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"As with so many others, Aaron Swartz had an indelible impact on my life. I didn't know Aaron well; we exchanged a dozen emails in early 2008. Still, if you followed the geekier aspects of Mac and web standards culture in the early 2000s, it was hard not to run across Aaron's work.\nYou probably know the basic outline by now. He co-wrote the spec for RSS at 14. He was part of Creative Commons at the very beginning. He beta-tested Markdown for John Gruber. Oh, and he co-founded Reddit (whether acknowledged or not) and sold it to Cond\u00E9 Nast.\nThe guy was a genius, in the purest sense of the word.\nWhen I first emailed Aaron, we were at different phases in our life. At 25, I was just starting my career as a tech reporter. I was green and unsure of exactly what it was I wanted to achieve.\nThough younger than me, Aaron was far more accomplished. He was 21 and had sold his first startup, left the company that acquired it, and was busy immersing himself in a wide array of policy projects.\nI first emailed Aaron about Jottit, one of those post-Reddit side projects. I was familiar with his work and was a longtime reader of his blog, so I made sure to mention some of our shared passions for books, film and the radio show This American Life.\nWe were also both depressed.\nDepression came up in our second email exchange. We had both written online about our respective struggles with it. I was just coming out of a major bout that had lasted months. I described it as \"coming above ground into the light after months in darkness.\"\nAaron too seemed to be coming out of his depression. He was frustrated that it wasn't something he could control.\nThere's an odd paradox with depression and all mental illnesses: It's one of the few diseases where the patient blames herself and feels like a failure for having to accept help or take medication.\nThis is especially difficult if you're highly intelligent and usually able to solve problems and answer questions \u2014 as many in the tech community are.\nAt 25, I'd already suffered through four major depressions since the age of 14. I had battled through phases of wanting to believe I could conquer my illness without the need of medication. But by the age of 18, I had come to the conclusion that it was necessary. I had stopped feeling like this made me weak or less capable.\nIt was never said explicitly, but I got the sense that Aaron didn't feel that way. It's difficult for anyone to come to terms with the idea that you can't have complete control over your mind, let alone someone of Aaron's intellect.\nWe stopped emailing each other after a few weeks. My life got busier. My career started to take off. Aaron became increasingly focused on public policy and advocacy for worthy causes.\nIn July 2011, Aaron was charged with hacking into the journal archive JSTOR. I e-mailed him to see if he could give an official comment. I also let him know that he had my support and if there was ever anything I could do, to let me know. He politely declined to comment and thanked me for my offer.\nIt was to be our last email exchange.\nSEE ALSO: 25,000 Sign Petition to Remove Aaron Swartz' Prosecutors\nI won't pretend to know exactly what Aaron was going through, or why he made the decision to take his life. I can only speculate that the impending legal case against him \u2014 a trial that seems unfair and so very trivial in the wake of all of this \u2014 was taking a heavy toll.\nBut while I can't speak for his situation, I am an expert on major depression. I diagnosed myself at the age of 9, on the basis of a mental health TV commercial. At 14, I was officially diagnosed with major depression and anxiety disorder. So began a 30-month process of trying to find the right combination of medicines that would properly align my biochemistry.\nAt 16, I missed the second semester of my sophomore year of high school because I literally couldn't get out of bed. I just wanted to die. I prayed for death. After a few good years and a good start in college, depression reared its ugly head again at the age of 20. A few years later, my psychiatrist told me I would probably never be able to come off my anti-depressants.\nWhile I haven't had a period of depression in more than five years since then, I still feel the occasional twinge of it. This is not a disease that can be cured. It's chronic, and it's for life.\nDepression is an illnesses largely hidden from society. By the time the illness is visible \u2014 when a person can't get out of bed, when they stop caring for themselves or their job \u2014 they've already been suffering for a long, long time.\nMost depressed people work with every fiber of their being to hide the horrible fact of it. To be depressed is to be a very good actor. Fake it long enough, you think, and maybe it'll become reality.\nThat might work with other aspects of life, but it doesn't work with depression. At some point, holding back the feelings of pain and despair becomes too much. It finds a way to spill out. It's messy.\nI've often described depression as a vacuum or a vortex. When you're in it, you can't remember life on the outside. Everything is sadness. Everything is bleak. Nothing seems to have purpose. Tiny flickers of light, moments of reprieve, often just make you feel even worse.\nIt aches powerfully, like the loss of your first love. It hurts like the scorn of high school bullies. And it sucks everything you have into its black hole of destruction.\nWhat's worse is that when you come out of it, it can be difficult to remember what depression is like. It is only through periods of genuine sadness \u2014 like the loss of someone as young and talented as Aaron \u2014 that I connect with that part of my brain and remember those feelings.\nI bring up my personal history because there are many in the tech community who have experienced something like it. I can't say we (tech journalists and the techies we cover) are more prone to depression; I can say we're iconoclastic enough to talk openly about it.\nBen Huh, Cheezburger maker extraordinaire, has been a leading light in this regard. Huh told Mashable the story of what saved his life here. \nMental illness has become one of the last social taboos in Western society (it's far, far worse in other parts of the world). There is a profound and subtle stigma associated with depression, anxiety, bi-polar, OCD, ADHD and any other in the myriad of treatable, functional illnesses.\nBias against depression is systemic. Until Obamacare, having a diagnosis of major depression or an anxiety disorder would prevent a person from getting full-coverage health insurance as an individual. It's a pre-existing condition. Most insurance companies won't take you, no matter how much you're willing to pay.\nAt 27, I was young, a non-smoker, a casual drinker, with perfect blood work, low cholesterol and well below the average weight for my height. Yet I couldn't get any insurance company to accept me on a PPO plan.\nIt wasn't until my company had enough employees to get good health insurance that I was able to stop paying more than $800 a month for medication. I wasn't alone. A number of my friends could not get insured after college. They could not afford their antidepressants or anxiety medication or ADHD drugs.\nThe stigma breeds fear. Fear keeps those suffering quiet.\nBut in the tech world, we're all about finding new solutions \u2014 the way Aaron did. So for Aaron's sake, it's time to stop being quiet. It's time to stop hovering in the darkness. It's time to come out of the closet, to speak frequently and at length about depression.\nStigma doesn't go away until the population hears personal stories from the afflicted. History bears this out, time after time, with each stigmatized group. More stories means creating a culture where future Aarons know they can speak out about their suffering. \nFellow techies, let's tell our stories. I for one am tired of staying silent.\nImage courtesy of Jacob Applebaum"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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