[DanielBMarkham]

I don't know if this is the correct post for this or not, but I've been thinking about it for some time.

We hackers and founders obviously suffer from mental illness and poverty, yet some of us do really well -- rich beyond most folks' understanding.

I don't want to get into a discussion of "what's wrong with society". I just want to know: why aren't we taking care of our own? We obviously have the resources. If we can do a basic income experiment, we can take care of the Terry Davis's in the world. Why aren't we?

[AdmiralAsshat]

So, I think this video succinctly captures him pretty well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uLzaKlZSQQ

Clearly a very intelligent and insightful guy. On the other hand, he also comes across as racist and an egomaniac, and it's debatable how much of that we can chalk up to mental illness.

On a cynical level, I don't think he was the "right" kind of mentally ill person for a charity campaign. Someone who is rendered, for lack of a better word, pathetic, or pitiable, by mental illness is a good poster child that will encourage visibility, donations, etc. However, no one wants to be the company sponsoring a guy who brazenly and defiantly calls everyone who disagrees with him a CIA n-word, while repeatedly claiming himself "the smartest programmer who ever lived". Simply put, no one pities an asshole.

That's not a judgment on him specifically, more on society as a whole and how there are social repercussions for showing pity on "the wrong" kind of people.

EDIT: I'd also argue that giving him a platform whereby his worst behavior can be encouraged and goaded by faceless followers is probably the worst thing you can do to a mentally-ill person.

[DanielBMarkham]

>>EDIT: I'd also argue that giving him a platform whereby his worst behavior can be encouraged and goaded by faceless followers is probably the worst thing you can do to a mentally-ill person.

I agree that for some mentally-ill people that it can make them more sick.

But is "more sick" better than dead? I don't care how obnoxious or racist the guy is. I hate his opinions myself. From looking at the video, this is not somebody I would want to be associated with. But I don't hate the person. I hate his opinions. No matter how worse his behavior becomes, if he's alive, there's hope, right?

Isn't this the problem? People from a particular looked-down-upon outgroup are those that we would really, really not like being around, and we don't know how to help them, yet we feel that we should? (regardless of the group or why we feel we should help them)

[thaumaturgy]

I've got plenty of family with severe mental illness. Some of them have died from it. More will.

The unfortunate reality is that we haven't yet figured out how to really help these people. There are no perfect solutions. There aren't even really any good ones. Even for a family member who's motivated to help, and who's spent a lot of time and effort understanding these illnesses, there's very little that can be done.

For the most severe illnesses, the drugs that are available are still too primitive to ease the symptoms without bringing other side effects that many people have trouble accepting. Some classes of illness work so that while taking the medication, the person doesn't believe they need it, and without taking it, they're incapable of making the decision to start taking it. Keeping those people medicated is difficult, at best.

For anyone suffering with less severe forms of mental illness, I'd strongly encourage you to try out different doctors and medications until you find something that works for you. Many illnesses seem to progress with age, and the people who are treated early in life have much better chances of living happier, healthier, longer lives.

There are no easy answers, but I think that early treatment and de-stigmatization of mental illness probably offers our best chances of real progress.

[Fireflite]

Money alone can't guarantee good outcomes in cases of severe mental illness sadly.

Our medications are not good enough, nor are they well-tolerated enough, and sometimes even with medication and money and strong supports and a willingness to try to improve patients still don't get better.

[HeadsUpHigh]

Terry didn't have any medication at all. He used to and he was doing better but in the last few years he was forced to stop them( got kicked out of his parents' house).

[DanielBMarkham]

>>Money alone can't guarantee good outcomes in cases of severe mental illness sadly.

An important point. I am not talking about giving people money. I'm asking if we care enough to try to figure out how to help them. I make no assumptions on what kinds of help would be useful or not.

[saalweachter]

There's going to be four things you have to confront when it comes to helping people.

1. Resources. Money and people are the two hardest resources, although space can also be a problem, especially when you start taking eg homeless shelters. It's not enough to have a big pile of money to spend on the problem, it's hard to find people who want to take on a front-line position in solving it.

2. Morality. It's odd to say, but one of the harder questions when trying to help people is how to do so morally. What if someone doesn't want help? What if they don't want the sort of help you want to give them? The low-hanging fruit of helping people is giving help to people who want it. What to do when someone refuses to leave a dangerous situation or refuses medical treatment is a hard question if you still want to help them.

3. Information. Having resources available to provide help to people who want it is all well and good, but if you don't know who needs help and people who need help don't know about you trying to give it, it doesn't do much good. Knowing who needs help is a really hard problem. Even if you have a vague notion that your neighbor is having a rough time of things, you don't always know how rough of a time, and they don't always tell you.

4. Risk. When you put yourself out there to help, you make yourself vulnerable. That scares a lot of people. Most people are nice people and most people aren't dangerous but some people aren't and are. If you do anything in the world that involves people, including helping them, problems will crop up. The challenge here is mitigating the risk of them without losing your humanity in the process.

If the four points above don't daunt you, then the next thing is to avoid the classic hacker mistake: reinventing the wheel unnecessarily. There are countless organizations already trying to help people out there. Can you join one and help it help more hackers?

[DoreenMichele]

I know an awful lot about helping people with special needs, including mental health issues.

I learned of Terry only after he was shadow banned. I don't know what went down before that.

How a person's issues are addressed by others can amplify or mitigate their issues. The dismissiveness, social isolation and similar typically exacerbate their problems.

If Joan of Arc were alive today, she would be in some psych ward getting her meds adjusted, not playing handmaiden to the birth of a country.

In order to reach someone like Terry, you need to genuinely respect them. This means entertaining the possibility that something real and meaningful is happening that isn't mere insanity. Even if you aren't comfortable calling it "God actually talks to this person," you have to allow for the idea that they are experiencing something meaningful and not merely chalk it up to insanity because it falls outside of our current mental models for certain things.

That's a rather tall order.

When I was homeless, a different forum actively heaped abuse upon me and told me it was my fault. They did that to a lot of people. I wasn't the only one.

That sort of behavior is super common and can drive you crazy if you don't start out as such.

(I will add that they ultimately banned me for basically bullshit reasons that boil down to "No, you just aren't allowed to have a positive experience. There is no redeeming yourself in our eyes because you never did anything wrong to begin with and we aren't willing to admit it's us, not you." Many people get behind the 8 ball socially and find that no matter what they do, the world won't let them get out from behind it because the world is racist, sexist, classist, whatever. It's designed to justify their abuse.)

I don't fit in anywhere. I never have. I have a lot of (personal, not financial) assets in some sense and I'm still struggling to make my life work.

It's hard to find a place to talk about my experiences and make sense of them. The fact that I was homeless for nearly 6 years makes it hard to relate to anyone.

If I talk about those experiences, I'm assumed to be complaining, a drama queen, a political activist etc. You talk about going to the office and no one thinks that's some bid for attention or whatever. I talk about my life, it's somehow a problem to say it at all, no matter the framing.

I'm extremely fortunate that I was on the street with my adult sons. They knew me as something other than a total fucking loser. That helped enormously with preserving my identity and head space from the worst of what can happen to your mind on the street.

My sons also knew to just not leave me alone and also not engage the crazy when I was suicidal. It was a best case scenario that most people will never see.

I'm also fortunate to have reconnected with a forum I participated in years ago that is full of really great people who are actively helping me try to figure out how to socialize "normally" again.

Spending a lot of time homeless creates an inherent barrier to feeling like society cares about you, you are acceptable etc. Every time you open your mouth, you have to decide between denying those experiences happened or accepting the stigmatization that goes with admitting to it. It's psychologically a no win situation.

That's kind of rambly. I'm trying to engage your question in good faith, but it's a difficult thing to talk about because people want to act like mental health is something bad happening in that one defective person's mind. They don't want to hear that there is a huge social component and how we treat such people is part of the problem.

I wasn't here before Terry was shadow banned. I don't know if the forum could have handled it better. But I have seen far too many cases where people who are different are mistreated and then told it is their fault. And I'm absolutely certain that's literally a crazy making experience that helps paint people into a corner from which there is no escape.

Thank you for asking.

[TAForObvReasons]

There's a spectrum. Consider the numerous open source projects used in proprietary products. A small bit of money would go a long way to ensure stability.

[DanielBMarkham]

And from a coldly pragmatic standpoint, think of the advances in tech society could have by funding people who naturally are obsessed with making tech.

This seems like a no-brainer.

[_zskd]

Terry was schizophrenic and was homeless and in poverty due to his condition. Tragically, he is basically the proverbial homeless person you see on the street. Outside of UBI it is very hard to help these people.

The sad fact is that it's very hard to take care of and control people like Terry due to their illness. They have delusions and think you are out to get them.

If you look at the criteria for schizophrenia it becomes a bit more clear: https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-tests

[threatofrain]

I don't think UBI can help someone like Terry. Only a community and nothing less.

[lovich]

UBI doesn't get rid of a person's agency. Terry was mentally ill enough that he either had to have a guardian, or society had to decide that he held diametrically opposing views from the mainstream and would be allowed to live a life according to those view, regardless of the consequences

[wolfgke]

> UBI doesn't get rid of a person's agency. Terry was mentally ill enough that he either had to have a guardian, or society had to decide that he held diametrically opposing views from the mainstream and would be allowed to live a life according to those view, regardless of the consequences

For this, we need no UBI. Simply donating to him suffices.

[krapp]

The world is full of people who would rather let the poor and mentally ill starve and die than lend them a dollar, for fear that doing so would just prevent them from leaving and drive down property prices. Which is why we put caltrops under bridges and on benches.

This is why we need UBI... because charity doesn't scale to the level of societies unless you force it to.

[lovich]

If that worked, there wouldn't be mentally ill homeless people because we already have donations. People do not voluntarily donate in enough quantities to handle society's problems

[wolfgke]

> If that worked, there wouldn't be mentally ill homeless people because we already have donations. People do not voluntarily donate in enough quantities to handle society's problems

This is a democratic vote in terms of money about society's problems. This vote shows that most people find this all quite OK.

[TAForObvReasons]

The honest answer is "because the richest hackers and founders got there precisely because they didn't take care of 'their own'".

It's controversial to talk about Facebook's origin story, but the generally accepted interpretation is that at times Zuckerberg worked with other people and subsequently turned around and screwed them. "Ladder kicking"

[Hydraulix989]

YC was doing a Basic Income experiment a while back? Can't recall how it went though, maybe there weren't any updates.

[gwern]

It ran into IRBs. It'll start in 2019. Maybe. See https://www.wired.com/story/y-combinator-learns-basic-income... (Yes, that's right, in 2018, you literally can't give away money without a ton of work.)

[jasonmp85]

I know you’re being tongue in cheek but I feel like an IRB is warranted here.

[kwhitefoot]

For the non US audience could you say what IRB means?

[jhayward]

An Institutional Review Board [1] is a mechanism most research organizations use to ensure that any research conducted is done in an ethical manner.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board