Psychosis, Hyper-Logic, and Engineering

I was so embarrassed when I graduated middle-school. Forgettable for most, the same could not be said for me. Something to know about my dad: He's the kind of father that would hoot and holler for his son's success at every turn. He managed to turn this short ceremony into an opportunity to do just that.

But that wasn't all; oh no. He then proceeded to quickly run up to the small gymnasium stage where I was and hand me a gift bag. Inside was a book: "Build the Ultimate Custom PC".

The book was comfortably outdated; It was published a good six years earlier. The book was also comfortably my style. Our only computer at home was older than even the book, and I was going to use it to inevitably disassemble and reassemble it a dozen plus times.

Between this book and my grandfather's stack of old tech magazines, it was going to be a fruitful year for learning about the fundamentals of consumer electronics. Sure enough, it was. I would spend hours and hours lounging around at my grandfather's house, snacking on candy and soda he'd sneak me while grandma napped.

It wasn't long before I'd started high school. The nerves were set to "maximum" when I entered the facility for freshman orientation; I was transferring from another part of town and didn't know anyone in this new environment.

When we were told to group up together, I saw swaths of students gather together and start discussing more in-depth. In our larger group, it seemed like everyone had an in; except for myself and one other student. I thought for a moment to join one of the smaller groups of kids, but instead meandered towards the other solo peer and decided to engage. I thought that he might be lonely and need some company.

It turns out that he was merely going a different path from his friends because he wanted to try to meet new people! He soon then introduced me into his friend group after we all regrouped together in the assembly area.

They were all nerds; my kind. I was immediately at home with my peers.

I didn't get along with every nerd in the crew at first, however. I was hanging out with the group during one lunch and spotted a guy in the group with a new phone. I asked about it since I had seen it in my magazines and wanted to get his thoughts on if the reviews were accurate or not.

He ended up talking about the processor inside of it and the software experience at a deeper level than I knew about.

I thought he was full of it. Nobody could know that much about computers at our age. Surely he must've been faking it somehow.

That man is now my best friend. I often laugh about that thought; it turns out he really just was that advanced.

But not all was well in high school (is it ever?); if you've ever seen a movie about that time period, you'll know the relentless wars between the nerds and jocks.

My freshman year's schedule had me kick off the day with a P.E. class: I was either going to show up to school wide awake or P.E. was going to knock the sleepiness away. Early on in the year, I realized that I had somehow dropped my mile time from 10 minutes in middle-school to approximately 6 minutes and change. I was fast all-of-a-sudden, so naturally I caught the eye of the footballers.

They were eager to talk to me, encouraging me to join the team. I was interested; an opportunity to fit in with the cool kids and have fun doing so. That was, until they showed up the next day and proceeded to make fun of a small group of students that were slower at running. In this group? A girl that I had a small crush on.

Having been bullied in years prior, I decided to do something about it; I ran the mile as fast as I could, lapping many of the football players. I gave them a taste of their own medicine, taunting and teasing them before going back and encouraging the slower students by running with them. At that moment, I felt a rush of righteous victory. But later that night, alone in my room, I'd ponder an existential question: Did I truly do it for the right reasons? Regardless, they'd make sure I'd regret that decision in the months to come.

But I never did; I got closer with the girl from that running group and even ended up dating her for a few years.

From the outset, I was a happy child; capable of holding social engagements within reason and generally appeared to be happy most of the time. Internally, things were very different.

See, there's a difference between mental state and mental wellbeing. While one can be in a good state of mind for a short period of time, it doesn't inherently mean that they're doing well longer-term. This was especially the case for me during these years, as you'll soon learn.

This is often called "masking" — where your external self is intentionally pretending to be better off than your internal self — but this isn't always the intention. Depression, in particular, is a longer-term sadness that might not have a reason behind it. The permanence of this sadness does not mean you can't be happy, however. You might be in the middle of a depressive episode at a theme park and enjoying yourself at the moment, only to return to being distressed in quiet moments.

As an adult, this reminds me of burnout, where one can be feeling out for the count in terms of their productivity but may be on the verge of crashing into a lower sense of productivity.

In both of these examples, you may end up masking to hide your internalized state from the world or even yourself; our society often vilifies and punishes transparency around negative mental health. This transparency can be leveraged against you to paint you as "challenging to work with", "not producing good work", or even "bringing down the mood".

Trauma Surfaces

I liked to think of myself as "hyper-logical" during these high-school years. I used to mentally explore the different possibilities for my decisions. Maybe if I tweaked this small variable, it would enable me to have this shift in outcomes. This was a fun thought experiment for me; I established dedicated time throughout my home-life to think through different possibilities and how I'd react to them. Maybe then I'd be more prepared for if the real-deal ever showed up.

I could even establish a thought brigade: A round-table of internal dialogues that would help me think through different problems. I could task them with anything I set my mind to; how to engage with different kinds of people, introspection on my actions, thoughts on art and media — the sky was the limit!

"What should I do during summer?"

"You should try to hang out with your new friends!" "Read up more about processors! You can catch up to that guy by the next year!" "There are a lot of awesome movies coming out — try to catch a few!"

As time progressed, so too did this round-table. Each of the members was becoming distinct members at the table; one would focus on the emotional angle, another would be more logical, yet another would be attentive towards morality. The topics were getting more nuanced too.

"Is it ever okay to lie?"

"Maybe, but it can hurt people in very bad ways." "Of course! A small misstep can help mitigate larger problems in some instances." "No, truth is a core tenant of our values."

"Yes, you're doing it every time you say you're happy."

... Wait, that's a bit dark. I'd eventually brush it off as an invasive thought, but it was worrying to me.

I wish it had stopped there. I wish I didn't experience the rest. I wish it was a one-off. But it wasn't. For every four thoughts from the round-table, there was another one:

"Nobody loves you."

Then it was for every three thoughts there was one:

"It's because you're worthless."

They weren't just malicious; they stood out. Not just for what they said either; they had their own voices. Eventually, they didn't only face inward with their aggression:

"You should hurt that person."

Some days the voices would be louder than my own internal dialogue. Or maybe the voices were my internal dialogue. Oh God, what if I'm just a terrible person? What if there are no "voices" and these are just my actual desires that I'm masking around? What if I was secretly evil all this time?

It wasn't uncommon for these thoughts to enter my mind when I was alone; tears weren't usually far behind.

The voices weren't alone, either. I'd see things. Likewise, they started small — something out of the corner of my eye that would disappear as I turned to look at it. But as time went on and the voices grew more intense, so did the visions.

One day I had returned home from school only to find that one of our walls was covered with writhing maggots. Shocked and scared, I shouted, "What happened to the wall?!" My mom quickly came in to look and asked, "What do you mean?" I turned to look at her, confused how she could miss something that obvious, only to turn back to a perfectly normal wall.

Another instance saw me walking around a creek near our house. I looked down a pathway only to find a lion — right in the middle of California suburbia — with the head of a fanged human. Blood dripped from its fangs onto its deer hoofs. It ran away out of sight before I could question further.

Both of these instances were indistinguishable to my mind as if they were real. Both were within my primary vision.

I never wanted to share what I experienced privately. I was afraid; afraid of what it meant about me, afraid of what it meant for my future. I was going to be locked away in a white-padded room in a straight jacket for a long-long time. So I tried to hide it from everyone.

But you don't hold these kinds of things in for long; I desperately wanted to tell someone; if for nothing else than the ability to vent. The first time I spoke about my visions, it was to a youth pastor at a church I attended with my family. I had just gotten back from a camp and spent a large amount of time confiding various youthful "insights" with them. Surely, if I could talk freely about fears of growing up and manhood with them, I could tell them about my mental problems.

"That sounds kind of... Crazy. Don't share that with anyone else."

Their response left me more isolated than before. There was never another follow-up with them, and I stopped attending that youth group shortly afterward.

Sophomore year landed. My mental health was getting worse. The voices? Louder. The visions? Growing more frequent.

Even if it weren't for these factors, It was increasingly rare to find myself happy. I was consistently depressed, and the question of "Does my life even matter?" would be raised repeatedly throughout any given day.

It became difficult for me to justify getting out of bed — even bad dreams left a reprieve from the anguish of uncertainty of self-identity and reality. Likewise, daily tasks would become a greater and greater struggle. I'd typically eat in my room, and the dish would need to return to the kitchen afterward. To carry them from my room to the next, to turn the faucet, to find the soap — the sequence of tasks felt as complex and exhausting as planning a moon launch. So they would sit. For weeks.

Like a vast ocean of immaterial melancholy, it became all too common to become despondent — engaging with others only through a glossy veneer of my mandated emotional mask. Despite the sun beating down in 100°F weather, there was no light surrounding me. The air around would typically feel thick and foggy; a muggy omnipresence. Even my own skin would feel foreign; like consistently watching a recording of myself from a third-person perspective.

As a result, my eating, too, was drastically impacted. I'd not eat for days at a time, only to drown sorrows in a mountain of junk food. This has the cascading effect of developing intense body dysmorphia. I'd eat everything in front of me to ignore the internalized pain, it would temporarily subside, then it would return alongside the guilt of eating so much; so I'd hit the gym for hours at a time. Of course, this exercise would backfire — I was malnourished and exerting more energy than I had. It wouldn't take long before the gym I attended kicked me out after passing out too many times.

I'd recluse away from my peers and even family — knowing that they couldn't possibly understand how I felt, especially when I never felt safe enough to express what was happening. My friends would notice; one had a step-mother who worked for a mental health clinic. He gave me their pocket pamphlet "just in case". It was one of the most thoughtful things anyone's ever done for me; I still have it.

The Start of Recovery

Internalizing things has a funny way of coming out at times. Sometimes a feather weight can break a weak foundation.

This was certainly the case in regard to my mental health; my mom and I got in a small argument that rapidly escalated. It grew more heated than any argument I've ever had; I threatened to take my life — I meant it. It wouldn't've been the first attempt either, but she hadn't known that. That year I had already tried a rope that had broken under my weight.

But my mom knew the risks well enough, she knew I was not okay. She knew there wouldn't be a tomorrow for me if she didn't intervene.

I was driven to a psychiatric ward and placed in their in-patient facility for my own wellbeing. In California, this is called a "5150"; to ensure that one does not harm themselves in the wake of a psychotic break.

I was being placed where I feared being the most.

But as it turns out, a care facility like the kinds you're placed into for a 5150 is not anything like what you'd discover on television. While of course there are restrictions on what you can have inside (no bedsheets, glass mirrors, or various other items that could be repurposed for harm), it's otherwise fairly slow.

There are many kinds of therapy scheduled throughout a given day; group and solo therapies to help educate and provide emotional tools, psychiatry to help mitigate and stabilize one's internal struggles.

There are non-therapeutic activities, too; television to keep things somewhat engaging, drawing, even occasional outdoor walks.

You're even given the same grippy socks that one might elsewhere in a hospital.

I began to talk with the care team about my problems. Maybe it was because of this realization of safety at the psych ward, maybe it was because I felt there was nothing else to lose. Regardless, talk I did. They observed my behavior, they asked questions, they interviewed my family.

At the end? A diagnosis: Schizophrenia. Later this diagnosis would be changed to "schizoaffective disorder." They began medication. It helped. They began more individual therapy. It helped. They sent me to out-patient group therapy when I was stabilized. It helped.

Out-patient, in particular, saved my life. Up to that point, I was still planning another attempt on my life once I had gotten out. It wasn't until I met another admitted teen and started talking with them more in-depth that my plans would grow healthier.

During a group therapy session one day, I was walking through my thought processes on my emotional state. It was a flawed line of reasoning that was contingent on unsound hyper-logic gone awry. My peer correctly called me on this:

"You're so focused on being logical that you miss the forest for the trees. Humans don't and can't operate the way you're describing, and by ignoring the emotional aspect of ourselves you leave the realm of authentic logic."

They then encouraged me to challenge this:

"Maybe if you called yourself out on it, you could shift your behavior and mindset for the better."

They meant it, too; the next day they brought in butterscotch candies — I had been known to smuggle a few from the front desk after leaving for the day — and told me that if I stopped myself mid-thought and considered a more emotional aspect, they'd give me one.

This act alone was the turning point for me. The candies weren't the point; they penultimately didn't matter. What did matter to me was that someone cared enough to not only challenge me, but encouraged me to challenge myself and reward that behavior. I'd known this person for a week at most, and they were empathetic enough to care for me in this way. I wish I could tell them how much that meant to me in hindsight.

All in all, I was out of school for a little over a month.

I was back at my traditional high school for a week. I was open with my friends about where I was. I was shown incredible empathy from those that I was close with. I was shown extreme indifference to downright distain from those that already disliked me.

Two days in, I was quietly telling a friend about the prior incident with the rope and how it broke. It was evidently not quiet enough in the quiet work-session of a classroom. Another student — one who teased me relentlessly prior to my hospitalization — piped up. "Oh, don't worry; I can get you a stronger rope."

The teacher either didn't hear or didn't mind. I complained to my mom after school, who stormed into the principal's office the next day and gave them a piece of her mind.

The student was suspended for a single day.

But this was the least of my concerns shortly after; my grandfather — the man who was a pivotal parental figure in my life — was given two weeks to live. I stopped attending classes for the entirety of the first week.

After discussions of my grades with faculty, my mom placed me in an independent school for the rest of the year. I missed the first week of that school, too.

My grandfather died.

I stayed with him at my grandparent's house for the entirety of the two weeks he was given. It was a devastating blow to my entire family; he acted much like the center stone of our family. Nobody that was lucky enough to have him in their life was left untouched by him.

My grandmother was left beside herself. I'd come out of the guest room only to find her sitting at the kitchen table aimlessly staring at the wall. I'd join her at the table, and it would inevitably result in us both evaluating the textured vertical surface for ages. Eventually, the silence would break after one of us would start a thought aimed at the other. Maybe it was a small bit of logistical planning, maybe a memory of grandpa would surface, maybe we'd heard a noise from the neighboring street.

Regardless of topic, small comments would turn into long talks late into the night as we both processed our shared grief. Trauma is isolating, even in a crowd. Feelings spoken among family shortened the emotional distance. I didn't know my grandmother well prior to this point; she was often working night shifts or would be asleep during many of my visits to recuperate. But in this time, we grew to know each other intently. While our sadness was prevalent, it brought us closer together. We remain extremely close today.

At this time, school was the last thing on my mind. Unfortunately for me, that came with problems of its own. It wasn't long before my mom received a threatening letter from the new school; have your son begin attendance or else.

I would continue to struggle with schooling for the next year. I was consistently missing school, and when I did attend, I was not present. I was not going to graduate on time — two years late — and I was going to leave with a very low GPA — 2.1 at the time.

I wasn't going to do another year. I was either going to stop attending entirely or take more drastic measures.

My mom had a tough call to make; push for me to continue with education or press for a high-school exit exam.

She went with the second. I found myself taking a "California High School Proficiency Exam" ("CHSPE"), which promised to give me a diploma without additional schooling if I were to pass.

I was fortunate enough to pass, thus marking the end of my formal education.

Post-School Blues

For a time after my exam, I didn't do much. I would play some games, read a bit, and generally goof off. By the time I'd look at a clock, it would barely be 1PM; my friends from the traditional high school would still be in class for a while longer.

I needed something to do. Something substantial. Something meaningful. I turned to an existing pastime, hoping to make it into something more.

See, two months after my hospitalization, I was given a cellphone — an Android phone at that! However, there was a problem; I couldn't install my favorite social media app (at the time) onto the device. The app took hundreds of megabytes (and exponentially grew after usage thanks to cache sizes), and my phone's storage was measured in the low single-digit gigabytes.

While the device had a micro-SD card slot, this app refused to install to it no matter what I tried.

As a young phone nerd, I was familiar with custom ROMs (a means to install your own Android fork to the device). Sure enough, after some Googling, I found it: There was a build of CyanogenMod for the device.

All I had to do was:

Root the device using a community exploit
Unlock the bootloader using another exploit
Flash a custom recovery image
Use the recovery image to flash the ROM of choice

Luckily for me, by the time I had gotten my phone, the device had already had the work above done for me. Then, it was a matter of mapping /sdcard (confusingly, Android's internal storage file path) to the actual SDCard via a script change.

It worked! I could finally install and use the app I was aiming for the whole time!

But having made it this far, my mind began to wander. See, CyanogenMod was not the only ROM around — there were a number of alternatives that had many more features than it. So I began to research the alternative ROMs, found one that I liked based on reviews, and wanted to try it. One small problem: Nobody had built that ROM for my phone.

So after a lot of investigation, asking around on forums, and reading walkthroughs I realized I could port it myself.

To do so required me to:

Install Ubuntu onto the only computer I had access to
Correctly configure required dependencies
Clone the ROM source code
Cherry-pick patches from the person who ported CyanogenMod to my phone onto the AOSP repo
Build the code into a flashable image
Risk permanently breaking my only phone to test installation of said image

Putting aside the risks to my hardware, this was a huge undertaking for me. While Ubuntu and installing developer dependencies came easy to me, I didn't know how to program or understand Git at all.

What's more, while guides and forum posts (usually from me begging for help) could get me past those problems, I had another issue: My internet speed was set to "no".

So, while the guide suggested I paralleled the source code download, I intentionally put the source sync script on to download a single file at a time and to immediately retry downloading any failed files immediately and indefinitely. It still took a month of "NO MOM, PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF MY COMPUTER I'LL JUST TURN OFF THE SCREEN" explanations to get the entire ROM source code downloaded.

But after that month (and a fair bit of experimentation) I finally had it — a usable version of the ROM I wanted to use. It was awesome; so many themes, features, and other customizations that I could waste hours into.

It was my first taste into getting involved in the tech scene.

With this context in place, maybe it's no surprise that my first job was interning at an adult high school in their I.T. department.

Getting that internship was a very fortunate circumstance for me; my neighbor asked me to help fix her son's computer. It turned out to be a simple case of Java not being installed — a requirement for a program they were looking to use. She told me that I should come join her at work (where she was an English teacher) sometime since they needed more manpower managing their tech.

Sure enough, it ended up being a single person running the entire infrastructure for the burgeoning charter school. They couldn't afford to ignore a free assistant.

I ended up interning there daily for about a year until finally they said "fine, we'll hire you".

Career Growth

These weren't the only ways I got involved in tech at the time. When I finally got hired at the charter school, I was fairly familiar with Git. Most of the downtime in my internship was spent experimenting with Linux, Bash, and Python to build out a prototype of an in-house deployment project, and we used Git to track my progress.

But I wasn't just into programming — I was also incredibly interested in design. I met a few peers on a social media site (different from the driving force behind my phone hackery) and wanted to collaborate with them on a shared design project. Having done enough Git, I wondered why we shouldn't simply work in the open and track our progress through GitHub.

The only question was "what to work on?" As it turns out, we had an answer in a commonality we shared amongst ourselves; we all loved making icons for Android skins. I asked around to see if anyone was interested; they were! And thus, an open-source Android icon-pack was born!

Eventually, this open-source icon pack grew to 12+ people and had more than 300,000 installations on the Play Store; I was shocked it was going so well. Naturally, we wanted to make it easier for our designers to move more efficiently.

So one of my friends who started the project with me built a website that allowed us to convert colors from any random color to the palette of our choice. It was generic enough to be used by other design teams as well, and as such was a pretty neat tool even externally. Because I was the other cofounder, they were nice enough to put my name and a link to my socials at the bottom of the site.

Unbeknownst to us, it blew up on Reddit.

Among the new users of the site was a local startup in my area — Sacramento, CA. They saw our profiles at the bottom of the page, noticed my city listed in my socials, and decided to reach out.

"I see your [sic] in sac. If you're looking for work let us know. We develop almost exclusively in MEAN / Angular / Material."

we came across you while doing research into [...] design principles. DM us.

Having not done any web development, I was confused and skeptical. Clearly not skeptical enough, however, since I ended up meeting them in their office and interviewing shortly after some back-and-forth DMs.

I prepped like crazy for that interview. I'd get home from my job at the school, study for as long as I possibly could, pass out, and do it all over again for the week I had to prep.

During an interview that felt like an eternity (but only lasted 20 minutes in reality), I practically begged for the job. "I may not know much yet, I will work harder than anyone else you could possibly hire."

When asked what my rate was, I asked for a raise from my previous role: "Maybe $2 more than minimum wage?"

Needless to say, I got the job. I spent two and a half years at that company, working 80 to 100 hours each week. When I finally left, it was to join a Fortune 500 company making six figures. That was over 6 years ago.

Today I am leading an engineering team as a VP of Software Engineering. I'm able to support friends and family alike from my career success, and I've never had a higher quality of life. I can trivially afford my medication thanks to my wage and work insurance and still have plenty in the bank.

I'm extremely fortunate to have seen the success in my life that many others would kill for. Even once we get past the statistics regarding suicide within those who suffer from a serious mental illness (a bleak set of stats if I've ever seen them), the likelihood of success in my adult life was low:

Those with a high-school diploma or less (whichever bucket you place me into is nuanced) are the most likely to be unemployed and make the least amount of money of anyone in the workplace on average
Those with schizophrenia are 20x more likely to be homeless than those without mental illnesses

And these statistics don't disappear simply because I've become successful. Success is not a permanent fixture in one's life; at any moment I could be laid off, fired, or anything in-between.

The 20x figure in particular resonates a warning sound in my mind; While my résumé is past the point where my education is a mitigating factor in hiring, my mental health is an ongoing concern.

A little over a year ago, for example, I found myself on the absolute limits of what my support system could handle. These events occur extremely rarely these days — maybe but once in many years — medication has helped me find intense stability compared to my youth. That said, I found myself in a psychosis episode where I felt needles embedded in the back of my head and was innately compelled to cut them out with a knife — despite better logical judgement.

Understandably, I found myself questioning whether or not I needed to re-enter the psychiatric ward for the second time in my life. Fortunately, the episode only lasted a day and never returned - but had it returned — even for a short while after that first day — I would have needed to abruptly leave my social and work obligations for a week at minimum.

While preparation helps — I have a "go" bag and extensive documentation and systems in place for my friends and family on how to contact my workplace and beyond — it's not a guarantee that my employment remains stable during what could be a months-long hospitalization. Even with laws in place to protect people like me, it's not for-certain that any given employer will fall in line with these rules.

Even with medication assisting my mental health, it doesn't make symptoms entirely disappear. Despite not having depression constantly anymore, I'd say a good 70-80% of my adult life is spent in a similar haze as I described in that phase of my life. Schizophrenia comes with two flavors of this haziness:

Depersonalization: Where your body and self-identity don't feel real.
Derealization: Where the world around you doesn't feel real.

Even as I type this sentence, it's a very real struggle to identify with who "I" even am. Most days I feel like a foreign actor in my own life. I cannot begin to express both how frustrating this feeling is when craving emotionally intimate moments with my partner and how lucky I feel when I have a full day without these emotional barriers.

Maybe that's part of why I still have a challenging relationship with food to this day — just like I did in high school. These days, though, my problems have pendulum swung in the opposite direction, and I now find myself struggling to lose weight.

This potential to need imminent medical treatment and required cautiousness in social navigation reminds me that I'm part of a broader group of folks: Those with disabilities. While my physical state is broadly left unaffected by my illness, it's clear that my mental state requires some accommodations from time to time. These accommodations — breaks in my work to prevent burnout, care given to tone in messaging, sensitivities around mental health terms — often end up benefiting everyone on the team, not just myself.

Likewise, as an engineer, I've learned how a user experience is consistently made better for everyone when cognition around disabilities and accessibility are kept in mind. As such, I've written a lot about how to make our digital experiences more accessible; it's deeply important to me to pass on that care given to myself to others.

And it's that kind of self-mandated empathy that has set me aside as an engineering voice on my teams.

It's a cruel irony that the voices in my head started from such a "hyper-logical" place that I now rely more heavily on empathy as a guiding principle in my logically focused career. This isn't to say that this shift towards emotions over tech is a bad thing, however. It's enabled me to be better at paths in tech less walked down: Documentation, code review, API design, and management style all benefit from this shift.

I think our society over indexes on the concept of logical thinking. When I was young, I wanted to be a "renaissance man" — the kind of person who could do anything and succeed in it well. This, for me at the time, meant a fixation on logical thinking and problem-solving. But as I've grown, not only do I realize now that specialization is as valuable (if not more) than generalization, but that emotional intelligence serves as a core ingredient to that success.

A better grasp on empathy is not the only way my lived experiences have improved my engineering, either. Having lived with hallucinations that intercept real-world senses, I've learned to be fairly critical of what data I'm ingesting. This criticality has come in many forms, whether it be cautiousness with media and news' tone towards different topics, challenging assumed engineering best practices, or even preventing phishing attempts.

Final Thoughts

As I wrap up this article, I can't help but wonder how it will be received. I've shared this with a number of friends to gather feedback, and it's spurred a lot of deeply introspective conversations. It reminds me of long-form conversations I used to have with others who struggled with mental health in my out-patient classes.

As it turns out, my support network has a fair number of people who's struggled with mental health in one capacity or another themselves. This is unsurprising when you learn that more than 1 in 5 Americans are estimated to live with a mental illness. While that statistic is region specific, I would not be surprised to find out that other areas have a similar rate of challenges in their mental health. Remember, especially when it comes to mental health problems, they're frequently under-reported due to cultural stigmata.

There's a shared sense of community amongst those of us that struggle with our mental health; between Depression, ADHD, Bipolar disorder, Schizophrenia, and beyond. This community can come together and help elevate one another's experiences in our shared reality.

And you don't need to have an illness to be part of this change; neurotypical individuals are a huge part of how our stories are shared externally and how acceptance is adopted. Moreover, your challenges are valid and need to be addressed regardless of diagnosis. I'm a huge proponent that everyone could benefit from therapy from time-to-time. I myself see a therapist bi-weekly at least.

I hope this article continues this trend with others as well; my only goals with this work are to demystify mental health challenges and spur healthier conversations around the topic.

Just remember that you are important and valuable; please don't hesitate to get any help you need along your journey.

Be well,

- Corbin Crutchley

Previous articleConfronting Career Inequalities