The Python community didn’t exclude Kenneth because of his condition, at least directly. They excluded him because of his actions and history of shady, manipulative behaviors.
And while workplaces should be accommodating, there’s a point where it gets to be too much.
I worked at a place with a person with similar behaviors and it destroyed that company because they refused to acknowledge reality: this was a business, not a care facility.
One thing is clear: Kenneth is suffering. I hope that he is able to see his behavior from the outside and heal. He’s a great programmer who ships products.
For those who don’t know, Kenneth created the Requests library which is nearly ubiquitous in the Python world.
jokoon · 1h ago
This doesn't surprise me.
It's central to understand that mental health can alter perception and judgment, even common mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.
I have chronic depression, and even after treating it for 15 years, I still realizes after the fact, despite being attentive to how I behave, that I just think differently when I am depressed.
It's very common for mentally ill people to think they are being persecuted. We also should still inform people more about mental illness, so both are true.
Illnesses that involves psychosis are not a joke and more severe than your average depression, and sadly I would be careful and not 100% trustworthy of somebody who is having such illness.
MOARDONGZPLZ · 1h ago
I read the post and felt a lot of sympathy. Then I saw your response and re-read the post and it comes across as quite manipulative (if your statements are factually correct). My comment is less about this person (great library, btw), but more how it is Interesting how context can totally change how words on a page are received.
hamburglar · 29m ago
One thing i noticed while reading the post is he doesn’t go into what events led people to be fearful of him. I’ve known someone with schizoaffective disorder and the episodes can be downright scary. You can have sympathy for someone while also knowing it’s a bad idea to let your guard down while they’re holding a fork.
"i'm sorry, hope we can continue working together in the future" seems like a very mild response to allegedly fumbling 30k, but what do i know...
> the asynchronous landscape within Python's ecosystem failed to meet my expectations, leading me to conclude that Requests should retain its synchronous nature.
i concluded that the ecosystem does things differently than my personal standards, so i'm gonna revert and keep the money. nice.
squigz · 1h ago
4 years late and no clarification on what actually happened with the money.
nemomarx · 1h ago
> I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups.
This is interesting. I can imagine that going both ways - maybe he feels like he's lost control over the project and that worsens his other reactions?
runjake · 29m ago
I think the important thing here is that Kenneth came up with Requests and did the initial implementation beginning in 2011.
The author is referring to Kenneth's involvement in Requests at that time (2019), long after its creation. Substantial work has been done on Requests since he stepped away from the project, but it was born from him.
nemomarx · 26m ago
Oh yeah I don't mean to diminish that part. Rather, I'm thinking this might actually be one of the things he's talking about in the post? Whatever happened that the maintainers took over the repo, that could be a point of tension and maybe a loss of control for him. Which would definitely make you feel like the community was isolating you, right?
Different sides to the story, and neither post here explains exactly what happened with Requests.
runjake · 1h ago
Yeah, I’m on mobile, sorry.
You can Google or HN search these past events. In fact, Kenneth lurks on HN, too.
ProllyInfamous · 19m ago
tl;dr (from the linked author):
>In short: He chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem.
A similar (but unrelated) fundraiser mechanism is why I no longer donate to any fundraisers, online (no accountability, no refunds). I'm looking at you µOptics >:-|
481Jqgat · 1h ago
Written by Nathaniel Smith, who also got Oliphant out of the NumPy Steering Council? And that linked post was approved by the CoC compliant Python Steering Council, a later version of which canceled and defamed Tim Peters?
Maybe Smith is right on the facts here, but the methods are despicable.
jorvi · 1h ago
CoCs suck because the newly empowered people often wield it like a blunt hammer to bludgeon everyone they don't like. They're almost always applied arbitrarily and unfairly. They have the noble goal of equalization but they're really just a co-opting of power by a new in-group.
This blog post is nothing like that. They're not asking you to silence Kenneth, or ignore him, or oust him from anything. They're just laying down the facts. The post isn't even asking you to stop interacting with, it's just a heads-up for anyone who does.
y-curious · 1h ago
The depth of the politics of the python community is very funny to someone that knows nothing about the community. You are expecting a lot of background knowledge about the opinions of OSS maintainers.
It's kind of like having very strong opinions about the council of yoyo judges and their dramas.
sfn42 · 1h ago
I don't know any of these people, I just thought this blog post seemed credible and painted a very different picture of Reitz than he presents in his own blog.
I do not know the truth, i just thought people might appreciate another perspective.
alphazard · 1h ago
> Silence means constantly monitoring my behavior for signs that might reveal my condition, avoiding discussions of mental health that might trigger suspicion and living with the constant anxiety that discovery will lead to rejection.
This framing is at the very least maladaptive and possibly indicative of the mental illness they are writing about. Mentally healthy humans regulate their behavior around other humans depending on the context. Sometimes this produces anxiety. And the fact that the author can pull that off at all (even with some difficulty) is a positive sign.
There is no reason for an employer or professional colleagues to be aware of an employees medical issues. Maybe there are exceptions for in-office workers with conditions like epilepsy. There are plenty of companies with no questions asked PTO, and as long as they do good work (which the article indicates) no one will bother them for using it.
standardly · 1h ago
> There is no reason for an employer or professional colleagues to be aware of an employees medical issues.
Totally agree, but it can get a bit weird. I struggle with depression, and at times I have felt like I owed my co-workers/manager/boss an excuse as to why I "suck" sometimes. IE; I didn't show up late for the meeting because I am irresponsible, rather because I'm just in a bad spell this week and have brain fog. If I don't tell them, they may think the former. If I do tell them, who knows.
alphazard · 58m ago
The rationalization matters far more to you than it does to your coworkers or boss. I have no opinion on how you should frame it to yourself.
However, I think it's genuinely good advice to say that professionally, people are just trying to build a mental model of how reliable you are. The reasoning doesn't really matter to them, and a psychological diagnosis is a predictive theory about how you will behave. Unfortunately, people will assume close to worst case for any condition you tell them about. The mental model you put in someone's head with a psychological diagnosis, is always worse than how they currently perceive you.
morleytj · 1h ago
This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent.
On another note though:
"This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience."
I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.
jorvi · 1h ago
> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it.
If you write concise but with some panache, people will think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023.
It really sucks. In a similar vein, before LLMs my friends always used to call me "the walking Wikipedia" because I tend to always have a fact or trick or trivia in my back pocket. These days more often than not, I get told "okay and now for a non-AI ass answer".
I completely understand why people have that reflexive response to it, but it also feels really vile.
For what it's worth, I do also notice it. Especially on Reddit, you'll start reading a comment and halfway through your gut feel tells you it's likely written by an LLM.
morleytj · 55m ago
I do also get that pretty often. Also because I've always liked using hyphens and emdashes, so I get that as well. I don't know if I'd call it "vile" to notice a common pattern like the above though.
But it does have a certain code smell sometimes, I often get it on Reddit posts as well.
jorvi · 2m ago
Ah, I should have perhaps formulated it better. What I meant with vile is the sensation of having put effort in to write pleasantly only to then have the effort misattributed to a machine and to be seen like a hack.
It's as if you reaped a field by hand for the skill of it and to then have everyone's first remark be "well, you certainly know how to operate a combine. Now show me some real effort!"
JohnBooty · 45m ago
If you write concise but with some panache, people
*will* think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation
leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023
Nobody's ever accused me, but I am definitely conscious (paranoid) about the possibility. I have found myself editing my words to look "less LLM-like"
What a world!
nemomarx · 32m ago
Less serious, but this reminds me of how before stable diffusion was consistently useful, there were artists who made a sizeable Patreon income on anime characters in 'realistic' style. Unfortunately that seems to have been one of the styles that got trained into models the best and now their good work is associated with cheap looking art, and not through any fault of their own.
All the way down this kind of genai has weird impacts I guess.
morleytj · 28m ago
That's something I find very interesting, honestly. I think the two way nature of the relationship between the impacts of a tool on humans and the impact of humans on the way the tool develops is a particularly weird little phenomenon that exists these days. It's overall fascinating.
JohnBooty · 47m ago
I thought the same exact thing. The "proper" em dash (or is that an en dash) as opposed to two dashes "--" is a typical giveaway, it seems to me.
However, the article in general certainly reads like it is coming from the author's own voice. Painfully so, even, because this guy is clearly suffering.
noident · 19m ago
The em dash existed long before LLMs. The fact that 95% of people don't use dashes properly doesn't mean that every single person who uses an em dash is relying on an LLM.
morleytj · 45m ago
Yeah, it's clear he's going through a lot of pain. Even just going through that many job changes outside of the other events sounds painful and difficult to deal with.
nemomarx · 1h ago
Yeah, I also kind of wish he published the blog in his own words instead of using what seems to be LLM polishing. It seems ironically like the same defensiveness and lack of transparency he wants to avoid?
JohnBooty · 35m ago
I don't mind AI polishing any more than I mind somebody using a spellchecker.
The article overwhelmingly reads like a (painfully) honest and personal account of what he's going through, it's not AI slop.
nemomarx · 31m ago
It's definitely not slop, but there's something kind of sad about a very personal and emotional account needing to be fed through the corpo speak grammar checker? At least in my opinion. It feels like if a friend wanted to vent to me on discord but didn't trust me enough to do it without editing their post for hours, or something.
erikerikson · 13m ago
Hah. Indeed and also this person was posting to the, on average, uncharitable Internet.
bradstewart · 1h ago
What specifically is the LLM verbiage you're seeing here? That reads like a normal sentence to me.
tikhonj · 1h ago
Slight variations on "This isn't X—it's Y." have been popping up all over the place, almost definitely because it's a pattern that ChatGPT has been tuned to (over-) use.
nemomarx · 1h ago
em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing. I see it in several other spots in the essay and it's kind of a "code smell"
Of course it's also a normal, polished sentence with good grammar, but it seems a little unrealistic. It's too polished basically.
dpoloncsak · 50m ago
pops up multiple times, too. One or two, sure maybe it's just a reflection of using LLMs often, but this many suggests that the article was (atleast) re-written by an LLM
I use Copilot to re-write emails all the time. I'm not going to act like I'm above it. I will say, it makes your emotional plea ring a little more hollow than it should, but so does posting it online, in text form anyway.
> This isn't job-hopping by choice—it's a survival pattern forced by systematic exclusion.
> This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience.
> The discrimination I'm documenting isn't just about hurt feelings or career setbacks—it has life-and-death consequences for people with schizoaffective disorder:
> These aren't abstract statistics—they represent the human cost of the systematic exclusion I've experienced. (little looser here, but still fits the bill)
> The pattern of discrimination I've experienced isn't unique—it's systematic.
> The discrimination I've faced isn't my fault—it's a reflection of society's failure to move beyond tokenistic awareness toward genuine inclusion.
morleytj · 1h ago
It's very common to see the particular syntactic structure of restating a point in the following general manner from Claude/ChatGPT in my experience and that of others:
"It's not X -- it's Y." or "This isn't just X -- It's actually Y."
Usually with an emdash there as well for the separation. As I said it's very plausibly becoming more common among people not using LLM-assisted writing too, just from seeing the stylistic approach used more often and having it spread naturally, but I do have been seeing it spread with dramatic speed over the last couple years. I even catch myself using other phrasing more often from reading it more. I think it's just part of how language spreads, honestly.
Alex3917 · 1h ago
> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look.
emdashes have been pretty popular among net native folks for the last 20+ years, e.g. if you were to look back at the most popular Kuro5hin stories from ~2001 - 2005, you'd see them everywhere. People just aren't used to the average person being able to write well, so it looks weird to them.
morleytj · 53m ago
I also use emdashes a lot. I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.
Alex3917 · 49m ago
> I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.
But that's one of the main uses of emdashes, for signaling that the second half of the sentence is more important than the first half. If you Ctrl-F for emdashes on my blog, you can see I do it everywhere, even though all of my posts were written before LLMs existed:
Out of curiosity, why em dashes and not en dashes? Is one easier to type in a particular keyboard layout or the default in some editor?
jasonlotito · 1h ago
"This is very unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear that the author has been excluded and is suffering to this extent."
I can't stop seeing this LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.
mathiaspoint · 59m ago
Personally I was expecting it to get more diverse since there are a number of companies producing the models but it seems to have converged? Are they all cheating off OpenAI Is there some fundamental linguistic reason for that?
It seems super strange to me. At the very least I thought they'd try to RL other personalities to make it harder to catch. The older base models definitely could handle that.
freehorse · 51m ago
Yeah I noticed the same, in the beginning they seemed to have different "personalities" as in ways of interacting with users. Maybe it is just a design related thing, same as all commercial websites ending up being the same, as the users know what to expect and how to interact.
morleytj · 51m ago
Very snarky, but okay, haha. Do you not get that sort of sense at all from the above structure? I'm curious if it's just in my head and what the perspectives of others are.
nemomarx · 1h ago
I think an llm would have put a comma in the middle of that?
I wonder why no one's tuned their model to make minor errors that way or leave a few things uncapitalized to fake a human touch
freehorse · 48m ago
You can do it after, remove all commas and newlines. Make it all a huge continuous blob of text that is hard to read. Definitely not LLM written.
A lot of this here imo is just llm paranoia. I do not think the style of the author is different than their pre-llm posts. One em dash is not proof of anything imo as long as the text in general does not smell as much like llm-generated. I could be wrong because I do not interact much with llms lately, but it does not seem that to me.
nemomarx · 43m ago
It's more like 4 or 5 uses of it, and some of the phrasing choices also have that vibe. Everyone's threshold for the smell will be different, of course.
It seems to me like it's more effort to write something and then have an llm clean it up instead of just posting it so I mostly don't understand the behavior to start with. Why are we going through this new effort?
squigz · 1h ago
Maybe everyone is just learning to be overly paranoid about the source of writing
throw18376 · 12m ago
people in states of psychosis often behave in frightening ways out of their control, and do and say hurtful things to those around them. if someone hurts you or does something very frightening, fear and anger are natural emotions.
but it’s not morally wrong to experience psychosis. so how could it be right for me to feel fear and anger towards that person when they haven’t done anything wrong? it is a tough contradiction.
you can resolve the contradiction by just deciding to hate and fear anyone who shows signs of psychosis, treat them as if it is a morally bad trait, which many people do, see discourse about homeless people in NYC.
or you can just try to pretend that psychosis doesn’t exist, which a lot of people do, like when some public figure shows obvious psychotic symptoms but people act like it’s rational behavior.
or you can disavow the fear and anger, but if a person does actually frighten and hurt you, the resulting negative feelings often tend to be expressed in weird and unfair ways. i suspect this author’s employers and doctors probably do a lot of this.
personally I think the least bad solution is to acknowledge that anger towards a person can be justified even if they’ve done nothing morally wrong, just feel anger, and express it only in controlled ways. but this is philosophically confusing, easy to state, hard to really believe deep down.
tux3 · 56m ago
The post echoed some similar points from Freddie DeBoer on real mental illness not always being pretty. There's limits to inclusivity that you quickly run into with schizoaffective disorder or bipolar. Companies are proudly supportive on paper, but that rarely extends to mania or psychosis.
It's a reality that most people are absolutely not equipped to deal with a coworker (or any contributor) that has manic or psychotic episodes. Mental illnesses is not anyone's fault, but there are still behaviors that will make it difficult to work with others, even for someone like Kenneth who is very good on the technical side.
34nabxgyF · 1h ago
Regarding the Python Documentary, that is just the old boys boosting their personal brands and valuations again. If you aren't part of that club, you are nothing in the Python world.
It does not matter what you have done, whether you just maintained an email module throughout Python-3 or had your broken code fixed and completely rewritten by people who came later: The only thing that matters is that you have been there before around 2000-2005.
inanutshellus · 33m ago
Ok so I was writing python professionally in this time period and ... if I were making a python documentary I'd expect it to honor folks that were active back this far much to the exclusion of late comers. I presume you were one of those?
Back then the language felt like a quiet little also-ran behind Perl and we looked with jealous eyes as Ruby On Rails took over the mindshare. If you were a python advocate then, you were really singing into the void.
My personal low-effort view has been that Python is only on the map today because MIT switched to teaching it as the language of choice in their CS classes. A quick internet search says that happened in 2009 though so ... maybe that's not fair. I thought it happened around 2005 causing the popularity to surge around 2010 but... them starting in 2009 seems like it wouldn't've been that quick to spur change. Sounds like I should go watch the documentary. ;)
arp242 · 44m ago
> A perfect example: the Python documentary releases tomorrow, featuring interviews with Python community leaders and contributors. Despite creating one of the most foundational Python libraries in history, I wasn't even contacted about participating. No email, no mention, complete invisibility. The omission speaks volumes about how mental health disclosure transforms you from community asset to community liability
It features 22 people, which already seems quite a lot for a 90 minute documentary. And I can think of several other prominent Python people who are not listed. And lets be real here: "I made a Python library people like" really doesn't compete against "I was a core Python dev for 20 years". requests being "one of the most foundational Python libraries in history" seems quite exaggerated.
This kind "I need to be front and centre of attention and when I'm not I am being oppressed" type stuff is a big part of the reason why so many people found it hard to work with Kenneth. His constant self-aggrandizing and need for endless validation gets very tiring very fast.
I appreciate that Kenneth's mental health struggles are very real and I do not mean to devalue that in any way, but his constant use of his mental health to dismiss and and all criticism of his behaviour is another thing that gets very tiring very fast.
Of course I have no insight in many aspects of Kenneth's life and can't comment on any of it. I am perfectly willing to believe that sometimes in some places he has been discriminated due to his mental health diagnosis.
I can however comment on the state of things in Python because much of it is public, and the problems there have been mostly or entirely unrelated to his mental health diagnosis.
rlmcdonald · 1h ago
All the comments here about how it's okay that he got excluded because he did the bad things fall right in line with what he's describing. Mental health awareness is easy when you just throw away all the people who make you uncomfortable! I thought it was a pretty good read and I'm not discounting it because it was written by someone struggling with mental illness.
erikerikson · 17m ago
Welcome to Hacker News.
You're not wrong. I thought it was a good read and some awesome honesty if not also leaving some things unmentioned or undescribed. Sometimes the details matter a lot.
Let's imagine another, non-existing, person so as to clearly differentiate from the author. Said imaginary person gets violent due to socialization and a anger issues. How should the company handle an episode that leaves another employee with a broken nose and bruises? Disclosure doesn't defend a company from it's duty to protect the bodily health of that person's coworkers does it?
Most people have some mental unwellness or at least experiences they struggle to navigate or understand. Their experiences can make the problem worse and some conditions lead to behaviors that add processing load and tax their capacity to remain well. At times that exceeds a capacity to navigate and injury occurs. While invisible that injury has impact and costs. Employees have a right to not be harmed by their coworkers and a right to demand employers protect that right. I'm making that argument on a basis of common decency but there are legal liabilities to consider as well. All of this sort of thing is a distraction from the work the employer needs done.
Our world is better off to the extent we help everyone be productive and contribute at their maximal capacity. While some of the affects we have on one another are very positive, today we are struggling with how to balance the negative hard affects.
I can report leaving a really wonderful job after being socially attacked by a coworker that lost reality and falsely convinced my team that I had harmed them. Despite sharing evidence from the third party involved that it was a departure from reality, my boss decided not to help correct the problem. This has very negative impacts on my mental health, finances, marriage, and it derailed my career for a while. I probably had good standing to sue for damages. I certainly was damaged. There had been many poor behaviors from that person prior.
It is complicated and messy. As much as I appreciated it, the essay reads to me as though it minimizes the negatives. Without discounting it and while being understanding and inclusive we still need to manage impacts and the distractions those negatives create.
dpoloncsak · 1h ago
Mate, theres another blog post about how the guy stole almost $30k of fundraised money. That's not mental illness, that's behavior that we should not be welcoming in any community.
tux3 · 37m ago
>That's not mental illness, that's behavior that we should not be welcoming in any community.
No, acceptance of mental illness doesn't work if you define away anything serious as not mental illness. That's precisely the trouble the author is having, when they have a mental illness that's not just the cute idealized Tiktok version.
People with well-managed schizophrenia can lead relatively normal lives. Or they can wake up from a three day psychosis, not remembering why they've been arrested. It's a spectrum, and it does sometimes get ugly.
nemomarx · 1h ago
I feel pretty sympathetic, but I also feel sympathetic when I imagine working with someone who has outbursts. The details of how he responds to "routine workplace stress" and the actual symptoms are pretty absent from this piece.
I'm not sure how to resolve the interests of everyone involved - I just know that when I've had to work with a colleague who was volatile or prone to yelling at me it made my own life and mental health much worse.
squigz · 1h ago
I don't think anybody is dismissing it. But what are you suggesting? That a company should just ignore mental health issues that affect other members of the company, potentially in a very serious way?
nake89 · 1h ago
Interesting interpretation of the comments.
gedy · 1h ago
I think there’s just a practical matter of if you have a person in this situation, you need to consider the others around him - as they may just leave to easier situations instead of dealing with it.
I agree that "Companies tout their mental health benefits and neurodiversity initiatives" really should not do this token performative crap without fully understanding what they are implying.
JohnBooty · 49m ago
Non-negotiable tenet(s): all human lives are valuable, all humans deserve dignity, and when we as a society can't find a place for a valuable and talented individuals like the author then we have failed in some sense.
That said, within the current system...
Morally and legally, what are the limits of accommodation?
Accommodation, in my uninformed layman understanding, is about accommodating people who can do the job, but need to do it differently than others. For example, wheelchair accessibility for white-collar office workers.
Does it include the inclusion of people who can't perform all aspects of the job?
Communication and collaboration are absolute pillars of nearly any engineer's job, but by the writer's own statements it seems like his condition often prevents this.
How do we resolve this?
squigz · 34m ago
> Non-negotiable tenet(s): all human lives are valuable, all humans deserve dignity, and when we as a society can't find a place for a valuable and talented individuals like the author then we have failed in some sense.
This sort of framing assumes the author bears no responsibility at all, and it's just society that has failed. The thing is though, even in an ideal society, it would be not reasonable to expect people to deal with someone's issues indefinitely, particularly when they chalk up all criticism as "discrimination"; I'm quite certain there are legitimate reasons, completely unrelated to his mental health, that he was fired or passed over for promotions.
rini17 · 2h ago
Sigh. I too would like to know an employer that can accomodate unpredictable performance or a partner willing to do emotional labor.
carlosjobim · 2h ago
As for unpredictable performance, employers never want to have that. But it is possible if you have your own business or consultancy. Or if you work with art and creativity, where it is the norm to have ups and downs.
runjake · 49m ago
Perhaps one option: work at a non-profit whose mission deals with your disorder.
They probably understand it more than most disorders and likely have some level of skills to cope with it and it makes them look good employing them.
rini17 · 1h ago
Idk artists I know have to work hard whenever there's some opportunity, regardless of whether they are up or down at the moment.
carlosjobim · 45m ago
I don't think it's about working hard or not, it's about predictable performance. Artists work harder than most people when they are active, but also have hiatuses. It's completely expected for artists to have break periods.
42lux · 1h ago
Thanks for writing this post. I live with BP1 and can relate to so much of what you shared even if I come to other conclusions than you. We just have to sit with the actions we took when we were at our worst and have to accept the consequences. Our illness is not an excuse, we still need to be accountable for our actions, but it feels different when you “wake up” from those delusions and suddenly find yourself cut off from friends, passions, or the life you had built.
The hardest part of these illnesses isn’t always the symptoms it’s trying to repair the things you broke in a state you had no control over. And maybe the worst part is learning to let go because people or projects deserve to move on without you, even if it’s painful and hard to make sense of within yourself.
sfn42 · 1h ago
I had never heard of Kenneth Reitz and I was curious about his Python contribution so I googled him and this was one of the first results
That post is all about money. The author came into someone else’s project, acts miffed that he isn’t treated as a founder right off the bat, and then complains endlessly about where the donations went. Even belaboring the “dishonesty” of rounding 28k to 30k. I won’t read to the end because clearly this person has major faults of their own and just wrote an attack without making any reflections on himself
sfn42 · 43m ago
It certainly isn't all about money, though I think the money is worth talking about. Anyway you're welcome to make up your own mind, I thought the blog seemed credible and reasonable and it certainly cast some light on why this person is having social problems beyond just a diagnosis.
I wasn't really looking for information to discredit Reitz, it was just the first thing I stumbled upon.
I imagine I could write a similar blog post about my experience in the field while suffering from autism and severe depression.
But the thing is, if you asked my employers, I'm sure they'd give very good reasons as to why I was let go.
I wonder what some of those 20 companies he's worked for would say if they were allowed to share their side.
I'm not trying to blame Kenneth here, but things are not often as clear cut as he is implying here.
zemvpferreira · 2h ago
"Schizoaffective disorder is a mental health condition that is marked by a mix of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression, mania and a milder form of mania called hypomania. Hallucinations involve seeing things or hearing voices that others don't observe. Delusions involve believing things that are not real or not true."
I'm not sure this is an employable condition unfortunately. As progressive as anyone wants to be, I can see the disruption an illness like this causes not being tenable. Businesses are competitive entities, not machines for inclusion. My heart goes out to OP but I don't think I'd want him on my team either.
zdragnar · 1h ago
It is a condition that is employable in the abstract, as symptoms are as varied as individuals are.
The difficulty begins with the treatment- the medications can be extremely unpleasant, and it is not uncommon for patients to cease taking them.
Unfortunately, people with the condition can be unreliable narrators, so to speak, and so any deviation from perfectly normal becomes suspicion of medication refusal, as the author noted in the article. Even when they are perfectly honest and accurate, just having a rough day will mean being met with distrust at best.
The thing that struck me as odd in the article is the repetition of fear as a reaction in others. There's not enough information to understand if this is accurate or not. One of my friends growing up had a cleft lip; his low self image had him constantly assuming the worst in others despite it (from my observations) contributing far less to people's reactions than he'd imagined.
So, we are left wondering: is the author of the post a reliable narrator, or are their symptoms coloring their perception of the interactions with others in a way that they are misjudging?
jerlendds · 47m ago
> difficulty begins with the treatment
As someone with a similar condition, I love my meds, I'm one of the lucky ones who only experiences mild-moderate side-effects from them and my condition hasn't yet reached a point where I've started "losing myself" to it, or, at least losing the aspects of me and my sanity that I like, to my episodes of psychosis. I know each episode I go through there's a likely chance less of the sane me comes back even after finding meds that work, less of who I really am, the me that I like, that can get along with others, that can develop cool software, and frankly, that scares the ever living shit out of me. I like to imagine its somewhat like the despair someone experiences from dementia when they have a moment of lucidity.
The only reason I experienced my last year-long episode of Psychosis was due to me being unable to afford meds. And the discrimination, bias and prejudice that Ken so eloquently illustrated works against you when you end up homeless. If you're homeless in the winter in Canada and attempt to seek help from the Canadian healthcare system they'll do their best to get you out of their system ASAP, despite being unmedicated and desperately needing treatment, I was discharged after a 1-2 day stay on 3 occasions. Their idea of evaluating someone is 1 or 2 10m talks with a nurse and Dr and I was still reeling from the fact I lost everything I owned and was homeless that those talks sorta focused on that which perhaps hid some of my symptoms. So I remained unmedicated, that was a long year to say the least, I was living in a nightmare that I couldn't escape. My episode of Psychosis got scary bad near the end of this year-long ordeal after I finally secured a roommate situation. At one point during my roommate situation I tried once again to get anti-psychotic meds from an ER doctor who turned me away because they thought I wasn't exhibiting symptoms. Sigh. I suppose I'm also unlucky (maybe lucky?) in that I can appear extremely convincing and relatively smart even during an episode, at least that's until before the Psychosis escalates into more severe symptoms.
> is the repetition of fear as a reaction in others.
This is something I've noticed, I think it's likely different from a self-conscious fear like having a cleft lip that most people don't even think much of. The vast majority of people with conditions like mine and Kens (70% last I checked) are non-violent but many shows on TV or in the media make us out to be violent and unhinged. or perhaps Im reading into things too much here. I do know I have lost multiple friends from being honest about my mental health struggles. It sucks to not have the trendy and fashionable mental illness of just depression or anxiety lol. Severe trauma and having psychosis-based disorder is a bitch.
> is the author of the post a reliable narrator, or are their symptoms coloring their perception of the interactions with others in a way that they are misjudging?
Excellent question, Id say it's a bit of both with only the author and their medical/care team being the ones to know for sure. During good-times and when the medications are working, I'm just like you or anyone else, when spiraling into an episode of psychosis, well, all aboard the crazy train, expect misjudgements galore.
I'm not sure why I replied and disclosed some of my medical issues here, I know this might come back to bite me at a future time so I may end up deleting this comment relatively soon. I admire how brave ken must be to share his mental health struggles so openly. It feels like that's not something I can do because of the discrimination and bias commonly found for mental illnesses of this type.
zdragnar · 32m ago
Thank you for sharing. I am sympathetic to the struggle, being an occasionally unreliable narrator myself.
It can be incredibly surprising and disappointing how people can react to mental health issues, even just hearing that you have them despite not presenting symptoms at the time.
A prior acquaintance of mine was a social worker who helped people with such conditions live (semi)independently. One in particular hated his medication, but when he wasn't on it, he'd become increasingly paranoid that vampires were out to get him. To the best of my knowledge he was never violent, but you're right- when imagining defensive paranoia, popular media always brings to mind a loose cannon who might be a danger to themselves and others.
In time, this may change, but I can't say that I'm too hopeful. We no longer associate menstruation with hysteria, but it's easy to change when we're talking about half the population. So long as fictional media outnumbers real lives, it'll be harder to change.
With that said, change comes from learning, and I hope your sharing will help others understand.
nemomarx · 34m ago
I hope you don't have to go through that in the future. The way people treat the homeless and how ERs treat anyone who asks for medication (accusations of pill seeking, as if it's impossible anyone might need pills) are horrible. Good luck out there.
kamranjon · 1h ago
I would hope that there would be some possibility for folks like this to utilize platforms like Patreon or GitHub sponsorships to help pay their bills - they are obviously motivated and productive coders and also talented writers.
In my experience there is sort of a discrepancy often times. Someone discloses a severe mental health diagnosis and the company just goes on pretending they are just like every other employee - making no changes to accommodate them.
On the flip side, employees with severe mental health disorders often want to be treated exactly the same as other employees - so it seems a bit of an un-winnable situation.
energy123 · 1h ago
You've got to put them behind a remote, narrowly-scoped, async interface. Basically hire them as a remote consultant, with 1 point of contact, and send them non-urgent tasks that they can complete whenever. It can work like this, I've seen it. Eventually they blow up, but the interface prevents any negative side-effects, and in the interim it was a win-win arrangement.
drcongo · 1h ago
I was reading along with great sympathy until I got to this bit...
Schizoaffective disorder carries stigma that depression and anxiety don't. People can relate to feeling sad or worried; they cannot relate to experiencing reality differently.
Depression is not "feeling sad" and very much is experiencing reality differently. Flippantly calling something so horrifically painful "feeling sad" is exactly the kind of thing he's accusing everyone else of.
jerlendds · 14m ago
Youre right its not just feeling sad but relative to the extreme symptoms of Psychosis, delression is very mild by comparison
swayvil · 1h ago
It isn't the simple fact tht you have a mental disorder. And it isn't "difficult conversations about symptoms, medication, and hospitalization". It's that you act crazy. Crazy, unleavened with humility, is hard to take.
That said, the squares are easily frightened and that's a fact of life.
nemomarx · 59m ago
Masking sucks but everyone has to hide parts of themselves in normal corporate workplaces, so it's part of life really. If you're struggling at home or going through a messy divorce, if you're stressed and anxious, if you're dealing with illness, you're supposed to keep some of that held back so it doesn't affect the 'squares' yeah
And while workplaces should be accommodating, there’s a point where it gets to be too much.
I worked at a place with a person with similar behaviors and it destroyed that company because they refused to acknowledge reality: this was a business, not a care facility.
One thing is clear: Kenneth is suffering. I hope that he is able to see his behavior from the outside and heal. He’s a great programmer who ships products.
For those who don’t know, Kenneth created the Requests library which is nearly ubiquitous in the Python world.
It's central to understand that mental health can alter perception and judgment, even common mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.
I have chronic depression, and even after treating it for 15 years, I still realizes after the fact, despite being attentive to how I behave, that I just think differently when I am depressed.
It's very common for mentally ill people to think they are being persecuted. We also should still inform people more about mental illness, so both are true.
Illnesses that involves psychosis are not a joke and more severe than your average depression, and sadly I would be careful and not 100% trustworthy of somebody who is having such illness.
https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2023-01-an_overdue_apology
"i'm sorry, hope we can continue working together in the future" seems like a very mild response to allegedly fumbling 30k, but what do i know...
> the asynchronous landscape within Python's ecosystem failed to meet my expectations, leading me to conclude that Requests should retain its synchronous nature.
i concluded that the ecosystem does things differently than my personal standards, so i'm gonna revert and keep the money. nice.
This is interesting. I can imagine that going both ways - maybe he feels like he's lost control over the project and that worsens his other reactions?
The author is referring to Kenneth's involvement in Requests at that time (2019), long after its creation. Substantial work has been done on Requests since he stepped away from the project, but it was born from him.
Different sides to the story, and neither post here explains exactly what happened with Requests.
You can Google or HN search these past events. In fact, Kenneth lurks on HN, too.
>In short: He chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem.
A similar (but unrelated) fundraiser mechanism is why I no longer donate to any fundraisers, online (no accountability, no refunds). I'm looking at you µOptics >:-|
Maybe Smith is right on the facts here, but the methods are despicable.
This blog post is nothing like that. They're not asking you to silence Kenneth, or ignore him, or oust him from anything. They're just laying down the facts. The post isn't even asking you to stop interacting with, it's just a heads-up for anyone who does.
It's kind of like having very strong opinions about the council of yoyo judges and their dramas.
I do not know the truth, i just thought people might appreciate another perspective.
This framing is at the very least maladaptive and possibly indicative of the mental illness they are writing about. Mentally healthy humans regulate their behavior around other humans depending on the context. Sometimes this produces anxiety. And the fact that the author can pull that off at all (even with some difficulty) is a positive sign.
There is no reason for an employer or professional colleagues to be aware of an employees medical issues. Maybe there are exceptions for in-office workers with conditions like epilepsy. There are plenty of companies with no questions asked PTO, and as long as they do good work (which the article indicates) no one will bother them for using it.
Totally agree, but it can get a bit weird. I struggle with depression, and at times I have felt like I owed my co-workers/manager/boss an excuse as to why I "suck" sometimes. IE; I didn't show up late for the meeting because I am irresponsible, rather because I'm just in a bad spell this week and have brain fog. If I don't tell them, they may think the former. If I do tell them, who knows.
However, I think it's genuinely good advice to say that professionally, people are just trying to build a mental model of how reliable you are. The reasoning doesn't really matter to them, and a psychological diagnosis is a predictive theory about how you will behave. Unfortunately, people will assume close to worst case for any condition you tell them about. The mental model you put in someone's head with a psychological diagnosis, is always worse than how they currently perceive you.
On another note though:
"This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience."
I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.
If you write concise but with some panache, people will think you LLMed it. I've had the accusation leveled at me with rising frequency since ~2023.
It really sucks. In a similar vein, before LLMs my friends always used to call me "the walking Wikipedia" because I tend to always have a fact or trick or trivia in my back pocket. These days more often than not, I get told "okay and now for a non-AI ass answer".
I completely understand why people have that reflexive response to it, but it also feels really vile.
For what it's worth, I do also notice it. Especially on Reddit, you'll start reading a comment and halfway through your gut feel tells you it's likely written by an LLM.
But it does have a certain code smell sometimes, I often get it on Reddit posts as well.
It's as if you reaped a field by hand for the skill of it and to then have everyone's first remark be "well, you certainly know how to operate a combine. Now show me some real effort!"
What a world!
All the way down this kind of genai has weird impacts I guess.
However, the article in general certainly reads like it is coming from the author's own voice. Painfully so, even, because this guy is clearly suffering.
The article overwhelmingly reads like a (painfully) honest and personal account of what he's going through, it's not AI slop.
Of course it's also a normal, polished sentence with good grammar, but it seems a little unrealistic. It's too polished basically.
I use Copilot to re-write emails all the time. I'm not going to act like I'm above it. I will say, it makes your emotional plea ring a little more hollow than it should, but so does posting it online, in text form anyway.
> This isn't job-hopping by choice—it's a survival pattern forced by systematic exclusion. > This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience. > The discrimination I'm documenting isn't just about hurt feelings or career setbacks—it has life-and-death consequences for people with schizoaffective disorder: > These aren't abstract statistics—they represent the human cost of the systematic exclusion I've experienced. (little looser here, but still fits the bill) > The pattern of discrimination I've experienced isn't unique—it's systematic. > The discrimination I've faced isn't my fault—it's a reflection of society's failure to move beyond tokenistic awareness toward genuine inclusion.
"It's not X -- it's Y." or "This isn't just X -- It's actually Y."
Usually with an emdash there as well for the separation. As I said it's very plausibly becoming more common among people not using LLM-assisted writing too, just from seeing the stylistic approach used more often and having it spread naturally, but I do have been seeing it spread with dramatic speed over the last couple years. I even catch myself using other phrasing more often from reading it more. I think it's just part of how language spreads, honestly.
emdashes have been pretty popular among net native folks for the last 20+ years, e.g. if you were to look back at the most popular Kuro5hin stories from ~2001 - 2005, you'd see them everywhere. People just aren't used to the average person being able to write well, so it looks weird to them.
But that's one of the main uses of emdashes, for signaling that the second half of the sentence is more important than the first half. If you Ctrl-F for emdashes on my blog, you can see I do it everywhere, even though all of my posts were written before LLMs existed:
https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/
I can't stop seeing this LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.
It seems super strange to me. At the very least I thought they'd try to RL other personalities to make it harder to catch. The older base models definitely could handle that.
I wonder why no one's tuned their model to make minor errors that way or leave a few things uncapitalized to fake a human touch
A lot of this here imo is just llm paranoia. I do not think the style of the author is different than their pre-llm posts. One em dash is not proof of anything imo as long as the text in general does not smell as much like llm-generated. I could be wrong because I do not interact much with llms lately, but it does not seem that to me.
It seems to me like it's more effort to write something and then have an llm clean it up instead of just posting it so I mostly don't understand the behavior to start with. Why are we going through this new effort?
but it’s not morally wrong to experience psychosis. so how could it be right for me to feel fear and anger towards that person when they haven’t done anything wrong? it is a tough contradiction.
you can resolve the contradiction by just deciding to hate and fear anyone who shows signs of psychosis, treat them as if it is a morally bad trait, which many people do, see discourse about homeless people in NYC.
or you can just try to pretend that psychosis doesn’t exist, which a lot of people do, like when some public figure shows obvious psychotic symptoms but people act like it’s rational behavior.
or you can disavow the fear and anger, but if a person does actually frighten and hurt you, the resulting negative feelings often tend to be expressed in weird and unfair ways. i suspect this author’s employers and doctors probably do a lot of this.
personally I think the least bad solution is to acknowledge that anger towards a person can be justified even if they’ve done nothing morally wrong, just feel anger, and express it only in controlled ways. but this is philosophically confusing, easy to state, hard to really believe deep down.
It's a reality that most people are absolutely not equipped to deal with a coworker (or any contributor) that has manic or psychotic episodes. Mental illnesses is not anyone's fault, but there are still behaviors that will make it difficult to work with others, even for someone like Kenneth who is very good on the technical side.
It does not matter what you have done, whether you just maintained an email module throughout Python-3 or had your broken code fixed and completely rewritten by people who came later: The only thing that matters is that you have been there before around 2000-2005.
Back then the language felt like a quiet little also-ran behind Perl and we looked with jealous eyes as Ruby On Rails took over the mindshare. If you were a python advocate then, you were really singing into the void.
My personal low-effort view has been that Python is only on the map today because MIT switched to teaching it as the language of choice in their CS classes. A quick internet search says that happened in 2009 though so ... maybe that's not fair. I thought it happened around 2005 causing the popularity to surge around 2010 but... them starting in 2009 seems like it wouldn't've been that quick to spur change. Sounds like I should go watch the documentary. ;)
It features 22 people, which already seems quite a lot for a 90 minute documentary. And I can think of several other prominent Python people who are not listed. And lets be real here: "I made a Python library people like" really doesn't compete against "I was a core Python dev for 20 years". requests being "one of the most foundational Python libraries in history" seems quite exaggerated.
This kind "I need to be front and centre of attention and when I'm not I am being oppressed" type stuff is a big part of the reason why so many people found it hard to work with Kenneth. His constant self-aggrandizing and need for endless validation gets very tiring very fast.
I appreciate that Kenneth's mental health struggles are very real and I do not mean to devalue that in any way, but his constant use of his mental health to dismiss and and all criticism of his behaviour is another thing that gets very tiring very fast.
Of course I have no insight in many aspects of Kenneth's life and can't comment on any of it. I am perfectly willing to believe that sometimes in some places he has been discriminated due to his mental health diagnosis.
I can however comment on the state of things in Python because much of it is public, and the problems there have been mostly or entirely unrelated to his mental health diagnosis.
You're not wrong. I thought it was a good read and some awesome honesty if not also leaving some things unmentioned or undescribed. Sometimes the details matter a lot.
Let's imagine another, non-existing, person so as to clearly differentiate from the author. Said imaginary person gets violent due to socialization and a anger issues. How should the company handle an episode that leaves another employee with a broken nose and bruises? Disclosure doesn't defend a company from it's duty to protect the bodily health of that person's coworkers does it?
Most people have some mental unwellness or at least experiences they struggle to navigate or understand. Their experiences can make the problem worse and some conditions lead to behaviors that add processing load and tax their capacity to remain well. At times that exceeds a capacity to navigate and injury occurs. While invisible that injury has impact and costs. Employees have a right to not be harmed by their coworkers and a right to demand employers protect that right. I'm making that argument on a basis of common decency but there are legal liabilities to consider as well. All of this sort of thing is a distraction from the work the employer needs done.
Our world is better off to the extent we help everyone be productive and contribute at their maximal capacity. While some of the affects we have on one another are very positive, today we are struggling with how to balance the negative hard affects.
I can report leaving a really wonderful job after being socially attacked by a coworker that lost reality and falsely convinced my team that I had harmed them. Despite sharing evidence from the third party involved that it was a departure from reality, my boss decided not to help correct the problem. This has very negative impacts on my mental health, finances, marriage, and it derailed my career for a while. I probably had good standing to sue for damages. I certainly was damaged. There had been many poor behaviors from that person prior.
It is complicated and messy. As much as I appreciated it, the essay reads to me as though it minimizes the negatives. Without discounting it and while being understanding and inclusive we still need to manage impacts and the distractions those negatives create.
No, acceptance of mental illness doesn't work if you define away anything serious as not mental illness. That's precisely the trouble the author is having, when they have a mental illness that's not just the cute idealized Tiktok version.
People with well-managed schizophrenia can lead relatively normal lives. Or they can wake up from a three day psychosis, not remembering why they've been arrested. It's a spectrum, and it does sometimes get ugly.
I'm not sure how to resolve the interests of everyone involved - I just know that when I've had to work with a colleague who was volatile or prone to yelling at me it made my own life and mental health much worse.
I agree that "Companies tout their mental health benefits and neurodiversity initiatives" really should not do this token performative crap without fully understanding what they are implying.
That said, within the current system...
Morally and legally, what are the limits of accommodation?
Accommodation, in my uninformed layman understanding, is about accommodating people who can do the job, but need to do it differently than others. For example, wheelchair accessibility for white-collar office workers.
Does it include the inclusion of people who can't perform all aspects of the job?
Communication and collaboration are absolute pillars of nearly any engineer's job, but by the writer's own statements it seems like his condition often prevents this.
How do we resolve this?
This sort of framing assumes the author bears no responsibility at all, and it's just society that has failed. The thing is though, even in an ideal society, it would be not reasonable to expect people to deal with someone's issues indefinitely, particularly when they chalk up all criticism as "discrimination"; I'm quite certain there are legitimate reasons, completely unrelated to his mental health, that he was fired or passed over for promotions.
They probably understand it more than most disorders and likely have some level of skills to cope with it and it makes them look good employing them.
The hardest part of these illnesses isn’t always the symptoms it’s trying to repair the things you broke in a state you had no control over. And maybe the worst part is learning to let go because people or projects deserve to move on without you, even if it’s painful and hard to make sense of within yourself.
https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...
I wasn't really looking for information to discredit Reitz, it was just the first thing I stumbled upon.
Archive link: https://archive.is/UjCgv
But the thing is, if you asked my employers, I'm sure they'd give very good reasons as to why I was let go.
I wonder what some of those 20 companies he's worked for would say if they were allowed to share their side.
I'm not trying to blame Kenneth here, but things are not often as clear cut as he is implying here.
I'm not sure this is an employable condition unfortunately. As progressive as anyone wants to be, I can see the disruption an illness like this causes not being tenable. Businesses are competitive entities, not machines for inclusion. My heart goes out to OP but I don't think I'd want him on my team either.
The difficulty begins with the treatment- the medications can be extremely unpleasant, and it is not uncommon for patients to cease taking them.
Unfortunately, people with the condition can be unreliable narrators, so to speak, and so any deviation from perfectly normal becomes suspicion of medication refusal, as the author noted in the article. Even when they are perfectly honest and accurate, just having a rough day will mean being met with distrust at best.
The thing that struck me as odd in the article is the repetition of fear as a reaction in others. There's not enough information to understand if this is accurate or not. One of my friends growing up had a cleft lip; his low self image had him constantly assuming the worst in others despite it (from my observations) contributing far less to people's reactions than he'd imagined.
So, we are left wondering: is the author of the post a reliable narrator, or are their symptoms coloring their perception of the interactions with others in a way that they are misjudging?
As someone with a similar condition, I love my meds, I'm one of the lucky ones who only experiences mild-moderate side-effects from them and my condition hasn't yet reached a point where I've started "losing myself" to it, or, at least losing the aspects of me and my sanity that I like, to my episodes of psychosis. I know each episode I go through there's a likely chance less of the sane me comes back even after finding meds that work, less of who I really am, the me that I like, that can get along with others, that can develop cool software, and frankly, that scares the ever living shit out of me. I like to imagine its somewhat like the despair someone experiences from dementia when they have a moment of lucidity.
The only reason I experienced my last year-long episode of Psychosis was due to me being unable to afford meds. And the discrimination, bias and prejudice that Ken so eloquently illustrated works against you when you end up homeless. If you're homeless in the winter in Canada and attempt to seek help from the Canadian healthcare system they'll do their best to get you out of their system ASAP, despite being unmedicated and desperately needing treatment, I was discharged after a 1-2 day stay on 3 occasions. Their idea of evaluating someone is 1 or 2 10m talks with a nurse and Dr and I was still reeling from the fact I lost everything I owned and was homeless that those talks sorta focused on that which perhaps hid some of my symptoms. So I remained unmedicated, that was a long year to say the least, I was living in a nightmare that I couldn't escape. My episode of Psychosis got scary bad near the end of this year-long ordeal after I finally secured a roommate situation. At one point during my roommate situation I tried once again to get anti-psychotic meds from an ER doctor who turned me away because they thought I wasn't exhibiting symptoms. Sigh. I suppose I'm also unlucky (maybe lucky?) in that I can appear extremely convincing and relatively smart even during an episode, at least that's until before the Psychosis escalates into more severe symptoms.
> is the repetition of fear as a reaction in others.
This is something I've noticed, I think it's likely different from a self-conscious fear like having a cleft lip that most people don't even think much of. The vast majority of people with conditions like mine and Kens (70% last I checked) are non-violent but many shows on TV or in the media make us out to be violent and unhinged. or perhaps Im reading into things too much here. I do know I have lost multiple friends from being honest about my mental health struggles. It sucks to not have the trendy and fashionable mental illness of just depression or anxiety lol. Severe trauma and having psychosis-based disorder is a bitch.
> is the author of the post a reliable narrator, or are their symptoms coloring their perception of the interactions with others in a way that they are misjudging?
Excellent question, Id say it's a bit of both with only the author and their medical/care team being the ones to know for sure. During good-times and when the medications are working, I'm just like you or anyone else, when spiraling into an episode of psychosis, well, all aboard the crazy train, expect misjudgements galore.
I'm not sure why I replied and disclosed some of my medical issues here, I know this might come back to bite me at a future time so I may end up deleting this comment relatively soon. I admire how brave ken must be to share his mental health struggles so openly. It feels like that's not something I can do because of the discrimination and bias commonly found for mental illnesses of this type.
It can be incredibly surprising and disappointing how people can react to mental health issues, even just hearing that you have them despite not presenting symptoms at the time.
A prior acquaintance of mine was a social worker who helped people with such conditions live (semi)independently. One in particular hated his medication, but when he wasn't on it, he'd become increasingly paranoid that vampires were out to get him. To the best of my knowledge he was never violent, but you're right- when imagining defensive paranoia, popular media always brings to mind a loose cannon who might be a danger to themselves and others.
In time, this may change, but I can't say that I'm too hopeful. We no longer associate menstruation with hysteria, but it's easy to change when we're talking about half the population. So long as fictional media outnumbers real lives, it'll be harder to change.
With that said, change comes from learning, and I hope your sharing will help others understand.
In my experience there is sort of a discrepancy often times. Someone discloses a severe mental health diagnosis and the company just goes on pretending they are just like every other employee - making no changes to accommodate them.
On the flip side, employees with severe mental health disorders often want to be treated exactly the same as other employees - so it seems a bit of an un-winnable situation.
Schizoaffective disorder carries stigma that depression and anxiety don't. People can relate to feeling sad or worried; they cannot relate to experiencing reality differently.
Depression is not "feeling sad" and very much is experiencing reality differently. Flippantly calling something so horrifically painful "feeling sad" is exactly the kind of thing he's accusing everyone else of.
That said, the squares are easily frightened and that's a fact of life.