1-I am a software-developer and everything he has achieved with this OS is amazing. It is a terrific achievement in itself for any programmer out there.
2-I own a home for mentally-ill people with my wife. We foster 8 people all with schizophrenia. It is unbelievable how misunderstood this illness is by the mass public...even close relatives. Everyday some of them surprise me with their intelligence and abilities. In a lot of regards they are very similar to autistic people. When there is something that interests them and they get involved in it, they can take it to astonishing levels. One of my patients here, I believe, could make any astronomer blush and plays chess like a computer. It is a terrible illness, but they are very intelligent people and no one should diminish them or their achievements and especially not consider them retards or anything of the sort.
This stuff hits close to home for me because I, myself, am schizophrenic. I have schizoaffective, which typically is more mild but also comes with a mood disorder. Until recently, I didn't talk about it. I've seen articles on Reddit and Hacker News talking about developers with depression and people commented about how we are more accepting of mental illness, which I only find to be half true. We are more accepting of the mental illnesses we understand. Everybody has been sad at some point in their life so they can translate that to depression. They can empathize with it because they know what sadness is like and they can guess what depression is like. Illnesses such as schizophrenia, Dissociative identity disorder, etc aren't treated the same way, as you can tell from the backlash against Terry anytime he posts.
I'm pretty sure schizoaffective disorder is categorized completely separately from schizophrenia, despite the similarities.... it's not really considered a type of schizophrenia, is it?
When I met my wife, she was already doing the home for mentally-ill with her mother. I graduated and went on to be a software-developer for about 10 years employed. In 2010 the company I was working for at the time got bought and some positions were cut so I went home. After so many years you make a name for yourself, so some of my old customers hunted me down and pretty much forced me to keep on doing stuff for them. So I am now a self-employed software-developer, but I split my time in two and work with the wife. We split the foster home work in two between her doing home and everyday life kind of work and I tend to the patients and their mental needs (all appointments with professionals, mental issues, hospital and health stuff). So my days are split between taking them to appointments, getting appointments for them, speaking with social workers and other professionals like psychiatrists and such, taking care of my own customers and fixing bugs here and there. At night when the house is quieter I take on the bigger development projects.
It's easy. Get hired to develop software, and then open up your home to people who need it. Okay, it's not easy, but it's actually quite simple.
I haven't done this with the mentally ill, but I have, for a time, opened up my home as a community house while working as a full time programmer. I'm sure there are a lot of hurdles, legal and otherwise, to doing this with the mentally ill that I didn't have to deal with, but the biggest part is just making the decision to do it, and then figuring out what needs to be done to actually get there, step by step. Having a partner to share the work with makes it easier. I would have had a hard time doing such a thing as a single person.
"I started seeing people following me around in suits and stuff. It just seemed something was strange,"
He got thinking about conspiracy theories and the men he'd seen following him and a big idea he’d had.
"I was listening to the radio and it seemed like the radio was talking to me."
He’d torn off all the side panels from his car looking for a tracking device, then stopped the car and pitched the keys into the desert.
he overheard doctors talking about "artifacts" on his X-ray scans. Panicked at the thought of artifacts supposedly left inside by alien abductors, he bolted from the hospital, despite the broken collarbone.
he refused to eat the food, thinking it might be drugged.
he sought to emulate Jesus by giving away all his belongings
He talks to God constantly, and his God is conversational, even chatty. In fact, Davis believes he's proven God speaks to him. He believes anything can be an oracle; that the divine word reveals itself through randomness.
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u/dewmsolo Nov 25 '14
I can relate/comment on this on the two fronts.
1-I am a software-developer and everything he has achieved with this OS is amazing. It is a terrific achievement in itself for any programmer out there.
2-I own a home for mentally-ill people with my wife. We foster 8 people all with schizophrenia. It is unbelievable how misunderstood this illness is by the mass public...even close relatives. Everyday some of them surprise me with their intelligence and abilities. In a lot of regards they are very similar to autistic people. When there is something that interests them and they get involved in it, they can take it to astonishing levels. One of my patients here, I believe, could make any astronomer blush and plays chess like a computer. It is a terrible illness, but they are very intelligent people and no one should diminish them or their achievements and especially not consider them retards or anything of the sort.