[overgard]

I've quit a job because I was going through bad depression before and I didn't think I could do a good job. I even asked for part time work, so I understand where she's coming from, but..

In my opinion, this attitude she's portraying is a dangerous attitude to have. This victimhood seems core to her identity. I'm not trying to shame the condition, I'm trying to say that the condition shouldn't become some core part of your identity. Real phenomenon: Have you ever heard of cancer patients becoming depressed after they've gone into remission, because being a "cancer patient" essentially became a core of their identity, and once they no longer had it they became lost? You don't want your identity to be "depressed person", because the last thing you want is to start feeling like a fraud when the fog starts to lift.

Also, I'm just going to say, it's ok to want your employer to have empathy for you, but you also have to have empathy for them. If you're consistently telling them "well, so, I'm a good employee, but I might drop off the face of the earth for 4 months at a time".. what are they supposed to do?

[grae_QED]

I couldn't agree more. It was also a red flag when she said that she wanted to normalize her depression. Depression, like any other mental illness, should be destigmatized but not normalized.

Through out the entire post she outlined exactly why it should not be normalized. It's a debilitating disorder that should not be left untreated. I think to try and normalize it would leave the impression that severe depression is analogous to having a hard day. This is because to most people that is the closest thing they have experienced to severe depression, but in reality it's very different.

I think by doing this she is actually working against her own interests.

[schroeding]

I agree with you about "normalization" vs "de-stigmatization", but I can't imagine she meant "normalization" like this?

> people like me are here, everywhere, you could be me at any point in your life

That's a very important point, and I believe that's what she meant by "normalise". "Normalise" in the "people with depression are normal people with an illness, not 'ill people', anyone can be affected because it's a normal illness like an infection" kind of way, which more or less equals de-stigmatization, right?

But English is not my first language, it's totally possible I'm reading this the wrong way, feel free to correct me if that's not a possible way to read this article. :-)

I can't really imagine that anyone with depression would really want to "normalise" it in the dictionary way, by suggesting that it should be untreated and a "normal way of life". On the contrary, nobody should have to suffer from this. :-/

[dahfizz]

The word "normalize" carries a lot of cultural baggage / implication since its adoption by the woke twitter crowd. Often, "normalize X" means "I want X to be common, I encourage doing X".

[jointpdf]

On the topic of destigmatization, I recommend this Robert Sapolsky lecture (on the neurobiology of depression) to everyone to understand just how physical and systemic depression is: https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc.

For understanding how lifestyle changes can help treat depression, I recommend this: https://youtu.be/drv3BP0Fdi8. He contradicts the author on the point of exercise—it is one of the most potent medicines (though hard to administer to yourself when you’re depressed).

Reflecting on my own (extensive) experiences with depression and its co-conspirators, I think there are two deep fears that inhibit seeking or sticking with treatment:

1. What happens if I don’t get better? Then I’m hopeless.

2. What happens if I do get better (and it’s not enough, or I ruin my progress with a relapse)?

I don’t have a definitive answer to either, but reasonable responses include: trying and failing feels better than languishing/surrendering (not trying is the only thing that’s likely hopeless), it is (or should be) OK to make nonlinear progress in managing chronic illness (depression or otherwise), and the universe/existence is at once magnificent and meaningless so just try to relax and enjoy the ride with your fellow creatures.

[vergessenmir]

I agree wholeheartedly while being empathetic with what she's going through.

The identification is, as you say, dangerous. Most people have depressive episodes at least once in their lifetime, and it can leave just as suddenly as it comes.

It makes me wonder if this intense identification slows her recovery or even worse blinds her from seeing its cause; if in this case it has to do with how she is living her life in terms of family, work and social life.

I hope she gets better.

[DoreenMichele]

She's a woman in a man's world. It's much more socially acceptable to say "I'm depressed" than to say "Doors don't open for me even though I am doing all the things I get told I should do to make them open and I'm doing my best and nothing really works anyway. It's demoralizing."

Women have long been given prescriptions for antidepressants in cases where "divorce" might have been a better prescription and so on.

And you eventually get beat down by it. Even if it remains clear in your mind that your gender is a factor in things not working even though you work hard and do what you get told is the right thing to do and yadda, you eventually learn that saying it out loud not only will not get you any remedy, it will get you nothing but open hostility from other people.

[overgard]

I can only take the author for her word, she didn't say anything like this in the article.

[DoreenMichele]

No, she wouldn't. If the world has broken her of talking about it, obviously, she wouldn't.

I'm giving you my take as a woman. But go ahead and do the PC dismissal as more concrete evidence that what I'm saying is both true and utterly socially unacceptable.

[xenocratus]

If you're already convinced the world is as you see it, there's no point having a discussion. The reality is that the world is a _really_ complex place, and one narrative simply doesn't cover everything, we're not all the same, not all companies are the same, not all societies/groups/cities/nations are the same.

I'm aware that women are disadvantaged in some cases, maybe even in companies that put a lot of effort into promoting them. But there are places where the opposite is happening. I used to work in a big tech corporation that was pushing this quite a lot - if they got two applicants, one was male one was female and they were roughly equally qualified, managers were expected to choose the female. This did make the gender diversity quite incredible, even in software engineering teams - I was in a team that was 50-50 male-female (this wasn't a 4 person team either). Have a look at [1], [2], [3], as well.

At the same time I don't want to discount your experience - there are plenty of awful people out there of all genders and races, and there's no excuse for stuff like that. We need to try and rat out discrimination, whichever way it points.

[1] National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track - https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112

[2] Gender discrimination in hiring: An experimental reexamination of the Swedish case - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[3] Man Up and Take It: Gender Bias in Moral Typecasting - https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2019.15459abs...

[DoreenMichele]

The OP said: In my opinion, this attitude she's portraying is a dangerous attitude to have. This victimhood seems core to her identity. I'm not trying to shame the condition, I'm trying to say that the condition shouldn't become some core part of your identity.

So if you are a woman, it's not okay to say "My gender is an obstacle to my career success and it's literally crazy making." And if you do the more socially acceptable thing of chalking it up to a personal problem like depression, then some internet stranger is free to malign you and your presumed victim mentality.

If another woman tries to say "Hey, maybe she has a legitimate reason for feeling victimized and it isn't just some kind of neurotic BS" on a male dominated forum where the comment occured, she gets a pile on of downvotes and various replies that more or less boil down to "How dare you make such an observation!"

I wasn't looking for a fight. I made a comment as someone with firsthand experience of how frustrating it can be to try to pursue a career as a woman in a man's world. A zillion people are vilifying me for it.

Why do so many people feel some need to try to shut me down and act like it's a bad faith comment in violation of the guidelines?

The reactions to my observation are over the top. The observation itself is incredibly mild.

I think I'm done here. It is probably a waste of my time to keep responding to comments where there is some kind of presumed guilt on my part. It's all too easy for other people to decide that's evidence of how fighty and irrational and bad I am when none of that is true.

What's true here is that it's an overwhelmingly male forum and it's socially acceptable for millions of people to watch me starve and shrug and say "Not my problem" and it's not socially acceptable for me to say "I would like to stop starving and wish someone would help me figure out the super secret handshake to being allowed to earn a goddamned living. Please and thank you."

I'm done with this ridiculous nonsense for today.

[Snoozle]

I have seen a lot of your comments and articles over the past few months. I don't presume to put myself in your shoes, but my wife works in software engineering, and I work with several other women or wives of friends in the field. They have all had normal experiences, much like mine, with very few instances of anything being different for them because they are women.

I'm providing these anecdotes because you are providing your anecdotes and I figured it might make a discussion. As I said before, I have read your medium posts and your posts to this forum, and it seems that you are always fighting a battle that doesn't always exist (see your comment above that was flagged), but I feel like you are using the 'dismissal' of people viewing your arguments as irrelevant to the conversation as proof that the battle is happening and you're losing.

I don't understand why you might be starving or not making a living unless you are unemployable or have some type of issue that prevents you from performing at a normal level, as I have not known anyone in tech who could not earn a living unless they were struggling with something that prevented them from being able to work properly.

These are my anecdotes and they aren't facts or truths, I am just showing that the experience I have seen of women in tech does not intersect with your experiences, in a way that makes your points very foreign to me and I'm sure to others who don't share those experiences. Perhaps you are also in an 'experience bubble', and the world as you see it does not always conform to the pattern.

[andreskytt]

The world is not a uniform place. Not everything is Netherlands, not everything is the US. Some of my best colleagues in software have been women (older ones, too), I have hired women and never ever preferred anyone because of their gender. I have trouble even understanding the concept because of my autism spectrum disorder.

All of this can be an indication of all being fine where I live. Or it can be an indication of my biases being well hidden. And both can be different where you are. “Women don’t know the secret handshake” could be a thing wherever you are based in and it could be that there is some underlying issue you are not aware of. Or it can be both or neither. This is why people flag the comment: our experiences differ wildly and generalizations thus tend to rub a lot of people the wrong way.

Also, as a male, I’ve always had the feeling of “not knowing the secret handshake”. I don’t fit in, I don’t usually get a call when somebody starts something new. I don’t get invited to a night out. Has nothing to do with the gender, I’m just not a pleasant person to be around. I know this and am working on accepting this after years of trying to change it. Might not be applicable in your case, but one can experience very similar treatment that women apparently do in some places for very different reasons.

[mbrodersen]

I have personally hired a number of woman for senior developer jobs and they have all done well. Better than some of the guys I have hired. If it truly is impossible for woman to do well in a male dominated industry, how do you explain that?

[overgard]

What you have is a theory for why she's depressed. You may be correct or incorrect. Unless you secretly know her neither of us knows if that is true. For me, my depression had nothing to do with the outer world. There isn't always a reason, sometimes it's just biology.

It has nothing to do with what I was trying to say though.

My point is not that her depression is valid or invalid, it's that forming a sense of victimhood into your core identity is dangerous. I would give the same advice to men or women.

I'm not religious but consider this widely known prayer: "grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference". Victim mindset is the opposite, it's focusing on things you can't control. I personally think it's more useful to do the best with what is in your power.

[dahfizz]

"WHY I WILL NEVER NOT TALK ABOUT MY DEPRESSION" doesn't really seem like the "the world has broken her of talking about it"...

[nitrogen]

I'm doing my best and nothing really works anyway.

This is probably something that most of us can relate to at some point in our lives.

[DoreenMichele]

I don't know if that's supposed to be sympathetic or dismissive or what, but especially in combo with the downvotes, it's hard to not see it as dismissive.

A woman says "It's not socially acceptable to talk about your gender being a factor in having trouble making your career work", gets downvoted to hell. People fail to see the irony.

I've been on HN nearly twelve years as part of an overall good faith effort to sort my problems and make my life work and I am quite open about being dirt poor to the point of going hungry and being willing to work and wanting to improve my income and it failing to open doors for me. When I talk about "Most men don't really want to talk to me privately unless they are hitting on me" I get snide comments about how HN has no messaging system, as if people haven't heard of email.

I'm telling you from firsthand experience this is amazingly demoralizing and crazy making and it isn't socially acceptable to talk about it no matter how much you can point to evidence that "My gender seems to be a factor in my intractable poverty" and no matter how carefully you word it to not be blamey or suggest people are doing you dirty with malice aforethought.

[mbrodersen]

I work with female senior software engineers and project managers, and have personally hired quite a few. They seem to be doing great, are well respected, and doesn’t seem to have the problems you are advocating. So obviously what you consider to be universally true isn’t. My guess is that you have been unlucky and worked for companies with bad cultures? I have personally worked in a company that was toxic to everybody (male/female/…) and the only solution is to jump ship until you find a good one. They are out there.

[haswell]

This doesn’t have to be universally true to be true for her. I also didn’t really see her claiming that this is universally true.

[ketamine__]

Downvotes are because you aren't taking the author at face value because it appears you have an agenda.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[DoreenMichele]

It's not an idealogical battle. And you aren't the mod.

[ketamine__]

It has nothing to do with the article and it is idealogical.

I never claimed to be a mod.

[runawaybottle]

The irony of it all is that the author did just that, talk about her depression.

Many people are habitual malcontents (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcontent). My parents were like that their entire life, and I picked it up and don’t know how to kick it (mostly try by shutting up). It’s awful way to be, but once it’s in you, good god it’s impossible to feel happy.

It’s not clinical depression, it’s just a miserable disposition that can often be dressed in the guise of woe-is-me, the forever teenage goth kid.

You see, I just did it again.

[TheAdamAndChe]

You see this a lot nowadays. A lot of social media sites are biased towards positivity and reaffirmation, but what happens is that people get lots of positive feedback for identities and mentalities that are counter productive to a good life.

[shkkmo]

I didn't see anything in the article about seeing herself as a victim or it being ”core to her identity." I think you might be projecting here.

In fact, I see her desire and efforts to normalize depression as an attempt to move away from victimhood.

> You don't want your identity to be "depressed person", because the last thing you want is to start feeling like a fraud when the fog starts to lift.

You also don't want to assume because the fog lifted, you should completely disassemble the support mechanisms you have built. Like with cancer remission, there is a signifant chance of relapse that can be somewhat mitigated by good monitoring amd timely interventions.