 So first of all, I'm just going to give a trigger warning, I will be talking about some emotional topics like suicide So if anybody's bothered by that and feels the need to leave at any point, that's totally fine First of all, I want to say Who am I this talk is mostly about my journey through the The world of mental health. So I need to describe roughly who I am. I grew up in New Zealand. This is me in a durable mode dressed as a Cowboy and when I was at the age of four at kindergarten I had a lifelong interest in cars This is a green Himalaventure Alpine that my mum managed to wrap around a power pole and when I was five years old After that I got obsessed with toy cars Contributed competitive many four-wheel drive racing radio control cars and as an adult now I do sim car racing online including against Somebody many many of you may know Max Verstappen who was a lot faster than I am Yeah, yeah, I figured being in the Netherlands most people would be lived in lots of countries One of them was Canada if you want to really annoy your landlord build an ice rink on your front lawn This is my front lawn there Really upset him then I moved to Norway and then I saw the light and move somewhere much sunnier I was actually expecting when I came here. It was going to be colder, but actually it was colder in Berlin when I came here I became a chemist at one point This is me before I realized it was better to shave my head than Hold on to the last vestiges of hair And then I discovered this thing which many of you may remember or I've heard of before called WordPress And I started building plugins and themes Mostly open source things for the public Then moved on to getting paid to build them for commercial plug-in and theme companies and then did web agency work But amongst all of this fun. I had a lifelong depression issue Actually, I shouldn't say lifelong up until the age of five everything seemed to be fine after that I was getting frequently asked. Why are you not smiling more? Why are you like so? Sad all the time And I was was like, I don't know. It was just who I am I was getting almost daily nightmares for like 35 years. I actually thought this was normal. I didn't realize this was abnormal until the last few years This is the same nightmares over and over again repeating and When I was preparing these slides, I looked up the depression rate worldwide turns out This is actually quite a hard thing to measure, but it's roughly 8 to 15 percent of People in high-income countries tend to be depressed at any one time So that probably means that 8 to 15 percent of the people at this conference are probably depressed right now Since this is a mental health talk, maybe it's a little higher in this room. I suspect Maybe not. I see lots of people smiling. So that's a good sign Then around 2017 I started to get a huge anger problem. Most people I see I see around who get angry They get angry they throw things or get angry at somebody. I was getting angry at people But I didn't really have anything To properly get angry at them for and so in my head. I was just thinking all I mean I'm annoyed at you for doing this and then in my head I was imagining things that they could have done in the past that would be affecting me now and I'll get Enraged about it. I was like, this is not good. Like why is my mind even doing this? It was really confusing me Now I had no idea Milan was gonna be here when I prepared this slide Even mentioned I tripped in Nepal here. Do you remember this picture take being taken Milan? You don't actually because this is actually our heads cropped out and stuck on another picture No, nope, it might be the faces might be the faces, but it was the background was different but we're walking through the Himalayas beautiful scenery as far as the I could see and Milan kept saying Why are you acting weird? I was like, I don't feel I'm acting weird but like I'd have my phone in my right pocket and Then for some reason it would transfer to my left pocket. I would stand up and start walking It's like where's my pocket? Where's my where's my phone gone? I'm in a panic and Milan was like calm down like It's not that big a deal. It's just a phone and he was like, why are you getting so agitated over everything? I'm not agitated. This is just the way I am. Do you remember this? Yeah, I see a nod but Yeah, I was just like It's just the way I am but deep down. I knew it wasn't the way I was and When I got back to balloon after this trip I sat down. I was like I Have a problem here. I'm constantly angry. I Am trying to miss a slide. I Didn't miss a slide. I miss part of this slide. Sorry So at one point during all this anger that I was feeling I noticed I was getting a headache and I was like That's annoying. So went trundled off to the doctor and The doctor said, ah, okay. Here's some Paracetamol and some caffeine pills and I was like Like I was expecting I'm getting headache for like three months I thought of do like a brain scan or something But he was like they we don't do that for a headache. It's like okay, but I don't need I Don't need caffeine. I'll just have some coke zero Because that tastes a lot better. He was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's full of sugar I was like dude. It has no sugar. It's coke zero zero sugar And he goes it was like no, no, there's no such thing. It definitely has sugar And I had to pull a bottle out of my bag and say look zero percent sugar And he was like is it maybe just a typo on the bottle. I was like dude, no It's definitely no sugar. He was like, okay, maybe but you're never going to be able to measure the dosage and I was like I can just calculate how much caffeine is in there and just measure out how much coke And he was way too complicated like it's a very complicated procedure Just fine. I'm actually getting angry at him. I was like, oh, I'll just take the tablets took the pills I took the prescription walked out of the His office dumped the prescription and the rubbish bin on the way out and went home It had some coke zero and paracetamol When I was sitting there charging away very large like a liter of coke zero. He'd basically prescribed me inadvertently And I was getting so angry at him Just not being able to Understand what coke zero was I was like clenching my jaw and then I suddenly realized where my headache came from I've been clenching my jaw for three months and that was causing these stupid headaches And then when I got back to Berlin after our Nepal trip, I realized I had to find some solution And I was like I have an idea to get rid of all my depression and my anger All together and I always found that building WordPress plugins was a very calming thing for me And this time I had another idea with a WordPress plugin. I Made one which was able to send messages to my friends and family Basically explaining where I was how I ended up there Scheduled some blog posts into the future explaining Things about my life what I've been up to Then contacted the authorities by email and it connected to some hardware The plugin was a WP content slash plugins slash the end The authorities were being alerted Sorry alerted where my body would lie and The hardware it connected to was sorry The hardware was connecting to was to kill me. I was about ready to connect all this together And I wrote this Facebook post this is actually a Paraphrased version of the original yeah, but it said I've been under a lot of stress lately It feels irrational. I Saw perhaps a way to alleviate it maybe to face one of my fears So I did tonight. I haven't felt so terrified since I was a small child Hopefully I can move on from it now and after that I threw out this part where I bought and deleted all the code Which will never see the light of day again Since I'm here, you know that I didn't use it obviously There are lots of nice comments coming in from people Dispective thing if you say you're stressed about something But what really surprised me was I was getting messages from nine specific people who all had extremely similar problems And so I really spilling their guts to me telling me the whole life story And I was like well if you talk to many friends about this and they're like, oh, no, no, no I can't possibly talk to friends about this. I was like, how come they're like, oh, they wouldn't understand Okay, if you tried therapy and some of them said yeah, they had tried therapy Some of them had done it for like two years. I felt better, but I still have this underlying anger Which I couldn't explain. I didn't know where I was coming from two years later no further improvement and so I started looking for Other means to improve my situation and I started reading up about psilocybin therapy psilocybin for any of you don't know is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms and magic truffles And in particular there's this study of linked here from Imperial College London into the treatment of Treatment resistant depression so people who have been treated for depression via various other means psychotherapy antidepressants many other Methods, but they're all failed But when they treated them with psilocybin therapy a Very large number of them were getting huge results very positive results and there was one Presentation online that I found from Dr. Rosalind Watts who was one of the researchers on this project and She quoted one of the study participants who said I want to know why I'm depressed I just don't know why I wish I could know I wish I could understand And I suddenly realized this is this is me. I wanted to know why I was depressed I knew I was depressed, but I had no explanation for why I was depressed didn't know I was angry either So with all this on board February 12th, 2021 My therapist on hand and somebody else Available to tend to me at the time I chugged a Rather nasty tasting glass of orange juice with psilocybin compound in it lay down on a sofa the blindfold on which is the procedure used in this study those conducted in the UK and Proceeded to have my brain completely explode I was seeing these Streams of purple symbols little rectangles with symbols on the flying in Thousands of them and there would be purple ones and then green ones purple ones and green ones. I was like, this is super weird I was like the heck's going on and then suddenly realized I had this deep love for the purple symbols And I say that's weird and I was like well I also have love for these green symbols. I was like what the heck I was like Why do I love the purple symbols and then suddenly one of them shot up boom hit me in the face? And it was a picture of a limoge plate Which is something my mother collected when I was a small child and they were either dark blue or dark red dark blue and Dark red together makes purple so somebody somehow my brain had symbolized my mother as a color purple and This is a woman who I really thought I had very little connection with until this moment And suddenly I'm feeling this deep deep deep love for and then I was like well what the heck is the green symbols? And then boom I had this vision on my head of my dad driving home in the green car that I showed you guys earlier Home from work park outside walk up through all the green foliage. I'm looking at him through the window Then I run around the outside of the house He'll come in around through our very badly decorated 1970s vintage green laundry and greet me And then he'd go down on his knees and hug me. I was like whoa, so my dad is apparently some green symbol on my head I was like, oh, this is strange And I was like why are there's why are some of them have a tool symbol on them? And then I suddenly realized the most positive experience I have from my dad from childhood Was working in the basement where he was building things And at this point I just had a complete meltdown that's the thing I said before about not being out at Christ since 12 Totally not true. My tear ducts definitely work I was like streaming non-stop and then I suddenly realized Why is my website green geeked a hellier to Kiwi and then I realized I had previously made it green because my My connection with my dad is relating to building things I symbolize him as green in my head and I subconsciously made my website green because this website is about building things with WordPress and Since then I've actually found a whole bunch of things in my life for a color-coded things without realizing I'm wearing red for reason and then I was sitting there Crying and I was like I'm trying to find out why I'm angry So I started asking why am I angry and more purple and green symbols are flying and I'll say this is not helpful I'm not angry at my parents So what the heck's going on here and I screamed myself in my head Why are you angry and then in the distance popped up this brown orange symbol? I was like oh, let's look ominous. I was like come a bit closer and it came a bit closer I couldn't really wake work out what it was and I was like come closer and then it just sort of like Waved which indicated to me that this was something. I was never meant to see and And the next moment I was just yelled at myself internally to make it come to me and it went so straight in front of me and I saw it The most terrifying looking thing I'd ever seen in my life was a brown orange tree which symbolize Apparently everything that I was afraid of in life. I'd very lucky I didn't have a coat brown in my pants to that point because I was absolutely terrified and Then I just disappeared and I said to my serotherapist you are correct I have a fundamental attachment to my parents what she really liked She said she's never seen anybody flip from saying they have no attachment to the parents to the extreme opposite like in about an hour So she was very happy with all for this and very happy that I was crying But I still had no idea why I was angry or why I was impressed and then over the next two weeks I was having the same sort of nightmares. I had my whole life But they were extremely vivid. The drug is long gone from a system at this point but all of a sudden These color connections that I had learned from the the psilocybin experience I suddenly realized applied to all of my dreams And I started patching things together over the next week as to what each of these dreams meant in some way and then at the two week mark I was like I Figured I figured out a bunch of interesting things But I still don't know why I'm depressed and why I'm angry and then I was like well There's only one dream I haven't had yet and it suddenly hit me like a brick to the face And it was this one symbolized here of it was of my grandfather pulling up In a green car the same one we had up when I was child I was standing beside a power pole on the side of the road and My grandfather asked me to get into the car my grandfather was colored orange Which is actually the color he was the last time I saw him because he was dead in the funeral home They just put bad makeup on him after he died and he was orange And I'll get in the car and my whole life. I've been waking up in a cold sweat panicking and I was like, huh I Told lots of people this story and everybody said oh, it's because you you're upset about your grandfather dying But I always said I didn't Fear and feel any fear of my grandfather at this point. It was something else But it know what and suddenly realized it's the power poles is the one that I mentioned earlier that my mom wrapped Our car around on February 12th 1985 I'd never been allowed to process that my brother was extremely badly injured I was shuttled off to my grandparents and I was asked not to discuss it in the family because it's stressed out my brother who was badly injured a stressed out my mom who was Very traumatized by it. My dad didn't want to talk about it I was asked not to talk to the kids at school about it in case they went bugged my brother about it so I just held in all the stress for like close to 40 years and At this point Well actually one important point I Found this out a few weeks later the car crashes listed is happening on February 12th 1985 and my medical records And it's the psilocybin trip on February 12th 20,000 2021. I don't know if there's coincidence I'm thinking it's probably not but My brother noticed correlation there when I told him about this story later So the after effects of this I was this is the happiest I've been since five years of age and it's held this way since this is three years ago I think now I'd learned that getting to the root of my emotion problems allowed me to solve those problems and solve a lot of my stress I have no nightmares. That's actually not quite true. I have no recurring nightmares and they're very mild I Discovered that crying is good I actually went to visit Remkirch de Fries a few weeks ago and I was telling him some some Very emotional stories and I burst into tears in front of them and the past is no way I would have done that But I've now realized that whenever I cry about something It just releases this tension out of my system So if anybody anybody here is like, oh, I don't cry because I want to be like tough guy Bad idea It took me to like 40 something years of age to realize that this is a not a not a good problem I'm not a good idea The only negative effect I noticed was my resting heart rate shot up to around 95 beats per minute And this is like overnight during the day. It would be like 120 beats per minute Which is pretty high considering my resting heart rate now is about 58 I think my brain was just processing a lot of stuff from the past rather abruptly for three months Conclusion is us developers are not robots and this probably applies to Everybody in the tech industry. I think a lot of people see us. We're tuning out websites plugins Articles whatever it is you're doing We're all emotional beasts We hide a lot of emotional things from ourselves or at least I did Motions are a lot more complicated than I think many of us realize most of all if any of this resonates with you Or you think it applies to somebody you know I think seeking help or getting therapy is by far the best option You're absolutely not alone there are many people I'm Standing up here and talking but I'm sure there are many people at this event here today with similar stories Maybe not crazy stories about colored symbols flying at them, but I've had similar Resolutions to their issues Very important notice be careful with drugs I didn't just like go get a bunch of truffles and like Chug them at a party. This is like two years of therapy my therapist monitoring me the whole time people assisting and then another year of therapy after that so this wasn't just a big drug-fueled solution that I found here Big thank you to my friends and family who I thought might find my story a bit weird But the biggest thank you probably to the Stratix team some of you will know the Stratix company I was working for them at the time was actually the first employee of the company And we had this very cool team here Most of us are gone now from the team But I was expecting when I went to them and said yeah I just did a bunch of drugs and I'm seeing like purple and green symbols And I'm freaking out and I need two weeks of work that there would be a problem But they were very understanding Like super understanding and I will be forever appreciating that of them I have a quick note here that doesn't apply to me, but will apply to Possibly some of you in this room a lot of people do remote work, and I see a lot of remote workers who? Just work from home all the time. This is a quote from a member of the WordPress community from many years ago who said working alone all day How do you cope with seeing no one turns out they had seen no one, but the person they Bought the groceries from For like three months. I was like I think you should find some solution to that My solution is I go to co-working events At work in libraries with a lot of other people cafes. I often run I just gather a lot of people together for a co-working session in a hotel lobby. We just gatecrash a hotel lobby They're good air conditioning food water Wi-Fi usually works really well Excellent. I just think that's a good way to keep some sort of personal connection going which is I think very good for people's personal health Last thing I'm Unemployed right now. So if you're hiring let me know and thank you very much for listening