How Bad Are Things?

Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health - bitquabit

This should be a hard blog post to write–after all, it’s the one where I openly admit I had an emotional breakdown and saw a mental health professional–but it’s actually easy. And it’s easy because it has a good ending: facing long odds and a frustrating situation, I ended up turning everything around and getting a place where I love my job and I’m a happy person again.

Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value

Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity.  Madness and Enterprise reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state. Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered.

Psychiatry at the Margins | Awais Aftab | Substack

Exploring critical, philosophical, and scientific debates in psychiatric practice and the psy-sciences. Click to read Psychiatry at the Margins, by Awais Aftab, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning.

African Content Moderators Have Worse Mental Health than Global Peers, Study Finds

A new study finds African content moderators report worse mental health than global peers, amid low pay, precarious work, and exposure to traumatic content.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Remote Work (After 5 Years of Experience)

Learning about working from home and location independent lifestyle was a true pivotal moment for me. Before that, I didn’t think much about the concept of “freedom at work” or anything like that. And even though the concept was a bit far-fetched for me at the time, I realized that it surely was something that I would… Read More »The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Remote Work (After 5 Years of Experience)

The downside of being happy

Nobody likes to be sad, but it can have a powerful and positive effect.

Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh)

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.

The unseen toll: Depression, anxiety plague Black women a year after being fired by DOGE

DOGE cuts dismantled a job pipeline for D.C.’s Black community and gutted the well-being of the women who hold up it up.

Who Gets to Define Human Suffering?

As psychiatry concedes long-standing criticisms of diagnosis, a deeper question emerges: What now justifies its authority over human suffering?

‘My brain feels like it’s been punched’: the intolerable rise of perfectionism

The pursuit of perfection, taken to extremes, can lead to OCD and depression – and the number of students reporting the problem has jumped by 33% since 1989

Could Shades of Asperger’s be the Secret to Becoming a Billionaire?

Success always leaves clues…

Choosing​ ​a​ ​Sex​ ​Worker-Affirmative​ ​Therapist

Due to the stigma of sex work, sex workers can be vulnerable to micro-aggressions and minority stress and experience discrimination when the

The Case for Lowering Your Expectations

It may be the key to happiness and sustainable performance

It is time for a community approach to mental health

Abolitionists and mental health advocates in the US are working to replace both police and psychiatry by reimagining how we respond to mental health crisis.

Opinion | In Praise of Mediocrity (Published 2018)

The pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure.