWindows implementation needs some work at present; it has worked well in the past but it has fallen behind changes to the internal API and is being updated right now. So it doesn't currently build on XWindows. But it will before we complete the beta test, and having some input from some X folks would be helpful.
Michael D. Crawford
I thought there was a 3c509 driver available but a quick search didn't find it. I suggest you ask on BeUserTalk.
But to find drivers and third-party software for the BeOS, I suggest you try:
Also, while technical support is not available from Be, Inc. for the personal edition, the BeUserTalk mailing list is very good; many BeOS engineers and experienced users frequent it and answer questions.
- Be Mailing Lists
For programmers there is also BeDevTalk and BeCodeTalk.Michael D. Crawford
I'm so set on working at home that I put up this page for recruiters to read about how I wouldn't work at a client site:
Recruiters - Please Read This Important Note
If you're a consultant or thinking of becoming one, or just want more power in controlling your destiny, check out this page I wrote recently:
Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Professionals
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare, Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
I will be submitting my changed to the Xerces folks at http://xml.apache.org but a little more work is needed before I do. Until then, email me privately at crawford@goingware.com if you want to try it out.
I haven't got it working yet, but I'll also be building the IBM International Components for Unicode (ICU) library on MacOS.
Mike Crawford
The CDROM's were usually document retrieval CD's full of sales lit for such large corporations as Tandem, Northern Telecom and FedEx. I couldn't really tell you which CD's got the GPL'ed code and which didn't; but because we tended to just reuse all the source to all the previous CD's on the next CD, the chance are pretty good that the graphics effects got rolled into an awful lot of programs even when it wasn't actually used.
They also did some consumer titles such as the 2Market Home Shopping catalog CD (with such catalogs as the sharper image with products on the CD) and the CD Version of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus.
I was pretty angry about them using the GPL'ed code but I really wasn't in a position to do anything about it. It was during a pretty low time in my life and I just needed to keep working.
Medior is defunct now as an independent corporation, but it was purchased by a small networking outfit you may have heard of - America Online who renamed it AOL Productions. AOL inherited all the assets of the company, the source code, rights to everything, most of the engineers and executives. I left just before the buyout.
Eventually AOL Productions was shut down and sucked into AOL. But a lot of Medior people are still working for AOL, including former Medior President and Founder Barry Schuler who is now AOL's President of Interactive Services.
You might drop him a line and ask for the source code for all the CD's that included the GPL'ed graphics effects libraries.
Regards,
Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow