[ZoFreX]

Note to people that know me IRL: This comment is quite personal. Feel free to read it but please bear that in mind.

I've really been trying to bite my tongue in the last 2 months but the number of articles about depression on HN is overwhelming and it's starting to bug me. A lot. And by "bug" I mean "upset, anger, and insult".

Here's some ground rules for not being insulting. It is possible to break these rules and not be insulting, but it's hard, so for a crude guide I think they are of some use:

1. If you don't and have never suffered from depression, don't tell people who do what they should and should not do.

2. Do not ascribe people's actions to their disease, nor predict them based on them having the disease.

3. Do not assume there is a correlation between depression and suicide. The connection is actually very weak, far weaker than most people assume.

4. Don't use (or even make mention of) other people's deaths for your own cause.

If you don't understand any of these, or see a need for them, please ask and I will expand.

---

Specifically regarding this article, but by no means is this the worst offender in recent memory (I just feel that, out of everyone, Jacques will actually read this):

If you want to write an article saying that running a start up is very stressful in certain ways, that you need to have certain other areas of your life in order, go for it.

Don't cover it with the blanket "don't do it if you have depression".

Why?

Stress isn't linear and some people can cope with some forms of stress better than others. What would break one person another could power through. Some people stress most at the thought of being homeless and jobless, other people find the idea of being stable secure and in a rut far more stressful.

Some people who don't have depression would fold under the stress of running a startup.

Some people who do have depression would rise to the challenge. It may even help them to have more control over their situation.

So in terms of a classifier for who can run a start up, depression isn't a particularly useful variable.

On: "taking their own life because"

Just don't go there. Please. You have no idea why they did it or what was going on. How many of your friends ran startups just fine while managing depression, and you had no idea they were depressed? How many people commit suicide seemingly randomly because no one else has any idea what is really going on inside their heads?

People with depression aren't fragile timebombs that if you aren't super nice to, they will kill themselves.

---

So, I've tried to keep things cool and rational so the things I am saying are hopefully sensible and self-evident. But I do want to impress upon you, Jacques, and you the reader, and especially you the HN contributor who might write an article like this in the future:

This advice is toxic. It is horrible. It is exclusionary. I suffer from depression that varies from the extreme mild end of the scale the majority of the time, all the way to the severe end of the spectrum at its worst. The one constant is that it is always present, even if in a very mild form. You are effectively telling me: "You will never make it. You don't have what it takes - some quality that I have, and you do not. Because of a disease you have due to no fault of your own, you won't make it in the startup world. Your dreams are futile and you should stick to the 9-5".

How would you react if someone had told you that some years ago, before you starting doing your thing? There are times when my reaction would be to curl up, give up, cry. Even now I am shaking not just with anger but also because I want to cry. These days though I am stronger - it is possible to have depression and yet be strong - and so my response is simple: "Fuck you. I'll do what I want."

I really hope that others reading this article have the same reaction, not because it is a good one (I would much rather the reaction be "What a useful and insightful article, I know what my next steps should be") but because it is far, far better than the alternative - to give up.

[comrh]

As a brother in arms in the battle with the same personal illness, you nailed everything I was thinking. When I first read even just the title my first reaction was "Screw you, random post on HN".

If you really want to be helpful with startsup and depression, encourage people to get some mental health treatment. No one ever has to fight alone nor is it a battle that can be won without support.

[mnicole]

This is really refreshing to see here. Thank you for taking the time to write something so deeply personal. Could you imagine how many people would be affected by a post telling them not to do comedy if they're depressed? This isn't just a phase for some folks; it's a series of highs and lows that never goes away. Expecting people to give up on their dreams because of a mental illness that society already tries to sweep under the rug and douse with often-ineffective drugs is beyond my comprehension. These are some of our best and brightest minds, we should be encouraging them.

[overcyn]

> Do not assume there is a correlation between depression and suicide. The connection is actually very weak, far weaker than most people assume.

Do you have a source for this? I've been searching for a bit, but can't find anything that indicates depression is very weakly related to suicide.

[bayesianhorse]

I believe the correlation is there, but it can be very misleading. The presupposition in the article is that a prospective start-up founder knows he has a mental health problem. In that case, his suicide risk is already lower.

[michaelochurch]

I have two minds about the depression/startup debate.

First, I'm going to make a blanket statement. People with depression are, as a group, better people. Sure, there are bad people with depression and good people without it but, in the aggregate, people who have suffered through it tend to be more empathetic and less mean-spirited. You're not likely to kick those who are down if you've been down. If you've had a 3-month spell in which everything took a massive amount of effort, you're not likely to inject annual "low performer" witch hunts into a company (cf. Enron, Google) for shits and giggles. So, it might get good for VC-istan to be more accepting of neuro-diversity. People with mild depression are also less prone to the absurd optimistic bias that plagues the ecosystem (depressive realism). People like that shouldn't be excluded just because they're the first to crack in this absurd brogrammer pressure-cooker that actually results in an extremely low quality of work across the board.

Finally, business formation doesn't have to be an all-consuming, destroys-your-life-if-it-doesn't-work-out-and-merely-ruins-it-if-it-does, affair. Our natural tendency, as humans, is to examine and improve things. For many of us, that includes abstract processes. That's kind of what business formation is... or at least where it starts. It's too natural and important of a process for it to exclude people who can't lay down a 5000-hour work year. It's a 90-hour-per-week, all-consuming affair in VC-istan, but maybe the problem is that ecosystem and not business formation (a millennia-old, natural process) itself.

On the other hand, there is currently no way for most people to start businesses that isn't unhealthy. Bank loans expect personal liability. VC-istan's problems are well-documented; VC's can ruin your reputation and make you unemployable and unfundable, so they hold all the cards. Using personal savings isn't a good idea in a world where full-time employment is taxing enough to exclude almost everyone over 65. Using friends-and-family money is even worse, because it can interfere with the personal relationships people need to be healthy. Then, in the U.S., there is the evil of private health insurance.

Obviously, I'm not saying that business formation should be entirely risk-less, but right now, there's no healthy way for most people to do it. Most people don't have the capital, relationships, and leeway.

I wish there were a healthy way for people who are inclined toward business formation to do it, and maybe that's the real problem we should be out solving.

[il]

This has nothing to do with VCs. Building a business-any business-is incredibly hard and stressful. I'm not sure if you've been there, but bootstrapping a business, really building something new and unknown from nothing, is infinitely more stressful than running a funded startup.

Raising money at least gives you a little cushion, a little breathing room to experiment and fail and try again. Bootstrapping, the "you don't sell, you don't eat" bootstraping, is constant, unending stress and fear. One single mistake, one bad hire or mismanaged advertising buy can kill the business, and the stress and pressure to stay alive is constant- the sword is always hanging over your head, and at any moment you think it's going to drop.

And that's what bootstrapping a successful, highly profitable business was like. I can't imagine what sinking all your time and savings into a failure would feel like. The sheer carefree bliss of never again having to decide whether you should buy AdWords ads or eat meat this week is worth whatever equity stake you give up.

[michaelochurch]

You are agreeing with my point, which is that there's no way to form a business that isn't extremely stressful. That's unfortunate, because there are plenty of people out there who have the talent and ability but don't want to take on the pain.