I Am Jack’s Reality Check

I am Jack’s reality check.

This is what comes immediately after philosophy.

Naturally.

A philosophy is easiest to believe on a good day.

On a good day I can say that reality gets first refusal. I can challenge assumptions. I can distinguish fact from experience from interpretation. I can preserve context, identify the missing denominator, notice the proxy, protect what I love, make something that did not exist before, and refuse to lie to myself more than survival requires.

I can write six thousand words explaining the system.

Then the system wakes up depressed.

This is not an objection to the philosophy.

It is the test.

I have lived with depression, and at times anxiety and hypomania, for roughly forty years.

There have been years when I was functional enough to move across the country, study for professional certifications, begin a software career, buy a house, marry, support a family, earn good money, write software, mentor people, meet strangers, date, travel, build things, and make plans.

There have been days when the available world became:

Sleep.

Eat something.

Feed the cats.

Clean the litter box.

Do enough work not to lose the job.

Go back to bed.

Those days do not merely contain a pessimistic opinion about the same life.

They contain a different usable life.

Energy changes.

Attention changes.

Hope changes.

Confidence changes.

The distance between the bed and the kitchen changes without either piece of furniture moving.

The people I might contact remain in the phone. The meetup remains on the calendar. The job posting remains open. The dating profile remains technically available. The code remains where I left it.

The facts have not disappeared.

My access to them has changed.

Then interpretation arrives to explain the experience.

Nothing will improve.

Nobody is there.

There is no point.

This is my life now.

This is my life always.

The interpretation feels like a fact because the experience supplying it is real.

That is the reality check.

A real experience can produce a false prophecy.

The answer is not to deny the experience.

The answer is to deny it unlimited jurisdiction.

Facts, experience, interpretation

Jack’s philosophy already has borders.

A fact is independently checkable.

An experience is what happened to a person as that person encountered the world.

An interpretation is the account constructed to connect facts and experience into meaning.

Mental illness does not abolish those distinctions.

It makes them urgent.

Here are some facts from my own history, subject to the ordinary limits of memory and the need to verify exact dates and medication details against records before publication.

I have been hospitalized for psychiatric care three times.

I have taken more than thirty psychiatric medications across several decades.

I have seen more than twenty-five therapists, psychiatrists, diagnosticians, and other mental-health specialists for periods ranging from a single visit to more than a year.

In 2026 alone I underwent ten sessions of ECT, a course of ketamine treatment, and a course of TMS. I also attended an intensive outpatient program several evenings a week while working.

I currently take eight daily prescriptions.

Those are facts about treatment exposure.

They do not establish that treatment is useless.

They do not establish that treatment works.

They do not establish that I am unusually diligent, unusually sick, unusually mistreated, unusually difficult to treat, secretly cured, permanently doomed, or morally superior because I have accumulated enough psychiatric procedures to qualify for a punch card.

Those would be interpretations.

My experience is messier.

Some treatment helped.

Some did nothing I could detect.

Some appeared to help for a while.

Some produced side effects that were worse than the problem they were supposed to solve.

Some therapy gave me language I still use decades later.

Some therapy gave me homework I never used again.

Some clinicians were kind.

Some were cruel.

Some were competent in ways I did not appreciate at the time.

Some were probably wrong.

I was certainly wrong sometimes too.

The history does not form a clean clinical arc.

It forms a life.

Before Jack

I was low-energy in high school.

I thought diet and exercise might fix it.

This was a durable theory.

I carried it into college, where the problem became harder to explain with vegetables.

During my second semester I experienced what I remember as my first unmistakable major depression. I failed take-home math and science tests, an achievement requiring a special relationship with incapacity because the tests were already in my possession.

I listened to Nine Inch Nails and Ice-T.

I continued to believe diet and exercise might help.

I saw therapists.

They did not help much.

At twenty-three I became severely depressed while caught in an unhealthy emotional fixation involving a manipulative boss. Eventually I could barely function.

A doctor prescribed Prozac.

About a week later I admitted myself to a psychiatric hospital.

That was the first hospitalization.

Over the following years came more medications and more therapists.

One therapist helped almost immediately by doing something so sophisticated that modern healthcare may someday patent it.

He noticed I was angry.

Not sad underneath the anger.

Not afraid disguised as anger.

Not using anger as a maladaptive defense against a teachable opportunity.

Enraged.

He said so.

Nobody had said that before.

The recognition helped.

Group therapy with him and other people my age helped too.

For about a year and a half.

Then it did not.

Useful is not the same as permanent.

Failure to remain useful does not erase the period when something worked.

This is a lesson depression would make me learn repeatedly.

The world becomes available

At twenty-seven I started taking Celexa.

It helped substantially.

That sentence deserves to remain plain.

It helped.

I did not discover a superior philosophy.

I did not finally choose happiness.

I did not defeat the negative beliefs holding me back by wanting success hard enough.

My usable world became larger.

I could sustain a long-term relationship.

I moved across the country to rural North Carolina.

Later I studied for seven Microsoft certification exams and became certified on Windows 2000 Server, an artifact from the lost civilization in which people carried enormous binders and believed operating systems could have names resembling calendar years.

I ended that relationship.

I moved to a larger city.

I started a software-development career at low pay because low pay was still a door.

I walked through it.

This matters to Jack’s philosophy because the same person can inhabit dramatically different fields of possibility.

The person who cannot get out of bed and the person who studies for seven certification exams do not require two souls.

They may require two states.

The moral story is tempting because moral stories are easier to administer.

He finally applied himself.

He stopped making excuses.

He found purpose.

He became resilient.

Maybe.

But Celexa helped.

Biochemistry is offensively uninterested in motivational literature.

Diagnosis is interpretation too

The improvement did not settle the matter.

After years on Celexa, sexual side effects became difficult enough that I went looking for alternatives.

A psychiatrist interpreted my history through Bipolar II disorder. I had never experienced a full manic episode, but I had experienced a period of hypomania in the late 1990s before a second hospitalization.

For years I tried different medications under that model.

Some caused severe side effects.

One caused relentless hiccups for two days.

Another produced intense anxiety and obsessive behavior. Klonopin was added to manage the anxiety and eventually reached a very high daily dose before later being reduced.

The original medication did not become useful merely because the medication treating its side effects remained.

At one point I paid for extensive psychological testing: cognitive testing, emotional testing, inkblots, the full ceremonial apparatus.

My recollection of the conclusion is essentially:

Highly intelligent.

Emotionally disordered.

Two hundred fifty dollars.

I am simplifying a professional evaluation for comic effect.

The evaluation was more detailed than that.

The joke survives because a diagnosis, however sophisticated, remains an attempt to model a person.

Models can be useful.

They can also change.

Decades later, after more treatment and more history, a psychiatrist changed my diagnosis from Bipolar II to major depressive disorder so that another treatment path would be available.

I am not qualified to adjudicate the final metaphysical truth of my diagnostic category.

Neither diagnosis explains every year equally well.

What I know is narrower.

I have experienced recurrent severe depression.

I have experienced at least a small number of periods I and clinicians understood as hypomanic.

I have experienced anxiety, agitation, insomnia, irritability, and medication effects that sometimes made the source of a symptom difficult to identify from inside the symptom.

That is enough reality to work with.

A diagnosis can organize evidence.

It should not be permitted to consume the person providing it.

The alcohol story

In 2013 I drank heavily for several months.

At the worst point, I was drinking as many as ten beers in an evening.

I became frightened by what I was doing.

I quit my job while I still had savings, went to Alcoholics Anonymous, and told my psychiatrist.

The drinking was real.

So was the fear.

My psychiatrist responded by taking me off Klonopin very quickly because alcohol and the medication were, in his view, bad news together.

I tapered by roughly one milligram per week.

I experienced hallucinations and became unable to work.

For several months I recovered without a job.

I attended AA daily for about six weeks and then stopped because I did not believe addiction accurately described what had happened to me.

A therapist I saw during that period agreed that alcohol abuse was real while questioning whether addiction was the correct interpretation.

I stopped drinking heavily on my own.

I have not had a recurring alcohol problem in the years since.

None of this proves that I could never have developed one.

It does not prove AA is ineffective.

It does not prove my psychiatrist was malicious to worry about alcohol and benzodiazepines.

It does establish something smaller and more useful:

A real problem can survive the failure of the first explanation applied to it.

Alcohol abuse was real even if I rejected alcoholism as my identity.

Withdrawal was real even if the prescription had once been intended to reduce suffering.

The category and the event were not the same thing.

Jack had not been named yet.

The mechanism was already there.

A person can be ill and still responsible

Years later I married.

For a while my medication regimen became simpler. A psychiatrist in a small Illinois town thought I was overmedicated and gradually pared things down.

Life remained complicated in ways medication could not resolve.

Family obligations expanded. My wife stopped working. I became the sole breadwinner. We moved, bought houses, helped relatives, supported adult children, returned to North Carolina, and built the sort of shared life that looks coherent in photographs because photographs rarely include the checking account.

Then my mental state deteriorated again.

A new medication regimen seemed to help and then did not.

I experienced a period of hypomanic behavior: little sleep, grandiose plans, unusual confidence, ambitions that felt entirely reasonable while I was having them.

Medication changed again.

I became weepy.

Then severely agitated.

Then almost unable to sleep.

For a long period I was getting three or four hours of sleep a night despite trying multiple sleep medications.

I was miserable.

My marriage was already under strain.

During one walk with my wife, I decided to tell her thoughts I had never told her before.

They hurt her badly.

The content belongs to Jason’s private history, not Jack’s public machinery.

The consequence belongs here.

I hurt someone.

My mental state is part of the context.

It is not an eraser.

A few days later, while she was away, I began misusing sleep medication during the day. She came home and found me impaired. She took me to the hospital.

I spent another week in psychiatric care.

She visited every day.

There is no inversion required to make that difficult sentence true:

The person I had hurt most was the person I depended on most.

After discharge, the marriage continued toward separation.

I tried sex therapy. I attended daily twelve-step-style meetings for months. I saw more therapists. I stopped looking at pornography almost entirely. I stopped the meetings when I no longer believed their model described me accurately.

Some of those actions may have been useful.

None of them retroactively changed what happened.

This is why Jack’s standards say explanation is not excuse.

A condition can narrow agency without eliminating agency.

A medication can influence behavior without making every behavior the medication’s fault.

A relationship can contain unfairness without making one person innocent.

Pain can explain why a person reached for relief and still leave him responsible for what he did while reaching.

Reality does not owe me exoneration because I have suffered.

It also does not require me to invent additional guilt because suffering feels morally suspicious.

Facts.

Experience.

Interpretation.

Keep the borders visible.

When treatment becomes the schedule

By early 2026 I was in severe depression again.

There had been better periods, functional periods, tolerable periods, and years in which I maintained work and relationships while never feeling especially well.

Then the floor dropped again.

A psychiatrist recommended ECT.

I underwent ten treatments, mostly unilateral and some bilateral.

I was living alone, so every treatment required its own small logistics company: Uber to the hospital in another town, IV, anesthesia, procedure, recovery, and prearranged non-emergency medical transport home because the person receiving anesthesia is apparently discouraged from simply calling another rideshare and seeing how the afternoon develops.

I went on short-term disability.

I slept a great deal.

ECT did not produce the improvement I had hoped for.

Next came ketamine treatment for about a month.

It did not produce the improvement I had hoped for either.

I became severely depressed again.

Then came TMS.

Daily treatment in Winston-Salem around noon.

At the same time I attended an intensive outpatient program in Greensboro three evenings a week for three hours at a time.

I worked between them.

I drove between them.

I accumulated worksheets about coping between them.

I became exhausted.

TMS seemed to be helping somewhat.

I was also irritable, impatient, angry, and outraged much of the time.

The IOP program increasingly felt like another obligation inside a life already organized around treatment. I left voluntarily about a week early.

Near the end of TMS I developed persistent headaches. They became severe enough that the final session was canceled and an online urgent-care clinician sent me to the emergency department. Imaging and blood tests did not reveal an explanation. The headaches later improved and eventually disappeared.

Treatment had become one of the largest things happening in my life.

Treatment was also not the same thing as recovery.

That distinction matters because healthcare naturally records interventions more easily than lived outcomes.

Ten ECT sessions exist in a chart.

A month of ketamine exists in a chart.

A completed course of TMS can exist in a chart.

The patient still has to wake up the following Tuesday.

The treatment is a fact.

The effect is an experience that must be measured over time.

The conclusion remains interpretation.

The little mermaid

At one point I drew the problem.

Not a validated clinical model.

Not a causal diagram for publication in a psychiatric journal.

A Mermaid diagram.

This is what software developers do when suffering refuses to fit cleanly into prose.

Rendering diagram…

The diagram is interpretation.

That sentence matters.

It feels accurate to me.

It captures feedback loops I recognize: depression reduces energy and hope; reduced energy makes it harder to alter an isolated or frustrating life; isolation and frustration then make depression harder to escape. Attempts to create meaning can be blocked by the very condition they are intended to make more bearable.

A missed connection can hit an already vulnerable system much harder than the event appears to deserve.

But the arrows are not laboratory findings.

They are my attempt to preserve context.

The diagram says: when I am down here, remember how the pieces seemed connected.

It also says: do not confuse the diagram with the territory.

There may be arrows missing.

There may be arrows pointing the wrong way.

There may be variables I cannot see from inside the system.

The diagram is valuable because it is contestable.

It can be revised.

The depression feels less revisable.

The sword without the kingdom

I live with something like the sword of Damocles, except nobody remembered to include the throne, feast, servants, political authority, or any of the other compensating features of the original arrangement.

The sword is enough.

Today can be good.

Today I can be productive at work despite ridiculous roadblocks. I can help other people without being asked. I can interview for another job. I can think clearly about AI and software and organizations. I can put myself on a dating app. I can go to a meetup. I can talk to strangers. I can write essays. I can look forward.

I can want another person because I want to be seen and known.

Then another day arrives.

Sleep.

Eat.

Feed the cats.

Clean the litter box.

Bare minimum.

The desire for another person changes shape.

Instead of wanting to be seen, I may need to be told that I exist.

Instead of seeking connection, I may seek evidence against hopelessness.

The distinction can be invisible from outside.

It is enormous from inside.

The sword is not the certainty that tomorrow will be bad.

It is the knowledge that tomorrow can be bad regardless of how convincingly today argues otherwise.

That knowledge can become its own pathology if I let it.

Why apply for the job if depression can return?

Why date if I may become unavailable?

Why make friends if I may disappear into myself?

Why build anything if the builder is unstable?

This is where the reality check has to check itself.

A possible future incapacity is not a present incapacity.

A relapse is not evidence that the good interval was fake.

A good interval is not evidence that the illness is over.

Both things can be true.

Apparently this remains irritatingly necessary.

The mirror error

Depression is not the only state that can overclaim reality.

Hypomania can do it from the other direction.

During one episode I slept very little, felt unusually capable, formed grand plans, and was ready to demand an enormous raise at work.

The depressed mind says:

Nothing can change.

The hypomanic mind says:

Everything can change because I have finally understood how powerful I am.

Both interpretations can recruit facts.

The depressed mind has failed treatments, loneliness, debt, bad work, lost relationships, and decades of recurrence.

The elevated mind has accomplishments, intelligence, energy, opportunity, technical skill, and the intoxicating evidence that several difficult things suddenly appear easy.

Both can sound like Jack.

That is dangerous.

Jack challenges assumptions.

So does grandiosity, right up until the assumption being challenged is the existence of gravity.

Jack refuses the useful lie.

So can despair, while quietly replacing every uncertain future with the useful lie of certainty.

This is why philosophy needs a destroyer inside it.

Apply Jack to Jack.

And on some days:

Apply the reality check to the reality check.

Who came first?

Jason came first.

Chronology remains annoyingly resistant to philosophy.

The harder question is whether the condition was a precondition for Jack.

Would someone with a long, stable, mentally healthy life have learned to challenge assumptions this aggressively?

Would he have noticed how quickly a fact becomes an interpretation and an interpretation becomes a world?

Would he have developed the same contempt for systems that confuse procedure with outcome?

Would he have learned to distrust any sentence containing the words this is just how things are?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

There is no control Jason.

I cannot rerun the experiment without depression.

I cannot remove forty years of mood states, treatments, relationships, mistakes, recoveries, side effects, loneliness, work, books, code, cats, anger, curiosity, and experience while holding intelligence and personality constant.

Any conclusion that depression made Jack would be an interpretation built from one sample.

A suspiciously literary one.

Suffering likes to demand royalties from whatever meaning survives it.

I decline the invoice.

Pain is not tuition I was required to pay for insight.

If I learned something while suffering, the suffering does not become good.

If depression sharpened my awareness that experience is contingent, that does not mean a healthy person must become ill to notice reality.

A healthy person can challenge assumptions because curiosity is pleasurable.

A wounded person may challenge them because assumptions have already failed catastrophically.

Both can arrive at the question.

The routes are not morally equivalent.

What I can say is this:

I have experienced enough contradictory internal realities to distrust permanence.

I have been certain I would never feel better and later felt better.

I have felt unusually powerful and later understood the feeling differently.

I have believed a treatment would work and watched it fail.

I have assumed a treatment was useless and later recognized that some part of it helped.

I have thought a relationship would last and watched it end.

I have thought a career door was closed and walked through another one.

I have thought I understood another person and discovered primary-source material capable of changing the conclusion.

I have thought I understood myself and then met another version.

Maybe that history contributed to Jack.

It certainly gives Jack material.

Reality is versioned

The phrase sounds like software because I am unfortunately a software developer and metaphors must eat what is available.

Reality itself is not merely a Git repository.

But my access to reality has versions.

There is the factual state.

There is the runtime experience.

There is the interpretation generated from both.

The dangerous move is allowing one runtime state to rewrite the history.

When I am severely depressed, the good days become exceptions, mistakes, chemical accidents, temporary reprieves that prove nothing.

When I am doing well, the worst days can become embarrassing artifacts from an earlier version of myself who should really have handled things better.

Both are forms of context loss.

This is where another piece of Jack’s philosophy returns with a vengeance.

Preserve context.

We have learned that preserving context is fundamental to using AI well. A model deprived of the relevant history invents connections, loses decisions, repeats mistakes, and treats the visible prompt as the whole world.

Humans do this too.

A depressed person can become a context-window failure with shoes.

The current state crowds out evidence from other states.

So preserve it.

Not as a gratitude journal.

Not as a folder of inspirational quotations insisting that everything happens for a reason, because some things happen because biology is rude and organizations are badly designed.

Preserve evidence.

I have worked effectively before.

I have loved people before.

I have been loved before.

I have recovered some function before.

I have built things while imperfect.

I have survived treatments that failed.

I have stopped behaviors that frightened me.

I have made mistakes and changed behavior afterward.

I have felt certain that nothing would improve and later discovered that certainty was not evidence.

On a good day, preserve evidence for the bad one.

On an elevated day, preserve constraints for the ambitious one.

On a bad day, do not demand that the archived version of yourself feel emotionally persuasive.

It is enough that he existed.

AI needs context to reason across time. Humans may need preserved context to remain recognizable to themselves across time.

That is not a cure.

It is continuity.

Treatment is not redemption

I am still willing to be treated.

That sentence is less inspirational than it appears.

I have tried more than thirty medications.

I have undergone ECT.

Ketamine.

TMS.

Intensive outpatient treatment.

Hospitalization.

Individual therapy.

Group therapy.

Twelve-step meetings.

Psychological testing.

Medication changes whose names I no longer remember without looking them up.

Today I take eight prescriptions every day.

Recently my psychiatrist added Auvelity.

Now we wait and see.

That phrase may be the most honest clinical intervention in the entire history.

Wait and see.

Treatment is an attempt to alter probability.

It is not redemption.

Taking medication does not make me virtuous.

Stopping a treatment that is not helping does not make me noncompliant in the moral sense.

Returning to treatment after disappointment does not prove resilience.

It proves I returned to treatment.

The result still has to occur.

This is where the culture around mental health often becomes too eager for a clean story.

Ask for help.

Do the work.

Take the medication.

Use the skills.

Get better.

These are reasonable actions.

They are not a causal guarantee.

Sometimes the person asks for help, does the work, takes the medication, uses the skills, undergoes the procedure, drives to the appointment, fills out the worksheet, pays the bill, and remains depressed.

The failure of treatment is not evidence that treatment was foolish to attempt.

The persistence of illness is not evidence that the person failed to participate correctly.

The result is the result.

Notice what is real.

Then decide what to try next.

Jack’s imperfect version

I am not presenting forty years of psychiatric history as evidence of sainthood.

That would be an extraordinary misuse of records.

I have behaved badly.

I have hurt people.

I have stayed in situations too long and left others too abruptly.

I have looked for affection in places where I was unlikely to find the kind I wanted.

I have confused validation with connection.

I have been selfish while suffering and generous while suffering.

I have been insightful and ridiculous in the same afternoon.

Depression does not make those contradictions disappear.

Neither does philosophy.

This is why I decided not to write another essay I had planned.

Some material belongs to Jason.

Writing does not help the people who were hurt merely because the writing is honest.

An origin story does not vindicate poor choices.

A diagnosis does not perform reconciliation.

There was no Jack inversion to expose there.

There were people.

There were consequences.

There is behavior I can try not to repeat.

That reality is enough.

Jack does not need to eat every part of the author to prove the colon works.

Jack’s attempt to be better

I do not know whether I am healthy enough for another relationship.

I know more about what I would need to do differently.

Move slowly.

Notice ambivalence before intimacy converts it into momentum.

Say what I actually feel before another person has to infer it from withdrawal.

Do not use another person to prove that I am desirable, alive, forgiven, or not alone.

Do not confuse chemistry with compatibility.

Do not confuse suffering with permission.

Do not confuse an explanation with an excuse.

Those are interpretations derived from experience.

They are not guarantees.

The next person, if there is one, will not be a regression test.

She will be a person.

Apparently production remains the only environment with complete coverage.

Jack’s continuing to try

Today was a good day.

Not perfect.

My right upper chest and shoulder hurt enough that I suspect I strained something. GitHub Actions spent part of the day attempting its own psychiatric intervention. Work remained ridiculous. A recruiter conducted a very short interview for a very small company whose entire employee population may eventually be scheduled to interview me individually.

Still good.

I worked productively.

I helped people.

I challenged an AI assumption before it became committed tests.

I interviewed calmly.

I thought about another job.

I thought about dating slowly.

I wrote.

I was curious.

I was present.

I could imagine tomorrow.

That is my experience today.

It would be foolish to turn it into a promise.

It would be equally foolish to refuse it because it may not last.

The sword remains overhead.

So does the ceiling.

The cats still require dinner either way.

Reality check

The philosophy says reality gets first refusal.

Here is reality.

I have a recurrent condition that can substantially alter my mood, energy, attention, confidence, behavior, relationships, and ability to interact with the world.

Treatment has helped sometimes and failed sometimes.

I have experienced long periods of suffering.

I have experienced meaningful periods of function and occasional good days.

I have made decisions while ill that I regret.

I have made decisions while relatively well that I regret.

I have also made decisions that built a life.

I do not know what tomorrow’s internal weather will be.

I know that today’s weather is not the climate.

That sentence works in both directions.

When I am depressed, hopelessness is experience.

It is not prophecy.

When I am energized, possibility is experience.

It is not destiny.

When I am hurt, pain is experience.

It is not automatically evidence about another person’s intent.

When I am ashamed, responsibility is real.

It is not proof that permanent self-condemnation repairs anything.

When treatment fails, failure is real.

It is not proof that every future treatment will fail.

When treatment works, relief is real.

It is not proof that the condition has surrendered.

Facts.

Experience.

Interpretation.

Run the check again.

Who came first?

Jason.

Jack came later.

Jack is not the illness.

Jack is not the cure.

Jack is one of the things Jason made from the available material.

Maybe depression sharpened him.

Maybe philosophy sharpened him.

Maybe software did.

Maybe forty years of watching certainty contradict itself made assumptions look less sacred.

Maybe curiosity was there first and pain merely gave it uglier things to inspect.

I do not know.

The missing evidence matters.

So I will not manufacture the origin story.

I am Jack’s imperfect version of himself.

I am Jack’s attempt to be better.

I am Jack’s continuing to try.

Today I am here.

That is fact.

How being here feels can change.

What being here means remains open.

The sentence continues.

Receipts

• Author’s treatment chronology and personal recollection, approximately 1980s–2026 — Supports the first-person history of depression, hospitalizations, medication trials, therapy, relationships, alcohol misuse, treatment changes, ECT, ketamine, TMS, IOP, and current medication burden described in this essay. Exact dates, medication names, doses, and counts should be checked against available medical and pharmacy records before publication; recollection is evidence of experience, not an independently verified chart.
• “Stuck” personal systems diagram, 2026 — The supplied Mermaid diagram maps the author’s own interpretation of feedback among depression, isolation, work frustration, treatment attempts, meaning-making, and acute interpersonal disappointment. It is included here in a privacy-sanded form and explicitly presented as interpretation rather than a validated causal model.
• National Institute of Mental Health, “Depression” ↗ — NIMH describes depression as affecting mood, thinking, sleep, energy, interests, and everyday functioning, and notes that treatment commonly includes psychotherapy, medication, or both, with additional options when symptoms do not improve sufficiently.
• National Institute of Mental Health, “Brain Stimulation Therapies” ↗ — NIMH describes ECT and transcranial magnetic stimulation as established brain-stimulation treatments used in severe or treatment-resistant mental illness. This supports the clinical context for the treatments named here, not any claim that they should have worked for this particular person.
• National Institute of Mental Health, “Bipolar Disorder” ↗ — NIMH describes bipolar disorders as involving shifts in mood, energy, activity, and concentration and notes that hypomanic periods can include unusually elevated energy or productivity. This supports the general distinction drawn between depressive and elevated states; the essay does not attempt to resolve the author’s changing diagnoses.
• National Institute of Mental Health, “Mental Health Medications” ↗ — NIMH notes that psychiatric medications can produce side effects and that antidepressant side effects can include sexual dysfunction. This supports the limited general medical context around the author’s reported medication experiences without assigning causation to any individual symptom beyond what the author recalls clinicians telling him.
• “I Am Jack’s Philosophy” — The companion essay establishes the distinctions among fact, experience, and interpretation; the principles of challenging assumptions and preserving context; and the requirement that Jack’s method remain contestable by its own standards.
• Jack’s Standards for Essays — The publication standard requiring fact, experience, and interpretation to remain visibly distinct is the formal constraint this essay attempts to apply to the author’s own mental-health history rather than only to external systems.