I posted it because I've known a bunch of smart, creative people who happen to have some sort of mental illness.
My guess is that many people on HN are in the same boat, or suffer from a mental illness, or both.
It frustrates me that it's still often quite hard to have sensible discussion about mental illness. If you have a physical illness people are instantly sympathetic. But you have a metal illness, well, to many people you're just crazy.
I think everyone knows people with a variety of mental health disorders. It seems that we're just now getting comfortable with the idea that we can discuss these problems publicly.
I'd also say that since the "nerd" personality types (at least from a Myers-Briggs [1] perspective) tend to be over-represented here, we would probably also find a larger than average percentage of us with Aspberger's Syndrome [2] (now removed from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" [3] and considered an autism-spectrum disorder).
My guess is that many people on HN are in the same boat, or suffer from a mental illness, or both.
It frustrates me that it's still often quite hard to have sensible discussion about mental illness. If you have a physical illness people are instantly sympathetic. But you have a metal illness, well, to many people you're just crazy.