Interview with Greg Baugues on Mental Health in Tech | RailsConf 2014

you hi it's mine with you tastic i'm at railsconf 2014 i'm sitting here with Greg Baba's whose ended I say the you said all right all right so I he's been talking about mental health issues in our industry and developer compression and other topics well thank you for taking the time to speak with me today what what inspired me to talk about mental health issues and and and treaty the form of the discourse form that you have for for sharing their stories what brought that on yeah so I mean I guess initially I have a type 2 bipolar and a DD and I had a failing out of school I got went through pretty rough out of depression about I guess I've been about 10 years ago and then had just a really rough few years and and I even got diagnosed at first got diagnosed with a ed and bipolar and I kind of like took the ad and was like told therapist you can kind of keep the bipolar and went through a pretty strong denial for a couple years and life just was like super rough I was bouncing from job to job and I was perpetually broken I just felt like I was always letting my friends down was sleeping like 16 hours a day and that there's just a lot of stuff I want to do with my life and I didn't seem to be able to like get myself out of bed to do that or to make any consistent progress on things i could have spurts of productivity and then and then I be incapacitated and I couldn't it didn't seem to matter how much I was like you know this time it's gonna be different it just it never was and so eventually I think I was like okay you know I don't want to take meds I really don't want to have to like admit this like something's wrong but it can't be worse than what I'm in right around you know and so it was like last resort I figured you know I'll just I'll try something and if the things do get worse than I come back I not like what this is like so I finally started seeing a psychiatrist and I got put on meds I'd take something called lamictal it's a mood stabilizer so with my type to bipolar like I will hop like spurts where I'm like super productive or not like weeks I'm depressed and it's just like evens everything else i still have highs and lows you know like there's still days on in depressed but it's like days and I'm not in capacity anymore and I still have days or more energy and I'm productive but in general like now you know I can make plans for week out with confidence that i'll be able to get out of bed and like be there so so that happened about five years ago and life just totally turned around so that's that's kind of where I was at that's a different story though then why I started speaking about the stuff for about a year and a half ago and there we had a guy working for us at table exiles consultancy here in Chicago and he was so bright his name's Caleb and he was he was pairing with me and helping me learn so much but he had a lot of the same symptoms that i had had before i got treatment so i kind of told him my story and he felt like that that maybe hit a little too close home so he set up an appointment with a psychiatrist for a couple weeks out and then he called in sick for a couple days before the appointment and then uh and then you know his appointment set up for friday so i come in on monday i'm excited here and josh the CEO of stable oxides that calls me in his office and he's like he's like you know I've bad news on psychology like Caleb like is he like specific under what and it's like no caleb died and we found out later the kale admit that struggle with addiction for a while and he missed his appointment and then he died the day after what would have been his first appointment psychiatrist so i was scheduled to give a talk on totally different topic at the office and I was like how about I just get up and I'm just like hey I bipolar medd you know like I think maybe Kayla had something similar if you all want to talk about it you know come find me because the biggest problem we have is the stuff is that we don't talk about it like people are ashamed yes to have the skin there in our industry where it is your mind that is your your tool your your means of production yeah you know you can be almost completely physically incapacitated but still productive but if your mind is is it's having issues it could be I I know I I I also been officially diagnosed with ADHD as well we went to a neuro on neuropsychiatry I came from the exact name four electrodes on my head and we looked at the results and just like that this is not good it's and it's a it's a real thing and some people though seem to look at some of our issues and where I'm like a bums like a badge of honor yeah like do you think that maybe that kind of even makes it worse for people to talk about having these issues because they maybe even trivialized or romanticized by some and others people just look at it as I know your ADHD or just fulmen Yeah Yeah right like if like that I you know that's kind of what i thought some plan B yeah that's what I thought I just wanted to try harder so you know when I first kind of start reading my ad is still a year after that before I saw someone because for me ad is what lazy people said they had one that I want to try hard and I didn't want to be like that and you know I think that all of the treats that i love about myself i can attribute to symptoms of a DD less maybe not all but a lot of yeah and even the bipolar you know like bipolar correlates with increased intelligence and incontinent correlates with increased imagination and a lot of yours a lot of programmers that have been finding out so far from bipolar and whatnot so if i can go back and choose a birth to have or not have a ed and have or not have bipolar I i would take both you know like no one now what I know about it like I really do think that it's kind of like having superpowers in some aspects and then having like the Kryptonite condition and other aspects and things like monotony and boredom are kind of like my kryptonite but as I've learned that I can work around it so and I think you're right like I think in in our culture you know there's a lot of the symptoms that we attribute to people to programmers that are you know things like social isolation and insomnia and irregular burst of productivity and kind of thoughts of grandiosity like thinking that you can change the world right they're not all inherently bad things but I think that if your bouncy if you have these symptoms you're bouncing around the world trying to find a profession you someone like accounting you're not going to work out there you know raised somewhat of a whole bunch of other things but you come to programming you might kind of feel at home yeah if you get a little bit can to keep me a little porky yeah but but again they might hide it yes the pursuit of a treatments yeah what are what are some things that in your in your discussions of people that you've learned that maybe people were talking about how they've learned to deal and cope with with their issues or seek help that's a good question i would say the first thing is just learning that it's okay to talk about it it's just learning that and I don't know that I answer your previous question but I think that especially for programmers because so much of our identity and our perfection is dependent upon our mind working right there were extra and we've been praised for our whole life about how well our brain works you know that were extra slow to admit that maybe it's not functioning quite right it was really scary thing to think that maybe your brains lying to you or you don't have full control over 21 right so I think first and foremost for getting treatment of whatever the first step is just being having it be as okay to say I'm depressed or it's okay to say I have a TD as it is to say I have diabetes or I have cancer or I broke my leg we treat conditions above the neck way differently than we do everything else there's so much more stigma there's so much more more shame I so to you with anything happening above the neck then below the neck so so the first thing is talk about it rather is with a friend or and then with a therapist or psychiatrist is kind of the first step if you want to get professional help and these are people who have gone to school for a really long time except I interests are medical doctors who then spent years after that specializing lying about the brain right there very is not quackery like this is like rooted in scientific method which we claimed love right as developers yeah once we start talking about brain so for like oz I don't give them well I I definitely in my experience have saw them but I went to the and I'm just drawing a blank on and what the hurt I wasn't she was a neuropsychiatrists something along those lines and up it was hard science and she worked with a neurologist to do the analysis of the results and I was shown like this is after you know 10,000 Barbies this is but a normal brain pattern would look like in here for years it deviates from the norm and then there was data you know there it was this statistical data over tens hundreds of thousands of scans and how long ago was that for you ah a year and what's your experience been like since then I know I know that I have but I've not quite had to encourage you to really go to the next steps but one of the things that you know even before that I was suspicious my lady ADHD but it's why I also enjoy the community community so much and I want to get to that insipid in your experience that people may be tempted sulfa site we tend to be just on Twitter and you think the dense social and I think that is a good thing but this time is getting out and doing the old looking people in the face I have user groups or conferences or just whatever social things has that been something that has been other positive and probably there goes you know it's been so positive at least for me right you know I figured that there were other people like Caleb and like myself who were struggling with the stuff and so I started speaking of Congress's last year and and then one of the last conferences i did last year the businesses software conference and so after i told my story my talk just like you know just out of curiosity how many of you struggle with this yourself you no doubt everybody raised their hand but as my guess is one out of five people raise their hands early out of curiosity how many of you have been impacted by this in some way either because a co-worker or a loved nut from of longer family members house or over countries every single person raising it right so this is something that is affecting the entire community but most people who are going through this are going through it alone because they're too afraid to talk about it and so it has been so encouraging from me to be able to stand up and speak in front of people and then after i got off stage had people come up and be like you know what me to like your you're not alone you know and then for those people to be able to then go back to their officer to their meetup and and they're they're like lightning talks you know i'll speak could i forget we're always but spoke and then someone kind of knew a lightning talk the next day was like i have depression too i'm Englishman for a while and like if you would have flocked afterwards but with other people like share you know it's the best that's all I want you to see that you're not just some weirdo yeah and isolation does that and that's when getting out and talking to people and finding out oh there's this other thing these other people and you do have a disk performance that's still active yes is not terribly active you know it's not done a good job of maintaining it partially because i know i originally set it up as after starts beating i got a lot of emails and I was afraid that it was I was going to be able to handle all that my own so I stepped up kind of as a place where I could put and touch all the people that that i was talking to is they could kind of talk with one another so I kind of built that for the reason because I didn't really have the time in which to manage the community and I was hoping to that we kind of come self-sustaining and then I just I neglected it so but it said press calm and there's a couple guys who might kind of carry the banner with that victim stuff pressed yeah p ress defrost yeah like depressed with a V in there and yeah but there are even if it's not the people aren't still currently contributing to it there are some incredible stories up there and there are some people who just open up and desert like their life and on there and I think that's just really encouraging for other people here I recall when you first I was there for that when you gave the first talk and I'll take my side about what happened was I I also knew Caleb from from up TV and the community in general ruby is a small community of Chicago yeah and and then I actually learned a colleague of mine it's also suffering from depression and ADHD that's a at my employer at the time and it definitely impacted my friends with him and empathy for each other um I think and totally side I'm for him and we talked a little bit since then but it is important to be share and we open up and then you find out that there are other people that are dealing with these things and it is a real thing and it's not it's not just you being a weirdo at home and desire fault right it's no more your fault than is if your fault for getting answer but you can just like you a fake cancer and I should do it to go and seek some help yeah and that help is not always pharmacological I know that there are top therapy there's talk therapy there's just there's an even best practice over for instance with my a.d.d I learned a few years ago that it was always useful for me to have pen and paper so anytime you find me I'll I started carrying this as a wallet instead and i just put duct tape on here father and i put an ID and credit cards in here i always carry a backpack which is basically like my man purse because i know like that if I like on friday at five I'm like oh and I'm going to need that book tomorrow I know that that's the one shot I have to remember that yeah my brains not gonna bring them back up again so I stick the book my backpack I never leave the house without my backpack in the next day is like two o'clock like I need though I have the book yeah so there's a lot of tricks if you just can become aware that like you might not be able to do things the way like everybody else does it and that's okay you just need to figure out the weights of that work freedom the forgetting the book thing I hike I had to go buy us off lease I the conference because I didn't I am you know and at one point I recalled when I was panicking like I should go get a fleece and love not having fleece and it's been a pretty chilly here yeah so yes I I totally that's a strategy you know keeping paper keeping pen handy in keeping things consolidated yeah so um well thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me and you know if you are somebody out there that's that's dealing with depression or sadness just know that I have ADHD you have bipolar disorder we're here and you're not well yeah and you can drop me an email i'm gb at twilio com and and you know yeah you're the two of us have this stuff and literally hive not hundreds of people over the last year in our profession like I guarantee there's someone else at your office who has this and and whatnot so if nothing else you know if you don't have anyone else to talk to feel free to drop me an email at gb a twilio com earn at great you be on Twitter and like I'm more than happy to chat and celebrate thank you very much yeah I know some things like user groups with lots to say interviews and more no way sharing great ideas in that tech community fascinating conversations a plethora of information find out for yourself today yeah cute a sitcom you