Show HN: Engineering Schizophrenia: Trusting yourself through Byzantine faults
My name's Robert Escriva. I got my PhD from Cornell's Computer Science department back in 2017. And three years ago I had a psychotic episode that irreversibly shook up my world.
Since then I've been applying a skill I learned in grad school---namely, debugging distributed and complex systems---to my own mind.
What I've found I've put into a [book (pdf)](https://rescrv.net/engineering-schizophrenia.pdf) on engineering, my particular schizophrenic delusions, and how people who suffer as I once did can find a way through the fog to the other side.
This is not a healing memoir; it is a guide and a warning for all those who never stopped to ask, "What happens if my brain begins to fail me?"
I am writing because what I've found is not a destination, but a process. It is an ongoing process for me and for people like me. I also believe it is automate-able using the same techniques we apply to machine-based systems.
I am looking for others who recognize the stakes of the human mind to engage in discussion on the topic.
Happy hacking, Robert
16 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 44.6 ms ] threadI spent a decade hearing voices, in and out of suicidal depression and manic psychosis.
In 2012 I started a process of exploration and growth to heal without medications.
13 years later mission accomplished.
Dr. Paris Williams book Rethinking Madness was a huge help, and recently become a friend and mentor.
Curious to check out your book and approach and to compare notes sometime.
I found computing and the internet to be the support network and escape network I needed but I could very easily see with a different personality how it could be the source of the issue. I work in engineering now, but i always focus on community projects such as supporting those with mental health challenges or those in prison which allows me to also stay focused on what my problems will always be.
I like the systems mindset in the book. I think it's great to introspect and try to debug your own self.
Starting from pages 31-33, I found some interesting things. This book is the product of an internal fight. It's lucid in places, and those are the most interesting. In other chapters... my takeaway is that you can't always come out on top when fighting yourself, but you still have to try.
I was really rooting for the protagonist, there:
>Instead of treating the events like a delusion and having to fight them, I chose to work through them—choosing to believe that somehow I was shown something.
>By treating it as real, working through it as a real problem, I was admittedly taking a gamble. I could totally succumb to my delusions and get stuck in the worlds of the Yoshu and the Mechanicals.
>It would be easy. What I found instead was opportunity
The parts of the book I liked the most are those that break free from Yoshu. The rest breaks my heart.
This probably explains the disturbing breakthrough that you call psychosis. If you had a sudden insight into the weird life of microbes, you'd quickly put it into reasonable terms because those insights are below your level. However, if the contents of the insights exceed your level, you'll be overwhelmed and may even suffer serious neural damage.
> Who is it that identifies something as missing? Can it itself go missing?
Your true spirit, most likely. You might reject this idea at the moment, but that's okay.
I'd also firmly reject everything that comes from that Yoshua. The vision you've described isn't really novel, and it's not a heaven, but hell, deceptively decorated with technology. It's a possible future for humanity. Helping others to get unglued from such visions would be a noble deed.
I have had some meditation induced psychotic symptoms. Terrifying experience, but also got me much more carious about the nature o mind.
I have close family with schizoaffective disorder, which is very close to schizophrenia, and have a couple of acquaintances with schizophrenia.
One of them is a chap that has chosen to take the “John Forbes Nash Jr” approach, and eschew medication. In his case, it has been effective. He’s a bit odd, to talk to, but otherwise, does fine. He's married, with a couple of beautiful kids, and has a good career.
I do find it annoying, though, that he pressures others to do the same. My family member desperately needs their meds, and can’t function, without. I think it has to do with how the condition manifests.
Another acquaintance also desperately needs their meds. A few years ago, they spent a few months, where they tried going off them, carefully, and assisted by doctors, personal research, discipline, diet, and exercise. Also, they had our full support (friends and family). We all wanted it to work.
It didn’t work. We watched them slowly disintegrate, until they damn near committed suicide, and were forced to go back.
Each case is different, but they hold in common, a total devastation of normal life.
I had a similar reaction when first skimming this book in that some of the sections sort of looked almost like allegory or something similar to allegory, but I wasn't sure if it was an artistic/linguistic device or if it was something resultant from schizophrenia.
Do you care to comment about that OP? EG: Metropolis chapter (page 10) through page 19 (Yoshu Prophecies). FWIW my takeaway was to have the charitable view that given your ability to even write this book, these sections are a depiction of some of those psychosis period for some illustrative purpose. But I have a small question in my head about it.
I understand it must be a burden to do have do so, but I wonder if you'd find that others would understand you more if you loudly prefaced usages of these sorts of techniques with their announcement. EG: "This is a metaphor, but _____" or "Here's an example:", or "I don't mean this literally, but ____". Dunno what the preface would be for these parts of the book, and I like I said I skimmed because I'm supposed to be at work rn.
The front half of the book, up until a clear pivot chapter, is me trying to put to words a coherent schizophrenic vision; both to establish credentials and to give people a sense of what it can be like.
A common theme I've seen both in myself and in others who have spoken to me about their experience is that it's common to have a delusion that you are at the center of a religion.
Personally, I've been blessed with insights at the core of every major religion that I know more than a slight deal about. It just so happens that the episode I detail in this book has me at the center of a prophecy; It rings in my head as truth, but I don't have any proof of that truth to produce.
In the latter half of the book, I introduce a conversation with Master Yoshu that I feel is critical to the message. It would have been awkward to say, "I heard this from a voice" without the setup to give that.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think what you'll find is that life is rarely ever centered around something that you can ever adequately put to words. Even if someone is always 100% literal, their concepts will not match your concepts; labels are the source of much of our suffering, and trying to label something as example or metaphor or "not literal" already betrays that you're unable to falsify it; thus, there's something to it.
I don't want to dismiss you though: If I went through that burden of categorizing my own text, how would your life be improved?
I guess the other point of my comment is potentially for your benefit in that if you want to have many people read your book, I have a fear that a large portion of potential readers will hear your story, open up the book, falsely conclude "oh this guy is still just crazy, this is a sci-fi/mythology text" and close it without reaching the parts that to me were the most interesting. But I would understand if you decide that you don't really care to change anything, just sharing in case it turned out to be helpful.