I am careful not to diagnose myself or others and using labels: OCD, ADD, depressive, etc... The reason I am careful about labeling is I don't think the diagnoses are accurate enough. I have concluded that maybe we can't always identify the disorders, maybe we can't cure the disorders, but we can coup with and more openly discuss the symptoms.

If you are someone that suffers from the behavioral patterns discussed in the article, try various methods to break the behavior bit by bit.

Here are tools I use: exercise, cook a meal (it has a beginning and an end. You get to enjoy it in a short time frame. Not like software development which never ends.)

What tools do you use?

I've been in various forms of psychotherapy for two years now, taking medication when it was necessary. To be specific: characteristics of OCD and schizoid PD as symptoms of depression and social anxiety. The personality traits were not prominent enough to warrant a diagnosis in itself.

In therapy, you get to know yourself better: there are probably reasons why you have certain problems. If you dig deeper in them, you probably get to a point where there are no more reasons. As a random example: you obsess because you fear (x) because you were on multiple occasions in a painful situation regarding (x), and this situation was painful because of (y) and (y) is painful for you but not for others because...and at one point, you might run out of good reasons. But getting to know yourself better helps, and exposing yourself to these issues can give you tools to make them less pressing. Dampening the oscillations, as it were. I have seen plenty of examples where this has made life easier for people, but it takes at least a couple of years. In the US, this might be a tricky proposition because 300 hours of attention from a psychologist is expensive. I hope you have good health insurance, but if you have a well-paying job, I'd say it is worth it.

We nerds are often suspicious of processes that are unpredictable, messy and nondeterministic, but any treatment to psychological issues will necessarily have these characteristics. It doesn't mean that it is pointless. These issues can rarely be cured, but they can be managed and mended.

I assumed it was probably a good idea to never do that again, but I have a incredibly detailed memory of what I pictured so there is a pull to try it again. My point is I think you can overstress your mind and like overclocking a CPU it becomes less stable as you do so. Our minds are a complex balance of chemical signals which has real limits. I try to get enough sleep and take care of the wetware because I think it's less stable than you might assume. Rest and good food are the basics, but so is balancing how you use your mind and trying to avoid unbalanced behavior.

I have gone all out 12 hour days for long periods, but they seem to lead directly to burnout and depression. Yet, if I don't work really hard after a few months I start feeling useless and slow, so I don't think steady state is the best long term idea. My guess is finding a good cycle where I avoid burn out and feeling useless for long periods but I have periods of extreme activity and rest is my best long term balance. However, I have no idea how this relates to my inner biochemistry.

I do the same thing on a regular basis, and I think the same "blacking out" thing happens to me (unless you literally blacked out), but I wouldn't really describe it as blacking out. It's more like day-dreaming - I end up in a mental state where there's nothing but what I'm looking at / thinking about. Very "visually" vivid, but hard to describe, and when I come out of it some amount of time has passed (5 to 15 minutes), and I'll have no clue what happened in my surroundings during that time.

It has been useful for visualizing overarching design - if I know what an unwritten application needs to do I might visualize how the "parts" should fit together (not in any magic sense, just faster than I would without being in that state). Sometimes it's good for solving logic problems, riddles, etc.

Sometimes it's not good for anything at all. Most of the time that it is really useful, it's by coincidence.

It's not a physically draining thing for me at all, just a bit disorienting.

Having a long-term girlfriend, now my fiancee, has been an amazing counterbalance for me. I now get much less high and do not fall as far.

Daily exercise has definitely helped as well.

Any psychologist worth their salt would agree with you: Diagnoses are blunt instruments which we use to describe what are, in reality, complex and unique collections of individual traits and tendencies. There is indeed a risk in "labeling" someone.

But, on the other hand, psychologists often do it anyway. Because the labels also have advantages. The biggest one is: Labels force you to acknowledge the existence of correlations. It is a sad but true fact that some people commit suicide. Other people drink themselves to death. But it's very, very hard to look at your best friend -- or at yourself -- and think this person is about to kill themselves or this person is an alcoholic. Your mind just slides off the subject, like water off a waxed car. You don't want to believe that, so you don't. That's why people always act so surprised. "Who could have predicted that such a successful writer could kill themselves?"

The answer is that sometimes you can't predict it. But one useful way of predicting it is to have a list of warning signs, and to apply (as clinically and scientifically as possible) a special label to anyone who exhibits seven out of ten warning signs. You can't always just listen to your gut, because your gut can be a hopeless optimist -- you force yourself to listen to the label. Then we can take action based on the label -- we give people insurance money to pay for extra therapy, give them access to special drugs, invite them out for coffee instead of beer, encourage them to call (or not to call) their moms, and/or make allowances for their behavior ("Oh, perhaps he's not sending an obvious social signal that he hates my guts! Perhaps he's just having an Asperger's moment!" Is that a glib diagnosis? You bet. But if only I had a dollar for every time that explanation has come in handy...)

Another advantage of labels is that they literally aren't personal. We treat the labelled condition as if it were somehow separate from a person's regular personality -- and that's often not a bug in our labelling system, but a feature! It enables us to distinguish "a guy who sometimes seems nice but is in fact a complete jerk" from "a nice guy, except when he's drunk". We can distinguish "a guy who just doesn't have it together" from "a clinically depressed guy", each of whom requires different treatment. You can try to help the first guy cheer up by encouraging him to change his life, or buying him a pizza, or perhaps just mindlessly telling him to "look on the bright side". You can't do that for the clinically depressed, as Will tells us in no uncertain terms:

"Some people have never dealt with depression, and they can't figure out how it's different from 'being sad.' 'I've been sad! I don't whine about it! I just get over it.' Yes, that's nice. Also, not the same."

As someone who was once depressed, but turned out not to have depression, I tend to think that the label is very useful. Otherwise I might have tried antidepressant treatments before I tried changing my city and my job. Conversely, if I did have depression, but were unwilling to accept that diagnosis, I might spend my time moving randomly from city to city instead of accepting my condition, seeking long-term treatment, and explaining it to my friends.

I try do this at least once a day. It might sound stupid, but I find it gives me a bit of a lift every time I do it...

I think a good explanation of depression for someone that has never really experienced it is: "Take the worse day of your life. Feel those feelings. Now pretend that every day of your life is like that from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep." If there is hell on earth, it looks alot like depression. Unfortunately, most of this is just biochemistry happening in your brain. Fortunately, there are tools today that can help.

It's funny, people can relate when they see someone with a broken leg or a huge scar. You can't see mental disorders and if you haven't felt them, they don't seem very real.

If there is someone you love that has a mental disorder, nothing you can quickly spat at them will help, "Oh, you'll get better" or "It'll go away, just be patient." anymore than you want to hear the same things when you break up with a girlfriend or lose a family member. See if they want help, help them get help if they do, and support them.

If YOU think you have a mental disorder like depression, please go see a professional. They are trained in a variety of techniques that they can give you to help manage your life better in the face of whatever problems you feel you are having. They want to help you, they want to heal you. But you have to take that step first.

-Wil

Also, it's customary for new members to let me take their Tesla for a spin.

Isn't that exactly how things are? It's not an illusion, that's just the truth. Most people have simply developed a solid sense of denial so they ignore that until they die - or at least until they get old and all their friends start dying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr05/realism.html