I neither like the taboo nor the opposite. Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I wish we would handle it all more privately...

That's right.

I built and released a game called Autism Simulator recently. Online feedback was overwhelmingly positive but with plenty of gaslighting sprinkled in, e.g. "everybody's a bit autistic", "that just sounds like working in tech".

Minimization is always the default go-to for men's mental health issues.

What do they mean by "vulnerability" here? There is this constant redefinition of words. In mainstream usage, "vulnerability" is not a good thing as it means you are open to problems and can easily be attacked. They presumably mean it in the sense of being "open to your own emotions" or tender. Silly misuse of words for a serious subject.

This is 100% not true.

> An effective education requires a certain amount of torture, and it works better when self inflicted.

It's the tortured artist myth. You can turn pain into art but it's not a prerequisite.

For every tortured genius whose passion comes from pain, there's a hundred who never get started because they lack the energy to get out of bed half the time, are slowly killing themselves with alcohol and other substances, and so on. But a pill alone doesn't fix that -- hell, current research shows most of those pills do no better than a placebo -- so the mythology of the nobility of suffering will continue for some time hence.

(Fun fact, you know that "lorem ipsum" text that's used as filler? It's not nonsense Latin, it's from a speech by Cicero where he denounces the stoic ideal of suffering being good for the soul, or at least "pointless" suffering anyway)

Luminaries also were concentrated in but a few spots of the world at the time: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771

Although tbf this is probably one of Linford's undergraduate papers

> We live in a culture of transparency where you are rewarded for confessing your weaknesses.

Where exactly do you observe this?

It's notable that the BBC recent adaptation set in the present day was also able to make Watson an Afghanistan veteran.

I read the stories as an child, and seen various of the film adaptations; Holmes became a meme even within Conan Doyle's lifetime, but I'm sure I'd benefit from going back to the source as an adult.

Realising current day events rhyme very closely with historical events is pretty eye opening.

It’s a tragedy of the commons we are all largely oblivious as a species.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of those who upvoted this did so because the agree with the sentiment in principle, not because they read the article and appreciated the contents.

Perhaps it made it to the top of HN because there are a lot of Sherlock Holmes fans here who are curious about some of the nuances of the character not often cited. That the article itself may be lacking in specifics may not be a problem if it has at least whetted the curiosity of a number of us. (And we can then seek out more details, or better still, read the whole series of books with a keener eye.)

>How did this make it to the top of HN? It’s an extremely facile work and reads >exactly like a high school essay

Asked and answered

If HNer's want to talk about something, or just feel the topic is important, then a short & weak article is more than good enough to be a sort of seed crystal.

(If you know of better articles on this topic, then please provide links!)

Yes, i thought it was silly as well. revisionist analysis such as these are pretty common, though normally better written. You can probably find half a dozen essays with titles like "Sherlock holmes fought against colonial oppression, a deep dive in how Conan doyle covered unpopular and controversial topics in the victorian age". And another 50 essays arguing the opposite point.

> a fantastic and hilarious job of portraying holmes as an erratic drug addict.

Except in Conan Doyle's books, Holmes was a user of cocaine, not an addict.

This desire to portray Holmes as a drug addict says far more about our own times.

Britain was a very repressed culture at the time and for a long time after this.

An Englishman’s proverbial “stiff upper lip” came to be a cliche for a reason.

“Boarding school syndrome” would be the term coined for the emotional damage that was an educational ideal for a long while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_school#Psychological_...

I suspect that it is purely a literary invention. The core idea of the story is a variant of the "Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", where a stolen gem was eaten by a goose. For the new plot, Conan Doyle needed some identical copies of something where a jewel could be hidden. These copies need to be destroyed, in order to reveal the jewel. If you decide on using busts in 1904 for an American and British audience, Napoleon is an ideal candidate: notorious, but not venerated. Imagine what a scandal it might have been if busts of the late Queen Victoria or of Abraham Lincoln had been smashed.

*six

If you read the article you’ll discover no, they don’t.

Drug addiction, loneliness and depression are masculinity instead of mental health problems? What about suicide?