Software, Entrepreneurs, and Mental Health

Drunken Blog is running an interview with Wil Shipley , founder of The Omni Group and more recently Delicious Monster . While not exactly ground-breaking, Wil does have some interesting insights into starting software shops, and reasons to develop for Mac OS X. Most interesting to me was the revelation that Wil [STRIKEOUT:suffers from] deals with chronic depression and agorophobia. Huh, I thought, that sounds familiar. I really liked his description of depressive episodes, though:

Depression is a sucky thing to deal with because it doesn’t have much to do with how you’re doing in life. I feel ungrateful every time I get sad, because in general my life really isn’t too hard. I can say to myself, “Look, you’ve proven that you don’t produce enough seratonin, you don’t have to feel guilty for the tricks your brain is playing on you,” but I still feel like a spoiled child. Yeah, that’s about it — sometimes the psuedo-guilt is almost as bad as the “30 wet blankets”. Almost.