0:00:20.000,0:00:22.000
OK, yeah, so my name's Greg.

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I work for a company called Table XI in Chicago.

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We're a thirty person Rails shop.

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I've been programming most of my life.

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I got started programming on a TRS-80 when I was about six or seven years old.

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I had cassette tapes and it had BASIC on there.

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I remember this magazine called 3-2-1 Contact

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would come every month and it had BASIC programs on the back page.

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I'd sit there and I wouldn't copy and paste, I would literally copy the program into the thing and run it

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and just make the screen change colors and whatnot.

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I spent most of my professional career kind of straddling development and client-facing work.

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And I also have type-II bipolar and ADD,

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not to be confused with Matz's Anniversary-Driven Development from yesterday,

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but Attention Deficit Disorder.

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Today I want to tell you guys my story.

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I want to tell you why we need to be talking more about

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depression and mental illness

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in our offices, with our peers, at meetups, and at conferences like this.

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You might be familiar with type-I bipolar. it's also called manic depression.

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It means that you cycle between periods of mania — the good parts —

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and depression at the bottom.

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The mania can feel kind of euphoric,

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and it can also be incredibly destructive,

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because it leads to great impulsiveness.

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People make a lot of bad decisions at that time.

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For type-I bipolar, this can also be rapid-cycling.

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So you can go quickly from top to bottom very fast.

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My bipolar, type-II bipolar, is much milder,

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and the cycles tend to be much more elongated.

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So what it would look like for me

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is typically anywhere from four to twelve weeks or so of

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just this long, slow, gradual slide down.

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It felt for me like I was always trying to crawl up a gravel incline

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that was really steep, and no matter how hard I spun my wheels,

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I just kept sliding back down further and further.

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And this was quite frustrating for me.

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I first noticed this during my last year, my fifth year

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— my "victory lap," although it wasn't particularly victorious for me —

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at the University of Illinois.

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And I had just broken up with a girlfriend, I had just moved into a place on my own,

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my first time living without any roommates.

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I was on my way to failing out of school

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and things were just getting really rough for me.

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I was never a particularly good student

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but I was always kind of smart enough that i could kind of fake my way through it.

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But that started catching up to me my junior, senior year.

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It turns out that, if you're going to go in and take a linear algebra final,

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it helps if you actually know what linear algebra means.

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I've taken that class twice now. I still couldn't tell you.

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And it became pretty obvious that I wasn't going to make it,

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that I wasn't going to graduate,

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and I didn't know how to tell my parents about that.

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And I didn't know how to deal with the fact that everybody else around me

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seemed to be graduating just fine,

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but I wasn't.

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I had a friend who said,

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"Greg is one of the smartest guys I know,

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but he also just happens to be one of the laziest people I know."

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And I believed that shit, because I didn't have any other excuse for it.

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You know, like, I slept all day, I didn't go to class,

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I knew that I was mentally capable, or at least smart enough,

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to go to class and do the homework.

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I just wasn't doing it, and that sounds like laziness to me.

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I pretty much, when I'm at the bottom of the depression, I sleep a lot.

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It's the most obvious symptom.

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The best part of my day back then was the time in which I was unconscious

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and the time I didn't have to deal with reality that was piling up,

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and just physically it was so hard to get out of bed I'd oversleep my alarm.

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I'd stop going to class, I'd stop going to work.

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I had a part time job with a very flexible schedule

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and it took them a while to realize that I had pretty much stopped coming in.

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And I had a friend, a coworker, who was just a great friend,

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and he really cared, he was concerned, and he sent me a couple emails just saying,

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"Hey, Greg, what's going on, you know?"

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And I ignored them because I didn't know how to talk to him about it.

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And then one day, it was like 2:00 on a Tuesday,

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I got a phone call from Bill,

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and I was still in bed,

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and I ignored it.

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And then he called again and I ignored it again.

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And then I heard a knock on my door.

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It was like, "Hey, Greg, it's Bill."

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And I was like, "Shit.

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It's fine. Just be quiet. He doesn't need to know I'm here.

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Besides, Tuesday at 2, why would he even think i'm here anyway?"

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And then I heard the doorknob start to turn.

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I wasn't very good at locking my doors back then.

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and at the time I was sleeping on kind of a cheap mattress.

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It was on one of those cheap bedframes with the casters on it

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and there was a gap between my bed and the wall that's about this big.

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And I very slowly slid into that gap

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and I pulled the blankets up over my head

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and I just held my breath while Bill walked into my living room

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and he poked his head in my bedroom

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and then he walked into the office and then left.

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That's what shame feels like.

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I failed out. I moved back home, went to Indianapolis, lived with my parents again.

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I started doing freelance work.

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I actually signed up for classes at a college there.

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After six months or so it became pretty obvious that I just wasn't going to be able to physically or mentally do that.

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So I lied to my parents and I told them I graduated.

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And i just came clean on that one about four years or so ago.

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And it was so frustrating,

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because even when I wanted to,

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even when I would go to class,

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I couldn't focus.

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Even when I wanted to do client work,

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and unless it was 2 in the morning the night before the work was due,

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i couldn't do it.

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When i got there, when I got focused on stuff,

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I could produce pretty good work.

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But I just felt like I had no control.

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And there's this verse in the Bible that says,

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"I do not understand what I do. What I want to do, I do not do.

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But instead that which I hate, I do."

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And that's what it felt like.

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It felt like anything that I tried to do, even the simplest task,

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it felt like I was walking through a swimming pool,

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like I just couldn't force myself, I didn't have control.

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I was like, "Why is this? Why can't I control myself?"

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So I did what you do when you have a question and need an answer to it, and I googled it.

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One night it was like 2 AM, and just out of desperation I googled "chronic procrastination."

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And it wasn't long before I was reading about attention deficit disorder.

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And I had always kind of joked that I had ADD,

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but I never meant it,

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because ADD is what lazy people use as an excuse

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because they don't want to work hard,

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and that's not me.

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But I read this book by this guy named Thom Hartmann

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called "The Edison Gene," and his premise was that

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ADD is genetic. And that inventors and creators have it.

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It's common. He said that tens of thousands of years ago,

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we had hunters and we had farmers, or gatherers,

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and in order to be a good hunter, you need to go out into new territory every day

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and you need to be constantly scanning the horizon

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and able to shift your focus from this thing to whatever comes into your peripheral vision

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and rapidly shift.

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In order to be a farmer, you just have to be good at doing the same thing every single day.

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You have to be methodical about it.

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And neither skill is better or worse than the other.

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It's just that, over time, as civilizations grew, farmers became

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much more useful than hunters,

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because you can support larger population bases.

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And when we'd go to war, it'd be the hunters who would go off and get killed

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and so their genes would get removed from the pool much more quickly.

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And over time, that portion of the population dropped,

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and now it's estimated that about 10-20% of the population

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could probably be diagnosed with ADD.

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He talked in that book about how people with ADD are just non-linear thinkers

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and people who don't have ADD are more linear thinkers.

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And what I found most encouraging about this is, he said

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that the symptoms that we attribute to people with ADD,

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things like lack of focus or procrastination or indecisiveness,

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those symptoms disappear during periods of high pressure.

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2 AM before the paper's due.

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Those same symptoms appear in linear thinkers

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during the same periods of high pressure.

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So you have to take a linear thinker and put them into a high pressure situation

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and they will exhibit indecisiveness. They will have a hard time focusing.

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And I found this really encouraging.

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Because it wasn't that I was broken — it was just that,

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in our society, we've built it so that we don't have a lot of high pressure situations.

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If you want to play nice with everyone else these days,

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you need to be good at showing up to work every single day at the same time.

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You need to be good at paying your bills or balancing your checkbook,

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whatever that means.

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So I kind of accepted this.

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It took me a year between reading this book and these other books I'd read

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and actually going and seeing someone about it,

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because again, I just wanted to fight through it,

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try harder, do it myself.

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But I did. I went and I saw a therapist, and I took the test.

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And she comes back and she says,

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"Yes, you absolutely have ADD, you're off the charts."

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And I was like "Yessss."

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She said, "But, I think you also have type-II bipolar."

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And I was like "Noooo....

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no, I will take the ADD, and you can keep the bipolar,

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because that's what crazy people have,

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and clearly that's not me."

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And so I pretty much lived my life like that for two years.

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I went to see a doctor, told him about my ADD.

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He said "There's two different kinds of drugs we can give you.

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One's going to take about two weeks or so to build up in your system for you to notice a difference.

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The other one we can give you, a stimulant,

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you'll notice a difference in about fifteen minutes."

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I was like "I'll try option B."

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And he was right. Fifteen minutes later my world went from out here to like right here.

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It was the first time in my life I could just make a list of A B and C, focus on it, do it in that order.

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It was amazing.

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But the depression remained.

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And it got worse because the meds helped me focus,

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and if the thing I was thinking about was how depressed I was,

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then it just helped me focus on how depressed I was.

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And the pattern throughout my life,

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because I was not willing to consider that my unhappiness was coming from inside of me,

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was internal, I would look to external factors,

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and the most obvious external factors are where you live and where you work.

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So when I was in college, I was like, "Screw this place.

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If I was just not in college, like, I'm not built for this, then things would be better."

0:11:06.000,0:11:08.000
And so I moved to Indianapolis.

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And then after a year, I'm like, "Well, screw this living with my parents stuff, like, I'm going to move to Chicago."

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So I move to Chicago, I get a job with a software startup with like five people,

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it's a great job for me,

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and I'm rocking it out for the first several months.

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And then, eleven, twelve months later, I'm like, "Well, this place sucks."

0:11:23.000,0:11:25.000
Like, I'm pretty unhappy again.

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Maybe I'm just burned out on technology.

0:11:27.000,0:11:30.000
So I go get a job showing apartments.

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And that's great. I'm like the top performer for a few months.

0:11:32.000,0:11:36.000
And things start getting bad again.

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Around this time I met a guy named Josh Golden

0:11:39.000,0:11:42.000
when i was playing poker, which i was doing a ton of at the time.

0:11:42.000,0:11:45.000
And Josh Golden was the CEO of Table XI.

0:11:45.000,0:11:49.000
And he and I became pretty good friends over the course of the year.

0:11:49.000,0:11:53.000
He told me, he found my background, the mix of sales and programming interesting.

0:11:53.000,0:11:57.000
He said, "You know, whenever you get tired of doing what you're doing, let us know."

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So one day I just up and quit my job.

0:11:59.000,0:12:02.000
I texted him and said "Hey, if you're still interested, I'm available."

0:12:02.000,0:12:07.000
And about six weeks later I started working for Table XI.

0:12:07.000,0:12:11.000
On that day, I had exactly one dollar in my pocket

0:12:11.000,0:12:13.000
and seventy cents in my bank account

0:12:13.000,0:12:17.000
because I hadn't been doing a very good job at the 100%-commission sales job.

0:12:17.000,0:12:21.000
I'd been pretty much non-functional.

0:12:21.000,0:12:25.000
And my roommate and i had had our hot water shut off about a month earlier.

0:12:25.000,0:12:27.000
We didn't have enough money to get it turned back on, so

0:12:27.000,0:12:29.000
I was taking cold showers most days.

0:12:29.000,0:12:31.000
I got to work, I didn't really know what I was going to do for lunch,

0:12:31.000,0:12:35.000
and that was the day I found out that Table XI buys lunch for its employees every day.

0:12:35.000,0:12:39.000
We have a chef now, but that day around 11:30,

0:12:39.000,0:12:44.000
Josh just IMed me and said, "Hey, give me your Jimmy John's order."

0:12:44.000,0:12:47.000
Table XI started out great. I mean, it was perfect.

0:12:47.000,0:12:50.000
It was exactly the company that I moved to Chicago hoping that I would find.

0:12:50.000,0:12:52.000
There were only six of us at the time.

0:12:52.000,0:12:55.000
There were many days when I felt like the dumbest guy in the room,

0:12:55.000,0:12:57.000
which was amazing.

0:12:57.000,0:12:58.000
We worked on interesting projects,

0:12:58.000,0:12:59.000
we had this cool loft place,

0:12:59.000,0:13:02.000
it just was cool and I was doing great work.

0:13:02.000,0:13:06.000
And sure enough, six, seven, eight months later, a year later,

0:13:06.000,0:13:09.000
things started getting pretty bad.

0:13:09.000,0:13:16.000
And it got to the point where I was dropping the ball every time it was put in my hands.

0:13:16.000,0:13:20.000
And I had a string of weeks when i didn't show up to work until about 2 pm.

0:13:20.000,0:13:22.000
I'd oversleep my alarm every day.

0:13:22.000,0:13:26.000
And things finally came to a head one day when it was a Friday,

0:13:26.000,0:13:29.000
we had a big project due with a client, it was on me.

0:13:29.000,0:13:31.000
I had stayed at the office all night trying to work on it,

0:13:31.000,0:13:33.000
left defeated, wasn't able to focus on it,

0:13:33.000,0:13:37.000
came home, said I'd get up early, overslept my alarm, and Josh was leaving that day

0:13:37.000,0:13:41.000
to fly to Italy to propose to the woman who's now his wife.

0:13:41.000,0:13:45.000
Josh lived about a block down the street from me.

0:13:45.000,0:13:49.000
So once again, I woke up to someone walking into my apartment,

0:13:49.000,0:13:51.000
saying, "Hey, Greg, are you in here?"

0:13:51.000,0:13:53.000
And this time there's no gap between my bed and my wall

0:13:53.000,0:13:56.000
and I just had to face it.

0:13:56.000,0:14:00.000
I set up an appointment with a psychiatrist that day.

0:14:00.000,0:14:04.000
I realized that it was pride that was keeping me from seeing someone.

0:14:04.000,0:14:07.000
I didn't want to admit that something was wrong with me.

0:14:07.000,0:14:12.000
And I said to myself, "I can't control this, but at least if I can localize the damage to myself,

0:14:12.000,0:14:15.000
I'll be ok," and I realized that I was just harming

0:14:15.000,0:14:21.000
everyone else around me by not seeking help for this thing too.

0:14:21.000,0:14:27.000
Four hours after I set up an appointment, I met my wife Rachel, who's right down here.

0:14:27.000,0:14:30.000
The doctor says, "Yeah, we've got drugs for that."

0:14:30.000,0:14:35.000
He says, "Type-II bipolar, sounds like exactly what you have."

0:14:35.000,0:14:39.000
He says, "These meds we have, lamotrigine, they're great, they work almost all the time.

0:14:39.000,0:14:42.000
Every once in a while there's this one side effect,

0:14:42.000,0:14:44.000
Every once in a while, in small cases,

0:14:44.000,0:14:52.000
you'll end up getting a rash inside your anus."

0:14:52.000,0:14:57.000
And I said, "Well, I'm pretty sure that if I get a rash inside of my anus,

0:14:57.000,0:15:03.000
I'm still going to be depressed."

0:15:03.000,0:15:10.000
Fortunately that didn't happen. So far, yeah. It's been like five years.

0:15:10.000,0:15:13.000
And I've been remarkably stable ever since.

0:15:13.000,0:15:15.000
It took me a while to climb out of that hole.

0:15:15.000,0:15:18.000
Not to say that everything's been happy since then.

0:15:18.000,0:15:21.000
Not to say that I don't still have days when I feel depressed. I do.

0:15:21.000,0:15:23.000
But now they're days, not weeks or months,

0:15:23.000,0:15:26.000
and I'm no longer crippled by them.

0:15:26.000,0:15:29.000
I'm incredibly fortunate. My meds worked the first time,

0:15:29.000,0:15:31.000
I had health insurance, I could see someone.

0:15:31.000,0:15:36.000
Table XI didn't fire me even though they should have, over and over again.

0:15:36.000,0:15:38.000
I'm still there six years later.

0:15:38.000,0:15:42.000
I met my wife who helped me get out of this hole.

0:15:42.000,0:15:45.000
A lot of people who have what I have aren't as lucky.

0:15:45.000,0:15:49.000
It's estimated that about 5% of the population suffers from bipolar.

0:15:49.000,0:15:57.000
10-25% of them will die from it, and one in three will attempt suicide at some point in their life.

0:15:57.000,0:16:00.000
Why does this matter to you guys?

0:16:00.000,0:16:05.000
If it's 5% of the general population, my guess is that it's three to four times that for developers.

0:16:05.000,0:16:10.000
These are some cherry-picked symptoms of bipolar disorder:

0:16:10.000,0:16:14.000
Hyperfocusing. Sure, it's hard to focus sometimes, but once you actually get down, you get into it,

0:16:14.000,0:16:16.000
the whole world just blurs away.

0:16:16.000,0:16:19.000
You can sit there for 12 hours at a time and just crank on it.

0:16:19.000,0:16:21.000
Racing Thoughts is exactly what it sounds like.

0:16:21.000,0:16:24.000
Pressured Speech is when those racing thoughts try to escape

0:16:24.000,0:16:26.000
through the small hole of your mouth.

0:16:26.000,0:16:30.000
Social Isolation. Irregular Sleep, especially onset insomnia,

0:16:30.000,0:16:31.000
which means that it's hard to fall asleep at night

0:16:31.000,0:16:34.000
and almost impossible to wake up in the morning.

0:16:34.000,0:16:37.000
And Grandiosity, thinking that the rules don't apply to you,

0:16:37.000,0:16:38.000
thinking that you're better than everyone else,

0:16:38.000,0:16:42.000
that you can solve problems that have eluded everybody else.

0:16:42.000,0:16:46.000
If you're a young adult or an adolescent struggling with these symptoms,

0:16:46.000,0:16:49.000
finding software development probably feels a little bit

0:16:49.000,0:16:54.000
like coming home. We accept the socially isolated.

0:16:54.000,0:16:59.000
We will work with irregular sleep patterns.

0:16:59.000,0:17:04.000
We will seek out people who have the grandiosity to believe

0:17:04.000,0:17:07.000
that they can solve problems that others can't.

0:17:07.000,0:17:12.000
We'll accept irregular bursts of productivity.

0:17:12.000,0:17:14.000
And our heroes are the people who are crazy enough to believe

0:17:14.000,0:17:19.000
that they can change the world.

0:17:19.000,0:17:26.000
Last September, we had a developer come and interview with us. His name was Caleb Corman.

0:17:26.000,0:17:30.000
And his resume was very impressive.

0:17:30.000,0:17:36.000
He had worked with three of the best Rails shops in Chicago: Hashrocket, Obtiva, and ThoughtWorks,

0:17:36.000,0:17:39.000
But he only spent a year or less at each one of them,

0:17:39.000,0:17:41.000
which raised some red flags.

0:17:41.000,0:17:44.000
But we hired him on as a contractor, and he was just great.

0:17:44.000,0:17:47.000
I got to pair with him, and he was one of the first guys I had ever paired with.

0:17:47.000,0:17:49.000
And I learned so much.

0:17:49.000,0:17:52.000
I mean, it's so rare that you find these people who are brilliant

0:17:52.000,0:17:55.000
but patient and good teachers.

0:17:55.000,0:18:01.000
He taught me about code smells. He taught me about the Pry debugger.

0:18:01.000,0:18:06.000
He tried to teach me vim, but that didn't really stick.

0:18:06.000,0:18:09.000
I remember, I had never paired with anyone before

0:18:09.000,0:18:11.000
and he taught me all these verbal shortcuts that we used

0:18:11.000,0:18:15.000
for punctuation, right? Because the names for punctuation are long.

0:18:15.000,0:18:19.000
So we don't say "exclamation mark," we say "bang."

0:18:19.000,0:18:22.000
And we don't say "question mark," it's a (inaudible).

0:18:22.000,0:18:26.000
And it's not an "underscore," but it's a "skid," is what he taught me.

0:18:26.000,0:18:34.000
And we don't say "pound sign." We say "octothorpe."

0:18:34.000,0:18:38.000
I never got that, I never understood it.

0:18:38.000,0:18:40.000
It's like we've got two commonly accepted monosyllabic names

0:18:40.000,0:18:43.000
for that piece of punctuation and we call it an "octothorpe."

0:18:43.000,0:18:47.000
It's just a bad-ass name, I guess.

0:18:47.000,0:18:51.000
A couple weeks after he started working for us, Caleb started calling in sick.

0:18:51.000,0:18:53.000
And he started showing up late.

0:18:53.000,0:18:57.000
And the excuse was a little different every time, and it just felt way too familiar to me.

0:18:57.000,0:19:06.000
And I told him my story, and I pulled him aside, and I was just like, "What's going on?"

0:19:06.000,0:19:09.000
And he said, "Yeah, you know, I've kind of wondered for a while

0:19:09.000,0:19:10.000
if I have something like that."

0:19:10.000,0:19:10.000
He was like, "But what am I going to do?

0:19:10.000,0:19:14.000
It's not like I'm just going to cold-call a psychiatrist from the Yellow Pages."

0:19:14.000,0:19:16.000
So I gave him a couple names, and he called around,

0:19:16.000,0:19:20.000
and it took a little bit of time because it's hard to get availability sometimes

0:19:20.000,0:19:24.000
but he got an appointment set up with a psychiatrist for a few weeks out.

0:19:24.000,0:19:26.000
The appointment was set up for a Friday.

0:19:26.000,0:19:30.000
The day before that, he sent an email to the team that we were working on,

0:19:30.000,0:19:33.000
and he said he was sick, he was seeing a doctor tomorrow and he wouldn't be in.

0:19:33.000,0:19:36.000
And then he sent me an email, and it just said,

0:19:36.000,0:19:39.000
"Hey, I'm having a rough couple of days."

0:19:39.000,0:19:44.000
And he said, "Right now I'm just struggling with a lot of things in my head,

0:19:44.000,0:19:46.000
and my emotions, it's kept me up the last two nights,

0:19:46.000,0:19:51.000
and that in turn has taken its toll on my mental and physical capacity this morning.

0:19:51.000,0:19:55.000
I'm scared that if I come into work, I'm going to make a fool of myself with our guests today.

0:19:55.000,0:19:59.000
I think it would be better if I just focus on making it to my appointment tomorrow."

0:19:59.000,0:20:01.000
He didn't make it to his appointment.

0:20:01.000,0:20:04.000
We found out later that he had run out of money

0:20:04.000,0:20:08.000
and the day after that he died of an overdose.

0:20:08.000,0:20:10.000
It was an unintentional overdose, we're quite certain.

0:20:10.000,0:20:14.000
He called 911 from his phone and he died at the hospital,

0:20:14.000,0:20:17.000
and his roommate, who was the first to his apartment after,

0:20:17.000,0:20:20.000
said it was set up just like he was settling in for a Saturday night.

0:20:20.000,0:20:23.000
He had his videogame controller on one side of his couch

0:20:23.000,0:20:27.000
and an open pack of Oreos and a can of Dr. Pepper on the other.

0:20:27.000,0:20:31.000
Apparently he had had a struggle with addiction for quite a while.

0:20:31.000,0:20:35.000
Some of his friends knew about it; we didn't.

0:20:35.000,0:20:38.000
His friends said the problem was, Caleb was just so damn smart,

0:20:38.000,0:20:43.000
he was really good at covering it up and making it seem like it wasn't so bad.

0:20:43.000,0:20:45.000
The thing that pisses me off most about this is that

0:20:45.000,0:20:48.000
Caleb died of an overdose on speed.

0:20:48.000,0:20:49.000
Speed is an amphetamine,

0:20:49.000,0:20:54.000
and the meds that are prescribed to me for my ADD are dextroamphetamine.

0:20:54.000,0:21:01.000
I'm quite certain that Caleb died self-medicating an untreated mental illness.

0:21:01.000,0:21:06.000
The history of computer science is too littered with tragedies like this.

0:21:06.000,0:21:10.000
Alan Turing, the father of computer science,

0:21:10.000,0:21:16.000
committed suicide after facing intense persecution from his government.

0:21:16.000,0:21:23.000
And earlier this year, we lost Aaron Swartz to similar circumstances.

0:21:23.000,0:21:26.000
In 2007, Aaron Swartz wrote this:

0:21:26.000,0:21:30.000
"I have a lot of illnesses. I don't talk about it much for a variety of reasons.

0:21:30.000,0:21:33.000
I feel ashamed to have an illness. It sounds absurd,

0:21:33.000,0:21:37.000
but there's still enormous stigma around being sick.

0:21:37.000,0:21:39.000
I don't want to use being ill as an excuse,

0:21:39.000,0:21:42.000
although sometimes I wonder how much more productive I'd be

0:21:42.000,0:21:44.000
if i wasn't so sick.

0:21:44.000,0:21:47.000
Surely there have been times when you have been sad.

0:21:47.000,0:21:49.000
Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you,

0:21:49.000,0:21:51.000
or a plan has gone horribly awry.

0:21:51.000,0:21:53.000
Your face falls. Perhaps you cry.

0:21:53.000,0:21:55.000
You feel worthless.

0:21:55.000,0:21:58.000
You wonder whether it's worth going on.

0:21:58.000,0:22:00.000
Everything you think about feels bleak:

0:22:00.000,0:22:03.000
the things you've done, the things you hope to do, the people around you.

0:22:03.000,0:22:06.000
You lie in bed and want to keep the lights off.

0:22:06.000,0:22:08.000
Depressed mood is like that,

0:22:08.000,0:22:11.000
only it doesn't come for any reason and it doesn't go for any reason either.

0:22:11.000,0:22:14.000
Go outside and get some fresh air, cuddle with a loved one,

0:22:14.000,0:22:16.000
and you don't feel any better,

0:22:16.000,0:22:20.000
only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel.

0:22:20.000,0:22:23.000
Everything gets colored by the sadness.

0:22:23.000,0:22:26.000
Depression causes nearly half of all disability,

0:22:26.000,0:22:29.000
it affects one in six, and explains more current unhappiness than poverty.

0:22:29.000,0:22:34.000
Sadly, depression, like other mental illnesses, especially addiction,

0:22:34.000,0:22:37.000
is not seen as real enough to deserve the investment and awareness

0:22:37.000,0:22:41.000
of conditions like breast cancer, which affects one in eight,

0:22:41.000,0:22:44.000
or AIDS, which affects one in 150.

0:22:44.000,0:22:49.000
And there is, of course, the shame."

0:22:49.000,0:22:52.000
The shame is what's killing us.

0:22:52.000,0:22:54.000
And the shame and the stigma around mental illness

0:22:54.000,0:22:58.000
is why our coworkers and our friends are suffering from this.

0:22:58.000,0:23:02.000
If I stood up here and I told you guys that I have cancer,

0:23:02.000,0:23:04.000
I wouldn't be afraid that anyone would think,

0:23:04.000,0:23:07.000
"Oh, it's just all in his head."

0:23:07.000,0:23:08.000
If I told you that I took insulin,

0:23:08.000,0:23:11.000
no one would say, "Aren't you afraid that you're going to be

0:23:11.000,0:23:13.000
dependent on that for the rest of your life?"

0:23:13.000,0:23:17.000
No one would think that I was using it as a crutch.

0:23:17.000,0:23:19.000
If I broke my leg, no one would say, "Just try harder."

0:23:19.000,0:23:22.000
They'd say, "Go see a doctor!"

0:23:22.000,0:23:25.000
But we have different rules for how we perceive

0:23:25.000,0:23:27.000
illnesses that affect the brain

0:23:27.000,0:23:30.000
than we do for anything else.

0:23:30.000,0:23:32.000
Which is ironic because the brain is actually the most complicated

0:23:32.000,0:23:35.000
organ in the human body.

0:23:35.000,0:23:37.000
And yet so many of us are reluctant to use

0:23:37.000,0:23:41.000
modern medical advances to help cure

0:23:41.000,0:23:43.000
the illnesses that affect it.

0:23:43.000,0:23:46.000
I think this is particularly true for developers,

0:23:46.000,0:23:49.000
because we've spent so much of our life being praised

0:23:49.000,0:23:51.000
for how well our brain works.

0:23:51.000,0:23:55.000
But the idea that it could possibly be misfunctioning

0:23:55.000,0:23:59.000
threatens our identity and our self-worth.

0:23:59.000,0:24:03.000
I can understand why, if you feel like you're struggling with this stuff,

0:24:03.000,0:24:05.000
you might be reluctant to go see someone

0:24:05.000,0:24:07.000
or reluctant to take meds.

0:24:07.000,0:24:10.000
It took me a year from diagnosing myself with ADD

0:24:10.000,0:24:12.000
to seek someone. It took me two years from having

0:24:12.000,0:24:14.000
a medical professional tell me that I had bipolar

0:24:14.000,0:24:18.000
to go get treatment for it. I get that.

0:24:18.000,0:24:21.000
I was afraid that it would affect the parts of my brain

0:24:21.000,0:24:24.000
that made me really good at what I do.

0:24:24.000,0:24:26.000
I was afraid that it would rob me of my creativity.

0:24:26.000,0:24:29.000
And yes, it's true. My brain works differently now.

0:24:29.000,0:24:30.000
I code differently now.

0:24:30.000,0:24:34.000
I no longer am consumed by thoughts and stay up all night

0:24:34.000,0:24:37.000
and pull these coding benders and crank stuff out.

0:24:37.000,0:24:40.000
I'm now much more like the tortoise.

0:24:40.000,0:24:46.000
I can be measured, I can have an objective view of the ideas as they come in,

0:24:46.000,0:24:49.000
and I have control over them.

0:24:49.000,0:24:53.000
And most importantly, I am now dependable and reliable,

0:24:53.000,0:24:56.000
which is something that i've never been able to tell my friends

0:24:56.000,0:25:00.000
or feel like i had before.

0:25:00.000,0:25:03.000
Going to see a therapist or psychiatrist has a lot of stigma around it

0:25:03.000,0:25:05.000
and I don't get that.

0:25:05.000,0:25:10.000
Michael Jordan had a coach. Tiger Woods had a coach.

0:25:10.000,0:25:13.000
Why would you not want an objective third party

0:25:13.000,0:25:16.000
whose job is to shut up and sit there and listen to you

0:25:16.000,0:25:19.000
and then occasionally make suggestions and

0:25:19.000,0:25:22.000
"Maybe you should try doing this just a little bit differently"?

0:25:22.000,0:25:25.000
And just as an aside, even if you have no mental health problems,

0:25:25.000,0:25:28.000
if any of you guys are married out there,

0:25:28.000,0:25:30.000
go get marital counseling.

0:25:30.000,0:25:31.000
Rachel and I have been doing this for about a year.

0:25:31.000,0:25:33.000
It's like you get to fight with a referee in the room.

0:25:33.000,0:25:35.000
It's amazing.

0:25:35.000,0:25:37.000
It's had a huge impact on us.

0:25:37.000,0:25:39.000
Even if there's no acute problems, just go see someone.

0:25:39.000,0:25:41.000
It will help.

0:25:41.000,0:25:42.000
Finding a therapist is hard.

0:25:42.000,0:25:49.000
They tend to be a little bit less tech-savvy than we are.

0:25:49.000,0:25:51.000
They tend to operate more by phone than email.

0:25:51.000,0:25:55.000
If you go to my blog, baugues.com/depression ,

0:25:55.000,0:25:59.000
there will be some resources on there that you can look up.

0:25:59.000,0:26:02.000
Unfortunately I'm not from here so I can't give any personal recommendations

0:26:02.000,0:26:03.000
for people in this area.

0:26:03.000,0:26:08.000
But there are some resources on there that will help you find someone.

0:26:08.000,0:26:12.000
If you're not there yet, just talk to people.

0:26:12.000,0:26:15.000
If you can't find anyone else, talk to me.

0:26:15.000,0:26:18.000
If you feel like you're struggling with this stuff,

0:26:18.000,0:26:19.000
just let your friends know.

0:26:19.000,0:26:21.000
If you have struggled with this stuff,

0:26:21.000,0:26:22.000
you can subtly let people know.

0:26:22.000,0:26:25.000
And you're going to be surprised at how many people will say, "Yeah, me too."

0:26:25.000,0:26:29.000
And if things seem so bleak for you right now

0:26:29.000,0:26:31.000
and you feel like it's not going to get better,

0:26:31.000,0:26:36.000
just know that, ten years ago, I was at college laying in bed at night,

0:26:36.000,0:26:38.000
and I was praying that God wouldn't wake me up in the morning.

0:26:38.000,0:26:44.000
Six years ago I had one dollar in my pocket and no hot water in my apartment.

0:26:44.000,0:26:47.000
And today i'm standing on stage at Mountain West Ruby,

0:26:47.000,0:26:49.000
my beautiful wife in the front row.

0:26:49.000,0:26:52.000
Things get better. We just need to start talking about it more.

0:26:52.000,0:26:55.000
Thank you very much.