When hackers get the blues

By Sam Varghese
Friday, 30 October 2009 05:10

Opinion and Analysis

Hacking is often a lonely profession: the wee hours are generally the most productive and communicating with an inanimate object often results in people being unable to interact in a regular manner with their human counterparts.
One of the results of this lack of personal interaction is the black dog. Something we call depression and something which is all too common in society at large and equally or more so among hackers.

Depression is an intensely personal thing and most people are often too scared to even admit that they are prone to it. Thus, when someone opens up and creates a forum for sharing about this malady, it tends to garner plenty of followers.

When Arjen Lentz decided to give a short talk about depression in the hacking community at the Open Source Developers' Conference in 2008, he wasn't sure about the kind of response he would get.

Lentz, a senior member of the Australian free and open source software community who for a long time was the face of MySQL Down Under, says he decided to talk about depression as a form of self-therapy.

"Yes, it's personal," he told iTWire in an interview. "Because people don't talk about it, and try to be a functional human being, they don't necessarily realise that others are dealing with the same thing. It's that form of 'being alone' that is extra nasty for someone who is dealing with depression.

"So, my reason... self-therapy. Doing this helped me too, as much as for anyone else in the room (and beyond). It's just good to be able to help in some way - I just happen to have gained 'stage confidence' over the years. So this allows me to use that acquired skill for something else that benefits others, along the  way also helping me. Others would not speak out (or get on stage), and that's fine too - it's just something that I am able to do.

"The original lightning talk with 'raise hands' was as far as the original idea went. I didn't expect it to end up being a group or website, or that I'm now  the defacto figurehead of it. But if it's helpful, I'm fine with it."

Out of this was born the website bluehackers. "Everybody had a look around, and thus knew that they weren't alone," says Lentz. "Afterwards, there was more positive feedback which continued over email in the days that followed. Someone suggested starting a group, and the same day bluehackers.org was born."

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