A cultural problem with depression is that it's very poorly understood, but a lot of people feel qualified to have an opinion about it. (People don't claim to be experts on other diseases, but a lot of people have pet theories on depression.) Yes, getting more exercise and sleeping better will help a lot of people clear out the mild, annoying but usually not life-threatening, depression that normal people get if they get sloppy. People with actual, bona fide clinical depression need medical treatment, however. (If you're sleeping 18 hours per day and brutally lethargic for the other six, it's hard to get physical exercise in the first place, and getting to the grocery store to buy fruit is an ordeal. Think of depression as like a really bad flu that last weeks and you won't be far off.) They aren't "weak" in any moral sense; they're weakened by a horrible, largely physical, disease.

You run into the same thing if you talk about panic, because a lot of people think of the low-level anxiety attacks that everyone gets, not the intense kind that literally feel like you're drowning in air.

I think the problem is that our society (especially in white-collar workplaces) measures people based on a war of attrition. Most companies intentionally create unnecessary stress and promote the last people standing after the rest develop mental illnesses (usually the mild, situational kind) that cause them to be unable to perform. The losing competitors are the ones who experience stress-related, career-rupturing anxiety or depression. (Sometimes this is called "nervous breakdown", but I fucking hate that phrase.) The winners are the ones left over, who are taken to have "proven their loyalty" by out-surviving the rest. This is absurd given that, if a company's running well, it should never see anything remotely like the rightward tail of the decline curve. But this is how the corporate ladder game has been run for decades.

A lot of people won't admit this, but they feel the same way about therapy and mood-regulating medications that they do about doping in sports. They're indignant that "the weak" aren't dropping off as quick as they'd like, and that normal people have to compete harder as a result because the people who used to drop off around 30-35 hours per day can now go to the standard 40-50 or more. This is pure speculation, but I've often thought that the emergence of good anti-anxiety drugs and anti-depressants has been a contributing factor to the increasing hours expected in white-collar work (not to say that these drugs are bad-- they aren't, they're lifesaving-- or that people who need them shouldn't use them-- they should) as well as the increasing prevalence of open-plan office layouts where open-back visibility is the norm. Before benzodiazepines, the economics didn't favor open-back visibility. Now, they might. (I still think open-back visibility is a disaster. Not everyone can afford individual offices, but have some decency.)

What makes us unusual in the "hacker" community is that most of us tend to have volatile and steep curves. Under decent conditions where human creativity is at the maximum, we're the top performers. Under pressure-cooker conditions that push people well along the decline curve, we're among the first to fail.

What's changing (in our favor) is economics. Pareto distributions (80-20 laws) can be cruel in terms of the inequality they represent, but those winner-take-all contests (which cause inequality in macroscopic business success, but we never get too tied to a business unless we're founders) are good for us as mercenary programmers. Upper-tier creativity and engineering talent are now worth something. We can sell our skills, finally, for what they're worth.

In the old-style corporate world, work was intellectually easy and tedious, even at executive levels. Coveted positions had to be allocated based on some competition, but the work wasn't deep or genuinely difficult, so the contest became one of doing large amounts of easy commodity work-- 2 to 5 times what a typical person would accomplish in an 8-hour day-- and remaining socially pleasant ("bubbly", even) while doing it. That was how people got ahead. So it was all about the rightward tail of the decline curve, and situational anxiety and depression (again, not severe enough to be life-threatening, but the kind that would make you unemployable for a couple months) were what separated the winners from the losers.

In the new, technological world, the value of commodity work is approaching zero. Upper-level creativity and technological skill, on the other hand, are gold. This means we need to stop the ratrace nonsense and focus on unlocking human potential.

In my personal experience, and I'll keep the details limited, pursuing proper treatment for mental conditions does not reduce creativity for most people. In fact, it's much easier to see creativity through when your brain isn't constantly trolling you. There probably are rare exceptions but, in general, however, altered states without insight (this applies to most drug use and mental illness) are not interesting or creativity-inducing, but unbearably boring and upsetting.

I hope this explains why the cultural issues surrounding anxiety and depression are so hard to address. They're an unspoken but huge player in the corporate ladder game, and there are a lot of people who are afraid that they'll lose ground if more people can seek treatment for these illnesses.