This was a really fascinating thread and I enjoyed reading all of your comments, Bohms especially on his journey with anxiety and substance issues.
For our US members, I want to offer a caveat regarding the use of any psychoactive substances, prescribed or not: keep it on the down low at work to avoid any negative impacts on your career. There is a stigma attached to psychological “problems” in our society, it might even be a bigger problem than the actual psychological problems our society has.
If you work for a big company you might find that the HR dept is actually your friend, but really the only way to keep your medical problems at arms length is if you can use the third-party behavioral health organization or mental health organization services offered by your medical plan. ( I worry too about the role insurance companies play in all this stuff - with the information that they collect and aggregate and how they can abuse what they know about problems you have).
Anyway, If you have to apprise anyone outside of HR of your personal situation, like a member of management, then you have compromised your privacy and potentially damaged your career prospects. Just be careful who you share these details with - this is a good reason to cultivate solid personal friendships with somebody in your chain of management who you know will have your back, should you ever need it.
I have had several friends crack up in visible ways - one over a divorce which landed him in a psych ward - others with chronic problems that finally culminated in acute episodes of substance abuse or legal problems. And in Silicon Valley it has become very unfashionable to have personal problems that intrude on your professional life. Despite the touchy feely culture that a lot of tech companies CLAIM to foster, in my experience this is mostly bullshit, and they merely pay lip service to the idea that employees are their number one priority - this is mostly for PR purposes. There are two factors in this: one is the influx of all the Asian and Indian engineers you get a lot of these emotionally wooden, kind of robotic personalities in these companies - they work like machines, and what has happened is that they set the bar at these inhuman levels where it’s virtually impossible for Anglos to compete. The other is that tech companies have this kid-employee fetish where they claim it’s to get the latest generation of employee, uncorrupted by previous corporate politics and in reality it’s so they can exploit eager workers who will sell themselves into wage slavery just so they can stop eating Top Ramen. People who work in this business surely will know what I’m talking about but I suppose to the rest of you it will sound a bit strange or maybe even racist or ageist. I can only assure you it’s not, and it’s a cultural phenomenon I’ve observed over the 15+ years I’ve been in the industry.
Anyway, anxiety in this new paradigm is a professional liability - and I never had major problems with it, however, I have battled anxiety for much of my life - even as a child, so I think I have been a bit blase about the whole thing.
I want to share an experience I once had, in which I made the mistake of telling one of our C- level executives (this was at a start up) about my anxiety problems, because it was affecting my ability to perform at work, and I am pretty sure that while he never shared this information with anyone else, I believe that it permanently altered his perception of me as an employee, that I wasn’t reliable or tough enough, or what not. Even though I was an extremely dedicated employee, and in fact the anxiety was in large part work related - partly to the stresses of my job, in which I was literally working 3 shifts a day covering customers on 3 continents. In any case, I am convinced to this day that most people would have cracked under the pressure. The anxiety was causing me some disturbing physical symptoms which of course made me even more anxious - until my doctors and I were able to figure out that the cause was the anxiety itself. Once I was convinced I wasn’t actually ill, I got better quite rapidly and haven’t had any relapses and in fact am much better at managing anxiety and actually avoiding it.
And maybe here’s another thread entirely, regarding life/work/stress balance: try to avoid putting yourself in extreme situations such as that. For me, since I had worked at other startups, in high pressure conditions, I figured I could handle anything. The mistake I made was in not taking into consideration the fact that my life had changed since I had been in those other high pressure environments, and I had more stressors and responsibilities in my personal life than I did back then- and it was just too much. In my line of work, confidence is an asset , but it can also be a liability in your personal life. Don’t figure you can handle everything - you CAN, but only to a certain point. Everyone has their limit. Knowing that limit, which requires a fair amount of introspection and self-assessment, is tricky. And really busy people often don’t have the time, or feel they can’t take the time. You *have* to make time for yourself. Very important. I don’t want to say to look out for number one, because that’s so cliche.but please.look out for number one.
