What Killed My Sister?  - <AUTHOR> http://theamericanscholar.org/what-killed-my-sister/?key=55917458 <comment><USER2> Psychiatrist here; glad to see this near the top of HN.Schizophrenia is a serious illness, and often misunderstood as "split personality." It is a constellation of delusions, hallucinations, and scrambled thoughts that is often (though not always) pretty devastating to work, school, relationships, etc. For some reason, because we have no blood test or genetic test for it, the diagnosis is still met with skepticism from many in the public, even though everyone seems to accept the diagnosis of migraine headaches which similarly has no clear-cut lab or imaging findings.

What most people don't consider is the change in life span: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21741216](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21741216)

Life expectancy as about 17 years less for those with the diagnosis, which is worse than most cancers. It's mentioned in the article, but worth repeating.

<comment><USER3> In the mid-90s, I remember hearing that in my state, cancer research received $150/hospital bed, heart disease received $100/bed, and schizophrenia received $7/bed. My amateur theory on that was that the first two affect old, wealthy people, whereas the third affects young people with no power.

<comment><USER4> Here in Virginia, we recently had a pretty striking demonstration of what you're talking about. One of the leading politicians in the state, state senator Creigh Deeds, was attacked with a knife and nearly killed by his own son, Austin, who was 24. [1] After the attack, the son killed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Deeds was in dire condition, but survived.

It came out afterwards that Deeds' son, who had been diagnosed in the past with bipolar disorder, had undergone a psychiatric evaluation the day before the attack, and as a result of that evaluation had been placed under an emergency custody order. But Virginia law only gives mental health authorities six hours to find a bed to put the patient into in such cases; and in this case no bed could be found in that time, so Austin Deeds was sent home. [2]

This has naturally provoked a great deal of concern in these parts, both about how so little resources are available for mental health patients that a potentially violent one could be turned away for lack of an available bed, and about the ridiculously short 6-hour limit on how long such patients can be held. And rightly so -- if help had been available for Austin Deeds when he needed it, he might still be alive today, and his father might never have suffered such a horrific experience.

Deeds has recovered now, and upon his return to the legislature announced that he would be pushing hard for mental health reform in the state, garnering wide support. But it's telling that the issue had to strike at a political leader for anyone in the political class to care about it overmuch. One wonders how many other families in Virginia have suffered their own horror stories, their own tragedies, in total silence -- just because, since they weren't rich or powerful, nobody in a position to fix things could be bothered to care.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/virginia-state- sen...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/virginia-state-senator- injured-in-home-another-person-found-dead- inside/2013/11/19/3e419ac4-512c-11e3-9fe0-fd2ca728e67c_story.html)

[2] [http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Va-Senator- Recalls-S...](http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Va-Senator-Recalls-Sons- Attack-Mental-Illness-242231141.html)

<comment><USER5> It's a complex issue. De-instiutionalization was driven both by cost concerns and advocacy for keeping the mentally ill in the community. At one time, the cops would use "searching for a bed" to detain people for excessive periods of time.

That advocacy was driven by the horrific conditions that became common. Google Willowbrook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This hits me particularly hard because I lost my sister to mental illness not but three months ago.

Perhaps our society will one day treat those with mental illness the same way we treat those with cancer or ALS, with compassion and love, instead of with insults and shame. I hope that I am alive to see such an enlightened society.

<comment><USER7> My condolences for the loss of your loved one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My brother has the illness. Every ounce of self-doubt I have, I worry is the beginning manifestation of Schizophrenia in my own mind. It's not a good place to be - that worry that every time you "hear voices", it's some sort of announcement about your own mental state? The worst for me is mishearing people, or muffled conversations, where I fill in the gaps with extremely negative content, causing a downwards spiral in emotion. I'm sure it's nothing, and I'm perfectly normal though.

<comment><USER9> What you're describing here could just be compulsive thoughts since you're worried about getting schizophrenia. If you do get it, it will probably be quite obvious, and you are at an advantage since you are already on the alert. Have you considered seeing a therapist about these thoughts?

<comment><USER10> > If you do get it, it will probably be quite obvious

What? Do you mean "If you do get it, it will probably be quite obvious to those around you"? Given the rest of your sentence, I believe not. You should count yourself out on counseling.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, but no thanks, GalacticDomin8r. Obviously this was not professional advice, but I have many years of experience both from the inside of the mental health system and from helping others navigate it. I stand by what I just said. A skilled therapist would be able to see things that GP doesn't, so that would act as a counterweight if GP was to ever get sick and unable to see it for himself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People tend to minimize the lethality of mental health problems. There's an assumption that completed suicide is the only cause of death for mental health problems. But people with MH problems suffer weird sub-optionalities in health care, even in England where we have the National Health Service.

Young people with a mental health problem will especially suffer from poorly funded treatment, often being sent many miles to get treatment.

Off topic: For any Googlers reading this article contained an advert that minimized Google Chrome and opened the App Store. That must be a bug. It is horrible horrible behaviour. Please can you poke the appropriate team and ask them to do something?

<comment><USER6> > People tend to minimize the lethality of mental health problems.

My sister fatally overdosed on heroin in January of this year. She suffered close to a decade of a progressively worsening bipolar/depression/substance abuse loop, even after spending over a year in voluntary, in-patient treatment centers. Serious mental illness is no different than cancer. The trouble with mental illness is that it manifests itself in socially undesirable behavior. Drinking, drugs, erratic actions, not a visible tumor hanging off of an organ. The lack of compassion for those people with mental illness is one of the greatest tragedies of our society.

<comment><USER12> I agree, I got schizoaffective disorder. I had too much stress in June 2001 and got sick, had a stroke, ended up in a hospital and got diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. It is a rare mental illness that has part schizophrenia and part bipolar in that it has schizophrenic, depressed, manic, and normal cycles lasting about two weeks each.

Every time I tried to post about mental illnesses and startups here, I always got downvoted and flagged. I think that the high stress causes some people to develop these serious mental illnesses. Because there is no compassion or empathy for the mentally ill, they have to hide it and go untreated and this is why there are so many suicides in the startup community as well as the banking industry and financial industry with the youth.

[http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624](http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624)

[http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally- ill-o...](http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-ill-out-of- work-programmer-down-on-his-luck)

I post about this on Slashdot and all other tech news sites. It seems nobody actually wants to care enough to help out a mentally ill person such as myself work on side projects and startup my own company or even join their startup or even help write a blog.

So I had made my own website and tried to do things with it. Nobody still cares enough to help.

I was told I would not live to see 40, I am 45 now. I hope to live a long time, but been out of work since 2002 because nobody cares.

<comment><USER13> We are all nothing but data-points on a distribution curve.

If you end up just a little bit outside of the very narrow band where the majority of people can be found, welcome to the land of the lost and ignored.

If you are lucky medical science has put a name on that part of the distribution curve and maybe they can help to move you closer to the peak of the distribution curve.

Myself and rest of mankind, please take a note.

Room for improvement: how we treat and interact with other people that didn't have the same luck in the big lottery of life..

Orionblaster, I want you to have better times ahead in your life than what you've seen so far. At least I can offer you my best wishes over the internet.

<comment><USER12> Thank you, I am a few standard deviations from normal I guess? Whatever normal is, I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Schizophrenia is such a hard disease to study in the same way that cancer is a hard disease to study - it not a disease with a common cause (like AIDS for example), but a collection symptoms used for diagnosis purposes. At least with cancer we have recognised that it is not one disease (Cancer is thousands of different diseases with thousands of causes), but with schizophrenia we seem to still be looking for the "cause".

</comment><comment><USER15> Excerpt:

 _Epigenetics—the way genes switch on and off—is another area of intense interest for schizophrenia researchers. Every nonreproductive cell in our body contains our entire genome, and in every cell, some genes are properly switched on and others off. We inherit our genes, but environment strongly affects the switching mechanisms. This was dramatically demonstrated in a study of persons born during the "Dutch Hunger Winter" of 1944–1945—a famine the Nazis created in the Netherlands by cutting off food supplies in retaliation for Dutch participation in the resistance. Infants born during the famine to half-starved mothers, a cohort now turning 70, have higher rates of all kinds of pathology, including schizophrenia._

I am super tired today, fall out from my own struggles with getting well in the face of a genetic disorder and doctor pronounced sentence of death. I feel pretty apathetic. I don't know how much is chemical, how much is situational. I get so tired of being treated like a loon by the world.

The disease, malnutrition, epigenetics, inflammation -- all that stuff is stuff I have worked on to deal with my own issues. I flail about, unable to find a way to speak of it. I have mostly moved on to trying to figure out how to make money instead of how to help other people.

I don't quite know what to say. Inflammation is rooted in acidity and promotes infection. Infection promotes malnourishment. Malnourishment does all kinds of wonky things to the brain.

I am not having a great week, physically, and it has a track record of impacting my mental functioning and mood. My only known auditory hallucinations are related to an overdose of decongestants. I have no reason to believe schizophrenia runs in my family but the article hits a nerve in some important ways.

<comment><USER16> _Inflammation is rooted in acidity and promotes infection._

Do you have any more on this? I have stumbled across the notion before. Someone typically counters with "but the body maintains a constant pH" and the conversation dissolves.

Stay well.

<comment><USER15> I dismantled my website due to ugly public attacks and moved it twice. I kept the info but it is currently not published.

The body does not maintain a constant ph. The body maintains the BLOOD at a very narrow range of ph because if your blood leaves that very narrow range of ph, you die. But if you watch crap about dinosaurs and stuff, you learn that not only are bones necessary to support your mass when you leave the ocean, they are necessary to mediate your blood ph. You can have sharks and invertebrates in the ocean because the mineralized sea water maintains their blood balance. When you leave the ocean, your body strips the bones of calcium to maintain blood ph when the body is in crisis. This is consistent with the fact that my condition is known to promote acidity of the tissues and also known to cause early onset osteoporosis, as early as the teens.

If you develop acute acidosis (example: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetic_Ketoacidosis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetic_Ketoacidosis)), they hospitalize you because you can die within 72 hours if it is not successfully treated. But then for my condition, they don't even treat the acidosis that they know it causes.

So whoever told you the body maintains a constant ph is full of shit. It isn't true. The body maintains a constant _blood_ ph, a very different answer. I think blood tests are likely not a very good indicator of subtle or early problems because your body places a real high priority on keeping your blood in homeostasis in order to not die. I suspect we would really need to do tissue samples to genuinely track some things in a meaningful way. So I tracked things symptomatically since a lot of the tests the doctors ran said there was "nothing wrong with me" yet I was dying.

Feel free to email me if you want to discuss it further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Has there been any research about the prevalence of schizophrenia in communities with strong social bonds (multigenerational families under one roof, closeness with neighbors, etc) versus modern urban communities (nuclear families or singlehood, relative disconnectedness with the physical world, lots more disembodied communication (Internet, phone, SMS) as opposed to traditional face-to-face communication)?

Edit: Turns out there is - [http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/184/4/287.long](http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/184/4/287.long)

I was asking because I definitely notice that if I am in a situation where I am living alone, I am just flat out less happy than when my wife is home. And I'm one of those people who is actually even happier when both my wife and mother-in-law are home, basically, the more people living under my roof, the happier I am. I was wondering whether it was the same for others.

<comment><USER18> Actually, schizophrenia appears to be one of the few mental illnesses -- maybe the only one -- to affect all cultures almost equally. Schizophrenics can be found in small African villages, Chinese industrial centers, Tibetan mountain villages, and of course in the West.

There's some variation in the respective prevalence of certain symptoms across cultures (catatonia is more common in non-western cultures, for example), but the cluster of symptoms defined as schizophrenia in the DSM has been found in almost every culture known to man (I believe symptoms of schizoprenia have even been found among some people from the Yamomamo indigenous tribe of the Amazon).

My knowledge of this comes from graduate and undergrad psychology, neuroscience and global public health courses -- I'm definitely not a psychologist or psychiatrist. But I am somewhat skeptical of the study you posted. I suppose it's possible that prevalence of schizophrenia might be _somewhat_ higher in urban environments, but there's pretty overwhelming evidence that schizophrenia occurs across cultures in similar proportions.

There have been many, many published studies on this phenomenon. Here's one:

[https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/journal-of-health- scien...](https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/journal-of-health- sciences/issues-2/vol-6-no-2-july-2012/cross-cultural-variance-of- schizophrenia-in-symptoms-diagnosis-and-treatment/)

<comment><USER19> I am curious: Is there a difference in the problems that show up with regards to the country that people look at?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > This parasite messes with the brain, causing rats, for instance, to feel a > fierce attraction to its predator, the cat.

This is wrong. The parasite causes rats to lose their natural fear of cat smells, not gain an attraction to cats. The author mis-read the research:

"Infected rodents show a reduction in their innate aversion to cat odors; while uninfected mice and rats will generally avoid areas marked with cat urine or with cat body odor, this avoidance is reduced or eliminated in infected animals. Moreover, some evidence suggests this loss of aversion may be specific to feline odors: when given a choice between two predator odors (cat or mink), infected rodents show a significantly stronger preference to cat odors than do uninfected controls."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodent_behavior](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodent_behavior)

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure I'd trust wikipedia as the final word

[http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/253802.php](http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/253802.php)

 _For example, rats infected with the parasite lose their fear of cats, and are even attracted by their scent, making them easy prey_

The Violinists Thumb,

 _Toxo does even stranger things to rodents. Rodents that have been raised in labs for hundreds of generations and have never seen a predator in their whole lives will still quake in fear and scamper to whatever cranny they can find if exposed to cat urine; it 's an instinctual, total hardwired fear. Rats exposed to Toxo have the opposite reaction. They still fear other predators' scents, and they otherwise sleep, mate, navigate mazes, nibble find cheese, and do everything else normally. But these rates adore cat urine, especially male rates. In fact they more than adore it. At the first whiff of cat urine, their amygdalae throb, as if meeting females in heat_

I haven't read the source research myself but the author isn't the only one drawing the conclusion that toxo-infected rodents are actually attracted to cat urine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Every nonreproductive cell in our body contains our entire genome, and in > every cell, some genes are properly switched on and others off.

Not entirely accurate: [http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=6...](http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=647)

<comment><USER23> Fascinating. There's so much we're only just beginning to learn about genetics and epigenetics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> An amazing story. And so sad. It could affect any of us. I don't know how to react other than to be thankful it has not struck anyone in my immediate family. Hopefully we will make progress in better understanding schizophrenia and work towards a better way to manage it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Deranged nutter here, glad to see mental illness being discussed in a mature manner on any website.

Ignorance of mental illness is widespread, but what is becoming more popular is abusing the terms to describe your own problems. When the term "bipolar" starts to be used to describe someone's mere eccentricity, it indicates awareness of the condition has increased, but the level of ignorance has remained the same.

A good example of ignorance related to depression:

Many people who suffer from depression have problems with anger. From my experience being diagnosed as a loony correlates with an increase in aggression among your fellow humans that is mainly directed towards yourself. I don't see how subjecting someone with anger management problems to more anger and aggressive behaviour is going to help them.

A diagnosis of mental illness is a diagnosis, not an answer to or explanation of a problem, which is usually how it is interpreted. Appropriate action will help the problem, as opposed to thinking that a prescription of escitalopram or fluoxetine will just make the problem fizzle away.

One more point: people with mental health problems dislike being talked to and treated like naughty children. That is the quickest way to lose their respect.

</comment><comment><USER26> A very interesting submission. If you like long-form videos of scholarly conferences, there is an amazing video of a public presentation by two identical twin sisters who are discordant for schizophrenia.[1] As you can imagine, the sister who didn't have schizophrenia thrived much better in life, and indeed is a psychiatrist.

I am privileged to know Irving Gottesman,[2] one of the world authorities on schizophrenia research (he was the consultant credited by the author of the John Nash biography _A Beautiful Mind_ ). He used to be one of the few researchers on the topic who thought that there were genetic influences on schizophrenia, which is now established medical knowledge. In the bad old days of Freudianism, schizophrenia was thought to develop solely from "schizophrenogenic mothers," whose bad parenting caused their children's suffering. It was adoption studies in several countries that conclusively showed that genes matter more than parenting in early childhood in triggering schizophrenia.

And yet environmental factors of various kinds plainly matter too, as the cases of monozygotic ("identical") twins not having identical disease course in schizophrenia make undeniably clear. Gottesman and most other researchers on schizophrenia believe that there are a variety of genetic vulnerabilities that people may or may not have that increase risk for schizophrenia, and then stressors in the environment (and it is not excluded that some of those stressors may be purely psychological, influenced by interactions with other people) trigger the expression of full schizophrenia symptoms. This is called the diathesis-stress model of schizophrenia, and the same model is believed to a helpful research hypothesis for study of depression and suicide.[3] So if you know someone who suffers from schizophrenia, the compassionate thing to do is to help the person find current medical treatment (which has improved enormously over the course of my adult life) and to cope with day-by-day life stresses.

EDIT ADDED AFTER AN HOUR:

Several other comments here involve participants who have close family members with related diseases, or who have related diseases themselves. That's rough. I hope Hacker News is always a compassionate community where you can share your experiences and then encounter empathy and helpful advice. We should support one another here.

[1] Video hosted on YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI)

Transcript of presentation:

[http://www.virginia.edu/uvanewsmakers/newsmakers/spiro.html](http://www.virginia.edu/uvanewsmakers/newsmakers/spiro.html)

[2] [http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/facultyprofile.php?UID=gotte...](http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/facultyprofile.php?UID=gotte003)

[3] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK107203/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK107203/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I found the 2010 Discover Magazine article, I believe referenced in the American Scholar article (the stuff about Torrey and HERV-W), fascinating. A couple of excepts:

"One, published by Perron in 2008, found HERV-W in the blood of 49 percent of people with schizophrenia, compared with just 4 percent of healthy people."

... "In the past few years, geneticists have pieced together an account of how Perron's retrovirus entered our DNA. Sixty million years ago, a lemur like animal—an early ancestor of humans and monkeys—contracted an infection. It may not have made the lemur ill, but the retrovirus spread into the animal's testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and once there, it struck the jackpot: It slipped inside one of the rare germ line cells that produce sperm and eggs. When the lemur reproduced, that retrovirus rode into the next generation aboard the lucky sperm and then moved on from generation to generation, nestled in the DNA. "It's a rare, random event," says Robert Belshaw, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England. "Over the last 100 million years, there have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has gotten into our genome and proliferated.""

And then our bodies reaction to HERV-W seems to be involved in most schizophrenia. It's odd to think of modern problems like that being down to an ancestor getting a virus millions of generations ago.

[http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity- virus](http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus)

</comment><comment><USER28> The link in the article about the neural network developing schizophrenia is broken, leading to the UTexas homepage instead. I've tracked the linked article down to here: [https://www.utexas.edu/news/2011/05/05/schizophrenia_discern...](https://www.utexas.edu/news/2011/05/05/schizophrenia_discern/)

More info: [http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.ca/2011/04/schizophrenic- comput...](http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.ca/2011/04/schizophrenic- computer.html)

Publication abstract: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21397213](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21397213)

And the full scholarly article: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105006/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105006/)

</comment><comment><USER29> >A model 1987 longitudinal study of 269 patients suffering from severe schizophrenia and released from the Vermont State Hospital between 1955 and 1960 found that one-half to two-thirds of them had significantly improved or fully recovered. These were the most hopeless back-ward cases. These patients had benefited from social workers and therapists and employment counselors—an extensive support system continuing over several years and consisting of one essentially unchanging professional team. By the time of the study, a significant number of them had reintegrated into the community.

i always suspected something like this. Looking at the obviously mental ill homeless people, i always feel some guilt that we, as a society, are just leaving them behind by not mustering the necessary support and help.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sorry I cannot reply to every thread.

My condolences to everyone who had a family member or friend die of complications caused by schizophrenia or some other mental illness. I myself have schizoaffective disorder since 2001 which is like schizophrenia and bipolar mixed together and less than 1% of the population gets it and it is very rare and misunderstood.

I have lost friends I worked with and went to high school with to mental illnesses and they killed themselves. I've been suicidal myself in my life in the past. But I vowed I would not try suicide ever again and work to improve myself so that one day I can return to work and earning a living.

You have my deepest sympathies, empathy, compassion, and love. I really care about mentally ill people and their families and friends, even ones that passed on.

</comment><comment><USER30> " Two University of Texas computer scientists programmed a voice-recognizing computer with neural networks and taught this artificial brain simple stories. They then simulated a hyped-up dopaminergic system by reducing its ability to forget or ignore. This unfortunate computer became delusional. It made up wild, disconnected stories, even claiming credit for a terrorist bombing. If computers can go crazy, can they be cured? If computers can be cured, can we be cured?"

I would like to know how they drove the computer "crazy" (and how this maps to human neurology, if at all).

</comment><comment><USER31> If you are currently helping someone go through this disease - or suffering from it - all I can say is: hang on there.

Dealing with irrationality is one of the most frustating feelings out there. You will get very tired sometimes. You will get overwhelmed. Nevermind. They are having the worst of it.

Keep going. You owe it to them to comfort them, no matter how many times. Remember two things: It's not their fault, and it will get better.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nice story especially that the infos here could be of great help for people who are suffering from the illness.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think I am having schizophrenia right now !

</comment><comment><USER34> No one gives a damn about your sister, only self righteous pricks who will still do nothing just "care". Caring, so usefull...

<comment><USER10> At least caring presents a better statistical outcome on action than simply praying.

<comment><USER35> More to the point, it gives a better statistical outcome than not caring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is this really... Hacker News? Edit: Note to self: read guidelines first.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it because I've known a bunch of smart, creative people who happen to have some sort of mental illness.

My guess is that many people on HN are in the same boat, or suffer from a mental illness, or both.

It frustrates me that it's still often quite hard to have sensible discussion about mental illness. If you have a physical illness people are instantly sympathetic. But you have a metal illness, well, to many people you're just crazy.

<comment><USER37> I think everyone knows people with a variety of mental health disorders. It seems that we're just now getting comfortable with the idea that we can discuss these problems publicly.

I'd also say that since the "nerd" personality types (at least from a Myers- Briggs [1] perspective) tend to be over-represented here, we would probably also find a larger than average percentage of us with Aspberger's Syndrome [2] (now removed from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" [3] and considered an autism-spectrum disorder).

[1] - [http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti- bas...](http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/)

[2] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome)

[3] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders)</comment></comment></comment>


The Myth of Female Software Developers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coderstack.co.uk/the-myth-of-female-software-developers

<comment><USER2> You lost me at "performance at Maths A-Level is the best indicator of performance at degree level Computer Science". I'm a crap to mediocre mathematician, like many people I'm just not a natural. After dragging myself through the Maths part of a foundation course I got a reasonable result for it (my original Maths AS-Level was appalling). But in comparison my Computer Science achievement has been extremely good. I think you can be a fantastic software developer without being a fantastic mathematician. I put this down to other attributes more important to programming success such as perseverance, a dogged willingness to learn and problem solving skills. I agree mathematicians can make great algorithmic thinkers capable of solving very complex academic problems, but in terms of development, software engineering, solving business problems and shipping software, I don't think it necessarily helps.

<comment><USER3>
        development, software engineering, solving business problems and shipping software

These aren't exactly what Computer Science programs focus on. There's a lot more theory (algorithms, data structures, etc.) and less practice in my experience. Working through the MIT algorithms book (CLRS) will be rough without the requisite math background. My MIS program was much more focused on the things you listed than my CS program was.

<comment><USER4> The bigger issue here is that programming and computer science are related, but not as much as you might think. It's like saying that if your main goal is to be a proficient writer you should study English literature in college. There are lots of kinds of writing and writing is useful in any field, and besides which studying English literature might make you a slightly better writer, but you shouldn't necessarily major in it if that's your goal.

I think it's a real travesty that somehow "programming" got parked under "computer science" and hasn't made its way as a staple into other programs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading this article, the thought occurred to me that perhaps it's the "building stuff" part of computing that women aren't as interested in, as opposed to the "math" part, which is the typical culprit.

So, did a bit of googling and found this article: <http://www.archsoc.com/kcas/ArchWomen.html>

Interestingly, via the table at the end of that article, the two professional occupations which had even _less_ participation from women than computing are: Architects, and Civil Engineers.

<comment><AUTHOR> But other fields which involve making things like Fashion and Design do have more female participation.

<comment><USER6> In Comp Sci, Architecture and Civ Eng you basically have to make it stable, make it work and—least & last—make it pretty. Fashion and Design have _slightly_ different priorities.

I wonder what kind of gender ratio UX, UI and IA have.

<comment><USER7> In fashion and design you DEFINITELY need to be buttoned up and make things work. Ever dealt with a poorly constructed shoe, backpack, or bedframe?

<comment><USER8> _Ever dealt with a poorly constructed shoe..._

Most women I know are quite happy to do so provided it is sufficiently fashionable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is vacuous. It claims to be able to disprove the "wrong arguments" for the issues with data, but the only data appearing at all is simply the reiteration of the fact that there aren't many women in Computer Science, and then some logic that does not follow from the raw data. You can't get to causation from there. It's not even showing correlations of particular interest (we already know women are in other disciplines of varying relatedness), let alone causation. This is argument-by-flurry-of-words(-and- graphs).

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't think the IT data disproves the more general hypothesis that females dislike working with computers ?

Or that the data that females have the qualifications to get onto CS degrees indicates it's not just an ability issue ?

<comment><USER9> "Dislikes working with computers" is a new argument you just made; the article cited "Working with computers is a "solitary" activity which attracts more men than women", IT is not particularly a solitary activity in practice. Not like programming can be, though the solitariness seems overstated to me there too. It doesn't do anything to disprove the assertion that there is something about _programming_ particularly distasteful to women, the real argument. (Which I am neither advancing nor attacking here.)

Like I said, all this article "showed" was a reiteration that there are "no" women in programming. You can't get to causation from there.

Besides, if you're going to argue that because women go into IT you can disprove some things, you need to take it _all the way_ , not just use it to prove a couple of pet points then run away from the other implications, like the fact that there are obviously no systematic barriers to women in IT, and it seems rather unlikely to me that there are systematic barriers to programming occupations that don't exist in IT. Certainly I'd like to see one demonstrated rather than asserted if it's going to be the core of your argument. So using this same data we can plausibly argue that the data shows that there is something about programming that women legitimately of their own free will prefer on average not to do.

This is not the argument I am advancing; if I were I'd be refining it a lot more. My point for this post is that there mere fact that I _can_ use this data in favor of such an argument is proof that the data proves nothing. It's not enough. (Trying to disprove the previous paragraph in a reply would be entirely missing my point.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A similar article could be written asking why so few men go into elementary school teaching or nursing. Men are just as qualified as women for these positions, but pursue them at a far lower rate than women do. Looking at qualifications clearly isn't enough. The hard question to answer is why so many qualified women choose careers other than CS.

<comment><USER11> In the UK at least, the answer to that is obvious - the government assumes that any male who wishes to work with children is a paedophile and the onus is on him to prove otherwise. So men simply refuse to endure that systematic humiliation.

There are actually no barriers to women working in IT other than their personal interest in doing so.

<comment><USER12> I have to agree with this comment. I've never seen a country so scared of children as is the UK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the suggested reaons for the importance of equal gender distribution of software developer are exaggerated.

Not being able to code is by far not as severe as not being able to write and read. Literacy enables you to take part in society, and prevents you from being cheated in all parts of life. While it's true that compentence in _using_ software is increasingly important, it will always be a small fraction of the population who is able (or willing) to actually produce the technology.

It is important to be able to drive a car, but nobody considers it harmful that not everybody can build one.

PS: I would love to see more female developers, but they should be in the field for the love of it, not because someone else told them it's important for their career.

<comment><AUTHOR> Software development is now the 7th most common graduate-level profession for men in the UK. It's more common than teaching. It's easy to miss how pervasive software development is becoming.

Even in non-software fields like finance and marketing, you see more and more jobs requiring the ability to put together models in VBA, etc.

<comment><USER13> My point wasn't that it's not useful to be able to program.

A lot of things are useful _and_ pervasive (like motors), but being able to read is just uncomparably more important. The article claims that it has the same degree of importance, and that's totally exaggerated IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >How can we fix it?

This is straight up begging the question. The article is taking it as fact that we should fix it.

I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage collection, snow plowing, roadkill removal, framing, or masonry. And framing in particular includes plenty of math when it comes to laying out rafters to build the roof.

I think it has to do with type of computer gaming that boys gravitate to which encourages experimentation with the computer (swapping out video cards, adding RAM, etc) that I just don't think young girls are encouraged (or motivated by slow specs) to do.

<comment><USER15> > The article is taking it as fact that we should fix it.

Assuming that women are every bit as intelligent as men, our field is missing out on roughly half the population of brilliant minds that could be inventing the Next Big Thing. No?

Edit: OK. Summary of the answers so far. A) Cannot necessarily make the above assumption. B) Women on average may be as intelligent as men but they will never be geniuses like Einstein (or likely to go to prison). and C) We don't need that many engineers anyways.

Conclusion: they should stay in the kitchen

<comment><USER16> No way is the conclusion that they should stay in the kitchen. The conclusion is that maybe women are better off in medicine, law, dentistry or other processions, not because they're women, but because most people would be better off in these fields.

I think that the reason people fail to understand why there are so few women in software development is because they frame the issue the way you just did. They think about how to convince a young woman that engineering is better than home economics.

Instead, try this as an exercise: imagine you're a career counselor at a university, and a very bright young woman has just entered your office asking for advice. She's a top student who can handle math, science, and arts/humanities, and she's got the chops to score in the high percentiles on whatever standardized test is required for a grad program.

Imagine a conversation where you try to talk her out of becoming a cardiologist and sell her on a grad program in computer science. Make sure you consider employment prospects, earnings potential, social prestige, job stability at age 48, and so forth.

This conversation will demonstrate why it's not engineering vs staying in the kitchen. Young women are starting to out-achieve young men in the US, and I'd be surprised if this isn't the case in the UK.

People (who are aware that the achievement gap is now starting to favor women) often think of the scarcity of women in engineering as a dark spot in an otherwise bright picture, but one that should still be remedied. I think they're missing the possibility that the evident aversion women have to engineering or CS is actually a _positive thing for women_ \- that women have realized that they can achieve more _real power and influence_ in other fields. By "better off" I'm not talking about some condescending "oh, you'll be happier at home with the kids" kind of thing. I mean wealthy, high income, highly influential, positions of power in business and government kind of "better off".

Now for a slightly lame backtrack - I actually do think that science and engineering are amazing fields, and the scarcity of women is a complicated thing - especially at the undergraduate level (after all, the most common academic background at the bachelor's level for fortune 500 CEOs is engineering in the US). However, I do think that the perspective I described above needs to be a big part of the analysis. People seem to view the low participation of women in certain technical fields as a negative for women without adequately understanding the other things women are doing and the possibility that they may be making better choices than men.

<comment><USER17> > maybe women are better off in medicine, law, dentistry or other processions, > not because they're women, but because most people would be better off in > these fields.

really?

if you had a teenage son or younger brother, would you be encouraging them to be a doctor, dentist, or lawyer? or would you be encouraging them to learn about computers, software, networking, mobile phones, social networks, the cloud, the web, and all the other cool things we love that are changing the world?

<comment><USER16> I would encourage my child to pursue his or her own passions My goal is to expose my kids to a broad range of fields, and strive to ensure that they are well educated enough to understand and make wise decisions about their own lives.

But if we're concerned about how women aren't going into graduate engineering or CS programs, that means we think something's wrong with their choice, right? It might not be their fault. It could be discrimination, an unfriendly environment, a lack of friendly encouragement (or a lack of pressure, which also works, though often at the expense of the person's happiness).

So think of it this way - if my daughter was interested in following grandpa's steps and going into medicine rather than dad's steps and going into computing, I certainly wouldn't discourage her.

BTW, I've posted about an article from the RAND foundation about the "shortage" of science and engineering PhDs in the US (it's easy to find on their site). RAND found that this is, essentially, a rational reaction to poor prospects and pay relative to the professions. I understand we're not robots, passion matters. But when researchers are RAND are reaching this conclusion, it starts to be very difficult to hold the position that women are somehow losing out by choosing professions over grad programs in CS/Eng.

<comment><USER17> okay, suppose your son is like most smart teenagers: he loves hanging out with his friends on social networks and talking on the phone, video games, and talking with other smart people who share his interests. he hates going to the doctor and the dentist and thinks that most lawyers don't add a lot to society. he likes all his classes: math, science, english. what would you recommend to him?

> it starts to be very difficult to hold the position that women are somehow > losing out by choosing professions over grad programs in CS/Eng.

but that's not what this article was about. we're talking choices at 16 years old, long before people have chosen a specialty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was at a conference where a developer from India said that this is much less of an issue there; that the ratio of female/male developers is much more even. I thought that was pretty interesting - can anybody from (or with experience in) India comment on that?

<comment><USER19> I think that CS is seen as a profession like medicine or law in India. Not a paid hobby for geeks like in the rest of the world.

<comment><USER3> I see people on LinkedIn nowadays with degrees from IITs and jobs in something completely different. You might be right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I was choosing what degree to do at university I didn't even consider computer science because I hadn't been exposed to computer science education before that so I didn't know what it was like and that I might be interested in it. I went to an all-girls school so it was probably assumed that girls would have no interest in it, in the same way that I wasn't offered courses in other typically male-oriented subjects like woodworking, mechanics etc. It wasn't until I took a computer science module as part of my business degree that I developed an interest in it and decided to do a masters in it.

So for me, the main reason I didn't study it at undergraduate level is that I simply wasn't exposed to it enough during my formative years to develop an interest in it, not through any perceived mathematical difficulty or that it is sometimes seen as a solitary activity.

</comment><comment><USER21> My sister started out in the same Computing program that I am currently in, she managed around half a year until she switched to a law program.

She was doing quite well, better than most she was told when she left.

She left saying that computing was boring for girls, she had no outside interest in the subject and struggle to get into the right frame of mind for computing.

Look at this, computing is boring for girls. Her words not mine, if you look into the social stigma behind computing studies. I get called a nerd or a geek when people find out about my degree, it is even less cool for most girls to get into the subject. I honestly think there is a much stronger social side, where woman and young girls just do not want to get into this field.

<comment><AUTHOR> If a guy you knew dropped out of CS (about 10-15% of them do in the first year) saying it was boring, would you be saying that computing is boring for guys ?

It seems hard to argue that there's a social stigma associated with computing that doesn't exist with IT, given that most people outside the field generally don't know the difference. So would you explain the difference in take up between the two fields ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> _> To get onto a good Computer Science degree you generally need to have a strong grade at A-Level Maths (which students study between the ages of 16-18)_

I stopped maths at 16, I hated it. I did CompSci at uni. About a third of unis in the UK have stopped requiring maths A level for compsci courses. They tend to be less 'pure' compsci courses and more generalised programming/IT/'making- stuff-with-computers' degrees.

I did do a Computing A-level though, which is quite rare. It was better-taught and more educational than a lot of my degree. And it was free. Goddammit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Graduates from higher-ranking universities are much more likely to get tech jobs (we're talking 2-3x more likely), so the top universities (which require maths) are supplying a disproportionately large number of the software developers.

<comment><USER22> _> Graduates from higher-ranking universities are much more likely to get tech jobs (we're talking 2-3x more likely)_

Sweet. Apparently having arsed around at a non 'top' university and still having got a tech job means I am in a statistically small cohort of awesomeness.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to see the stats for the graduates from your degree you can see them at <http://unistats.direct.gov.uk/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One of the reasons may be, that men always help women with their computers. They don't need to clean it off spyware, reinstall windows or anything, because their IT friend will do it for them. So they don't need to explore how anything works, it's just a stupid black box for them. Why would they go and study Computer Science? They probably don't know what it is about.

I got into computers thanks to my little brother - I didn't want to admit that he knows something better than me. So I tried to fix it myself. Somehow, while searching for sites about how to fix this and that, I found some discussions on how Windows sux. Found Linux. Found out about programming...

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how we could gauge how much of this apparent "predestination" is due to the innate differences between men and women and how much is simply a consequence of the way our society works. Most people will paint a newborn girl room pink and a boy room blue.

I don't think we should ignore or even try to dim the differences between men and women (diversity is a chance), but maybe society should give more room to children when it comes to choose what they want to become, and not brainwash them since early childhood that GI Joes are for boys and baby dolls are for girls.

</comment><comment><USER25> When I was finishing up my A-levels and deciding what to study at degree level, the standard advice was that if you thought you might one day want to work with computers, to _not_ take a computing degree (because at the time they were regarded as lower-quality than more traditional subjects), but to take something like maths instead. I don't know if that advice continues to be given, and I can't think of an _obvious_ reason why women would pay more attention to it than men, but maybe someone else can?

<comment><USER26> I think you pick up on an interesting point - the focus on Computer Science qualifications above GCSE level. The drop-offs the article points to are between A-Levels and degrees and, to a lesser extent, between GCSEs and A-Levels. But those drop-offs can only be said to explain the gender disparity among professional developers if you accept that the vast majority of software developers working professionally today studied Computer Science at degree level. I'm not sure that's true, and I'm equally unsure that it _should_ be true.

Given that there's a software developer shortage overall and that software development jobs don't tend to require CS degrees, wouldn't it be more prudent to make the professional end more attractive rather than concentrating on outreach for degree programmes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Certainly among graduate employers CS degrees are the dominant source of developers (although you do get a number of Maths/Physics/Engineers as well). Unfortunately I don't think there's any good data on it. I wrote to the minister for universities a few weeks back trying to persuade him that HESA should be collecting this data, but I haven't heard back.

The problem for companies taking people without programming experience is that it's very high-risk. If you hire someone and after training find they can't program it's very hard to fire them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can't understand why we can't just go with "Women just aren't interested in Programming" and leave it at that.

I never considered going into fashion or nursing or anything other remotely female dominated profession, because they just weren't interesting to me, and no amount of PR would have changed that.

<comment><USER28> The problem is that some women _are_ interested in programming, but are discouraged by the education process, which is as male-dominated as the field itself. I know several guys who are in fashion, nursing and other female- dominated fields, but they have never been made to feel ostracized and alienated to the extent that budding female programmers are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nobody ever says maybe our brains are wired differently. Maybe there's some innate differences between the sexes.

Not to say that they can't, I knew a girl who was taking non-linear differential crypto-analysis at as a junior in high school.

<comment><USER18> Other technical fields have a higher male/female ratio, so neurological gender differences doesn't seem like a promising hypothesis.

<comment><USER8> The only technical fields I can think of with significantly higher ratios are either a) softer (biology), or b) have a teaching track which attracts women (math teacher).

When I was in grad school, the math major had lots of women. The vast majority were education minors. The undergrads taking grad courses (note: every serious math major does this) were mostly men.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just as a counter-point to this stupid title, my workplace has 50% more Female Software Developers than Male Software Developers</comment>


Dozens of U.S. diplomats urge strikes against Assad - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/middleeast/syria-assad-obama-airstrikes-diplomats-memo.html <comment><USER2> While I am no fan the POTUS' international policies, I am even less a fan of war or being the world police. These 51 'diplomats' are mid-level and all 'career' diplomats.

Civil war sucks, but sometimes, you have to let the people fight. Few, if any country in the world exists today because it's people wouldn't fight for it (take a hint, Iraq).

<comment><USER3> Ok, but meanwhile there are a lot of innocent lives being ruined as homes are destroyed and civilians slaughtered at the hands of a brutal dictator and his Russian accomplices. Unnecessarily destabilizing regions because we don't like a regime is one thing, but using our military prowess to help threatened peoples defend their lives and political freedom is quite another.

<comment><USER2> see my comment on being the "World Police". This country supports and props up dictators all the time. Why should we pay for a war (with dollars and blood) in another country when we can't even help the homeless here?

You as a human being will make sure your children/family are fed first, before you give to someone else, right? How is that any different as a nation?</comment></comment></comment>


How deep does C go? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5020246/how-deep-does-c-go

<comment><USER2> This seems like a valid question to me. Who cares if its vague? The more to explain to the person asking the question...</comment>