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'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.
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 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 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 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.
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.