Ask HN: Is startup PTSD real and possible?
To you individually, do you believe startup PTSD is real and possible?
Do you yourself - or someone you know and/or love - have it?
I ask this as a young person who has had both success and failure in tech entrepreneurship, with particular moments from the hardships causing severe negative emotional reactions and ultimately (at least temporarily) debilitating me from accomplishing things effectively, if at all.
I’d really like to treat this like any problem in my life: acknowledge it, understand it, take responsibility for it, and work to improve it, but struggle to find authoritative related resources.
P.S. I wrote this via my phone while sitting on my couch in silence on a Friday evening pondering this. My apologies for any spelling or grammar errors.
86 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadThese might not compare to the worst horrors of war, but they rank among life's agonies with getting divorced, or losing a parent. They can cause something like PTSD. It can take months or years to be ready to try something big again, and some people never bounce back.
Most people who haven't experienced that kind of failure can't appreciate how much it hurts. So it's worth seeking out people who have gone through big failures to commiserate with. There are lots of them out there. Few will post details online, because it's sensitive stuff that involves other people. So you have to talk 1-on-1.
I believe that OP was asking about actual PTSD, which is thing with a specific definition and diagnostic criteria.
The medical model of the human brain is good for billing insurance companies and standardizing clinician behavior i suppose but not necessarily an objective reality.
The terms refer to an abstracted and coarse version of reality. They don't have zero utility, even if the criticisms are fitting.
Yeah losing all your savings working on shit that didn't matter in the end while wasting years of your life isn't traumatizing at all. Glad you cleared that up for them.
At what point does it become traumatizing? After a person in that circumstance falls into one hellish layer of depression after another and decides to finally end it?
Nobody is saying that those experiences aren't traumatic or stressful. What we're saying is that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a specific thing with a specific definition, distinct from "the set of all people who have experienced trauma as the result of stress".
https://www.brainline.org/article/dsm-5-criteria-ptsd
The person I was replying to was saying exactly that. The fact there's a specific diagnostic criteria wasn't relevant.
That said, you may find C-PTSD of interest:
https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/essentials/comple...
If you take even a cursory glance at C-PTSD, you'll see a lot of it has to do with the stress of being trapped in extreme circumstance, with highly deleterious or even catastrophic mental health effects resulting from that prolonged stress.
You wouldn't tell a POW or concentration camp survivor that their trauma was less than that of a combat veteran or shooting victim, would you? Of course not.
Consider failed startups can sometimes lead to homelessness, which is both very trapping and extremely stressful. Sometimes deadly.
Point being: if the trauma ultimately enlists the same physiological and emotional mechanisms in ripping apart the human mind, then attempting to become an arbiter of trauma severity is really besides the point, if not poor taste.
Personally, I've experienced events that satisfy Criterion A of the DSM-V PTSD diagnostic criteria. Think dealing with an enraged, manic family member with a loaded rifle. Being on the receiving end of domestic violence. Threats of sexual violence against loved ones. That level of bad.
While the effects of those events easily satisfied the remainder of diagnostic criteria at the time and lasted quite a while, they pale in comparison to the chronic effects of choosing to pursue a startup and what that did to my mental health.
I’m curious, since you’re a pedant about diagnostic criteria, I’m surprised that a qualified individual would make such a determination from a brief HN post.
The purpose of labeling disorders, whether it's PTSD, autism, or depression, is to be able to learn from related experiences. It's useful to talk about founders having post-traumatic stress because you can apply lessons learned from larger groups like soldiers and ER surgeons, both of which have large organizations studying their mental health, unlike startup founders.
Labels also cause problems. People reject labels because they feel they are so unique that no other human experience could possibly shed light upon their own. They may be right about some intellectual aspect of themselves, but people's emotional systems are pretty darn similar.
There should be more startup mental health groups, or awareness, or something.
End of a startup can also end friendships and relationships and financial security and all of those things together can happen at the same time and honestly be very traumatic.
I suggest you slow down and write cause, effect and solution for everything that seems to be circling repeatedly in your mind when your mind wanders. I also suggest taking a hike or few.
Healthy living, effective analysis, and time is a fix for most problems.
It was hard to accept the fact that your friends/coworkers will sell you out so quickly, and that no matter how bright the future looks, a stupid founder can ruin the whole thing in an instant.
It's better to look at it as a game and an experiment. If someone gets too in-love with their "baby," emotionally or identity/ego, then they won't be able to pivot, chop it up, exit, or strangle it.
Take a break, get a job, go on a coke bender, sleep with 3 affiliates of VCs, become a Twitch DJ, vlog from India, sell windmills, have a kid, whatever it takes to get back to making a living or trying to make livings. It can be difficult to unfuck your shit after a big loss, do whatever physical or emotional labor is necessary to get back to an even keel. Psychological and/or pharmacological assistance could be needed for some people.
Time off helps and is difficult to take for the chronically obsessed.
Chose your obsessions carefully and learn how to let go.
The most effective thing for me was confiding in supportive friends. I noticed I stopped thinking about it when I traveled far from the people/places that reminded me of it. Getting invested in new projects also helped.
Feel free to email me if you want to talk about it!
The adrenals are the alarm, and the thyroid is the gas pedal. Trauma can offset both.
But yes, life and work is tough unless we have balance and willingness to grow from pain.
Keep breathing deep and take ashwagandha.
These times are more rough than most recent histories.
Sending love.
Life is not trauma. As my cat says.
Can you elaborate?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
#PTSDChat on Twitter - Every Wed 9pm EDT since 2014
"Is _career trauma_ real and possible?"
Yes, absolutely.
I had an experience early in my career where I was working with a partner who was toxic, and over months and months I became more and more stressed out, and eventually I ended up having health problems. I finally had to end the partnership, and my health improved significantly -- but I was deeply burned out for a while, it took a long time to get all the way back to productivity.
So yeah, trauma in your work life is very real, it happens to many people, and it's difficult to recover from. But life does get better, and you can recover!
Definitely consider counseling if you aren't getting it already. A professional counselor can be a very big help to your mental health - and remember that in knowledge work our mental health is our vocational bread and butter, so it's worth investing in :)
In the pop culture sense, PTSD is basically just residual stress/anxiety from some negative event that happened in the past. Burnout, or even generalized anxiety disorder with work-related triggers... these are all totally legitimate things that have a very negative toll on quality of life, and that people conversationally might refer to as PTSD, but from a clinical standpoint, they aren't the same.
PTSD has very particular clinical diagnostic criteria [1]. If you read carefully, they're perfectly understandable. But I want to make some key points: in a clinical sense, the trauma referred to in "post-traumatic stress disorder" is explicitly and exclusively "actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence". That's it, end of list. Among other things, a PTSD diagnosis requires some kind of repeating, severe negative episode(s) -- night terrors, dissociative reactions, panic attacks, that kind of thing. It has to last more than a month, and it has to cause significant disturbance in your life. PTSD is a disorder, but it is almost always a qualifier for a disability, because it is extremely common that PTSD precludes your ability to live a normal life. PTSD, in the clinical sense, is something I would find extremely, exceedingly rare in any kind of business situation, startup or otherwise.
To be clear, I don't want to be relativizing either PTSD or burnout or anxiety disorders. I don't want to be comparing anything; I've yet to see anything productive come out competitions about who has the worse health problems, mental or otherwise. There are plenty of other very real conditions that can and very likely do result from the stressful environment of a startup, and they can be very serious, even leading to suicide, and I really don't want to trivialize that. But I want to make one thing clear: from a clinical standpoint, PTSD is a distinct entity with concrete characteristics. I've personally been dealing with pretty severe mental health issues my entire life, and I've also had friends with diagnosed PTSD, and to be completely honest, even though I doubt you meant anything by it, conflating the two feels deeply disrespectful to all of us.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/box/part1_ch3.b...
One caveat to this: I'm considering workplace sexual assault and harassment as out of scope in my comment. That is itself a really important topic, but I don't think it was in the spirit of OP's question.
During my startup time, my co-founder joined me and a colleague at an event after he came back from the airport and might have even drunk something at the event. The way back while he was driving he was fairly upset (like he was all the time during work) We had a car crash, I was hospitalized for 2 or 3 days.
That said, to quote an actual psychologist, trauma is when there is something you cannot talk about.
Anyways, I'm not a Psychologist.
"Daily Active users" from silicon valley made me cry for days and call and message former early stage co-workers.
The best way to work around it for me, is to accept it, work through it in my head; and if I can identify biases that I am scared of in current work, to at least call them out as things that I have good/bad experience with but encourage my team to work them to instead have a fresh point of view. Some of my spiders include cofounder trust issues; and seeing them can trigger hours of remembering why I am better off.