Had this thought. Wanted to share it.
First, this picture of male, young-adult onset, delusional thinking with violent acting-out,
is a serious thing. It sounds to me like it may well be a type of problem with a pretty grim prognosis, it sounds a lot like schizophrenia. Esp. since he acts manic or bipolar, there’s a big suicide risk. He’ll need medication for the thought process disorder, which it won’t be easy get him to stay on. He sounds like a risk to others as well, and it looks to me like he’s got a good chance of being institutionalized or in-and-out. There might not be a cure.
My impression is that his lifestyle and training, plus the loss of a long term girlfriend probably had a lot to do with the transition from weird, but functional to nonfunctional and incarcerated.
We geeks are selected for further training based on aptitudes for symbolic reasoning and skill with systems that don’t correspond very well to the real world. Advanced math, computer programming, and the rest fit this mold. My impression is that people who are very grounded in the real, day to day world of existence and also are able to master these alternative, made up worlds are rare. This is no surprise and no great revelation. Geeks tend to not be as “with it” as the rest of the population. Duh.
We are encouraged to run with this mode of abstract thought. It’s very much a marketable skill. Much like when a kid shows skill at athletics or music, schools don’t try very hard to round them out. “Hey, you’re already good at that, why not try this thing that you’re bad at instead…” is not what we hear. In my case, I’ve gotten to a point in my career where interpersonal interactions happen mostly by choice. I can spend whole days (probably my most profitable days, in pure business terms) by myself with my computer, in a made up world of networks and program, where my creative vision matters much more than any pre-set rule of the system.
Brian took this all the way. He went to Seattle and signed on with Microsoft Research. My understanding is that he worked on human/computer interaction: This would tend to blur the line between people and machines, reality and fantasy, even more. When your job is to program a computer to interact with a human in such a way that the human feels natural about the interaction…you will naturally start to look at it from the other side too: Might the humans really be the machines? Who is really programming who, after all? Couple this with 80 to 100 hour work weeks, most of that time spent alone in the made up world of computer programming, and you can easily get some serious social disfunction (and, from my experience in school, some really vivid dreams).
Then, for whatever reason, in some order or other, his girlfriend left him and he cashed out of Microsoft and started altering his sleep patterns to live more in his dreams and less in the real world. When I get stressed, I choose to retreat into physical exercise and things like cooking and music. I know that ledge, and I avoid it by sprinting back towards reality. Rock climbing is great for this because the feeling of FALLING is a really strong reality check.
Brian ran headlong out of our world, dropping both the social contacts at work and at school, and indulging his dreams rather than waking from them. I hope that, with care and medication, he can find his way back, and can perhaps even be happy and sane again.
There have been some interesting studies lately about two PhD couples (mostly in silicon valley) and how the rate of autism from such unions is markedly higher than in the rest of the population. It’s certainly at least in part due to increased diagnosis among that population, but even factoring that in, double PhD families tend to have statistically more socially troubled kids. As a species, on average, we are very highly optimized, meaning “as far out on this particular limb as one can safely go.” Push any further and, well, bad things happen.
Anyway, it’s sad but predictable. Like the divorces and the young-deaths that are starting to pervade my extended social circle. Life goes on.
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