Sweet.  Now that I’m public about being manic depressive, I get to write about fun analogies with various aspects of mathematics and computing.  Today’s analogy: depression and mania are like least and greatest fixpoints in lattices.

To the depressive mind, the world is as bad as it could possibly be given some of the available evidence.  (I say “some” because a depressed person tends to ignore a good deal of positive evidence).  Negative facts are probably true unless obviously false.  Random ideas are almost certainly worthless, since few random ideas are backed by hard evidence.

I believe life is more joyful and free when one is open and honest about as many things as possible.  Therefore, I’ve decided to be open about having manic depressive illness, in the belief that being public about it will lift a bit of mental weight from my shoulders, and act as a personal vote in favor of openness and lack of stigma about mental illness.

So far I’ve had two manic periods.  I recovered from the first on my own with the help of friends and family, with the significant downside of not being diagnosed.  The second one happened five years later, and was much worse: I was hospitalized twice (yes, that means they made a mistake letting me go the first time), and lost both a job and a girlfriend.  I’m taking appropriate medication, now, so with luck there won’t be a third by the time the real cures come along (see below).