Show HN: Engineering Schizophrenia: Trusting yourself through Byzantine faults
Hi HN!
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 I will check out your book as I had what I now believe to be trauma schizophrenic response (auditory and visually), and was diagnosed with unspecified schizophrenia in my late teens. I found that dealing with the trauma and dealing with what allows my brain to struggle helped solve things. Now in my mid 30's I am so used to dealing with it without medication it isn't an issue any more but I do have to do a few things every day to make sure I do not get to a place where things are possible. 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 appreciate you saying something. As you'll read in the book, I've got a project going to primarily help myself, but to date it's been 100% open-source. I haven't been able to be consistent enough to both pay the bills and volunteer and work on the open source, so I focus on the former. Would you mind saying more about what you do every day? For me, I anchor myself for at least a set time; when I sit during that time, nothing can touch me and I can deconstruct symptoms to recover any deviation from baseline. Hi Robert - I have no comments on the human mind, but wanted to say that I enjoyed your work on Warp and I'm glad to hear you're finding a path that's working for you. I've had two relatives with schizophrenia and the difference between the one who found a way to make things work and the one who didn't was very striking (and sad for the one who didn't). Hi Dave, I'm surprised you can remember me. We once sat near each other on a bus for SOSP, and that's the extent we interacted in person, so it warms my heart to hear someone like you remembers someone like me. In case you're looking for the technical, the book doesn't say such, but one innovation laid out for me was my work on lsmtk, a new compaction algorithm for LSM trees. I'm not sure if I'm off my rocker here or not, but I documented it when I released the crate: https://crates.io/crates/lsmtk. I know you're busy, but in case you revisit this thread and want a neat trick, I thought I'd bring it up. Lastly (and most important as I'm prone to doing), I appreciate you sharing something personal like that. Hearing that others who have tried to make it work can often do so keeps me going on my worst days. Hello! I 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. Thank you for the book recommendation! I will see if it's for me. Thanks for sharing that, Robert, and good luck! 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 appreciate you sharing. My understanding is schizoaffective disorder is one of four categories of schizophrenia. I think people often use them interchangeably. Medication can be tricky because when it works it seems increasingly unnecessary and often has side effects of its own. I hope no one reads my book as a substitute or prescription to avoid medication on their path. To each their own, but it's not what I'm advocating for. Thank you again! Great book. Its first part could become a sci-fi novel, and that's probably how many of the great novels were written. Its second part makes me think that you have a high spiritual foundation, despite your hardcore scientific attitude. Otherwise how did you spontaneously jump to the essence of meditation at that level? 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. Also from 1988. Nice writings. Btw, still in meds but same symptoms. My psych doesn
't allow me to not have those pills. I am on leave at work so not so happy about work life. But I am based in Spain so YMMV. Thanks, is there a .mobi version? I have had some meditation induced psychotic symptoms. Terrifying experience, but also got me much more carious about the nature o mind. Well, I've reached the end of the book. 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. I'm sorry to hear you were heartbroken. I assure you I've seen people who are worse than me turn out much better than me and I hold hope that I'm on a good trajectory. I read parts of this and found them quite interesting! One of the annoying things about schizophrenia is when someone you care about is in treatment/remission/managing their symptoms, if they use metaphor or symbolism or other similar linguistic devices it can be hard to tell if they are doing that - intentionally using metaphor/symbolism/imagery to make a point, or if they are veering off into a strange delusional statement and something you think is meant to be metaphor is actually written or spoken literally. 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. From where I sit today, I can say that I see things others don't. I have a hard time saying they aren't real, though, as experience has been a zero-knowledge proof the the commentary. 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? My life wouldn't be improved at all, I mostly just wanted to get your reaction because I was curious. I have a person I care about who suffers from schizophrenia and I struggle to tell when they are exaggerating or saying something for comedic effect or hyperbole or if they are making an analogy or are saying something literal, so my question / comment was mostly to hopefully gain some perspective. I could just ask them "are you saying you literally believe X" every few minutes but it's hard to get a word in with them sometimes. 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. I appreciate the feedback. I can definitely see people thinking I'm crazy by the first few chapters and not getting to the good part. I was trying (and failed) to be clever about improving your life. What you say about exaggeration vs hyperbole vs analogy vs literal resonates with me. Have you considered they may not, themselves, have an answer to this? For example, I often throw out (hyperbolicly) really wild numbers at work that are off by orders of magnitude to illustrate what happens when stuff grows to an extreme; yet, I'm also very cautious to get precise numbers when building. My co-workers may be bothered by this (so I'll be more mindful now that I've probed for this insight), but I would like to think that hyperbole is easily detected. Honestly, I don't know if I can help with perspective without witnessing you with your care-person. Everyone's different and the nature of the beast is you only interact with really ill people when you yourself are out of commission. I wouldn't want to generalize me onto someone else. Perhaps you just show them the post I'm replying to and ask what they think? Loved this post :). good writing!!