Comment by cushychicken

It’s hard to say exactly what the folks in the article are grappling with, not working with them personally. I never got to the point where I was anywhere near personal crisis from my classified work. These folks sound like they were associated with some kind of wet ops or drone programs. Not fun to deal with.

I know cleared psychologists are a thing. I never tried to speak with one but I’m told demand is high, and the ones out there are typically very oversubscribed.

I may be a bad counter example to this article. I never had to cope with super severe depression or crisis, or conops that would bring me a ton of personal crisis.

I just see a commonality in struggling with not being able to talk about it. Work is too big a part of my life to not be able to discuss it freely. That did cost me something, personally. I’m glad it didn’t cost me anything as dear as what it cost the people in the original article.

There are chaplains and in-agency psychologists, both can have classified conversations with you. The problem is that you cannot change the underlying causes of any illness/sickness

It was, on a technical level, the most interesting work I’ve ever done. What people say about the US government being ahead of the commercially available technology curve is certainly true.

The work I did absolutely had positive impact on the world.

People rush to criticize and write off working in the defense sector, but it can be a very rewarding place to work. There are absolutely problems in that sector - bad management and regulatory capture being primary among them. (Ultimately, those are why I left.)

It’s hard to judge accurately from the outside. That’s the nature of classified work: by definition, you can’t know what you’re getting yourself into until you’ve jumped with both feet.

Everybody here is all so small minded.

The government has spent centuries doing spycraft and has a budget in the billions.

If they worked there recently, they probably grappled with this in some capacity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon

everyone seemed to nonchalantly care because you all got blanket secret clearance in mil. if you had TS/SCI and an interesting SAP you would not be saying this

Well go on then...

Sounds like a good tip if someone wants to find themselves in jail

Plenty of people work at Meta.

I think most people think the ethical values are far higher in those jobs than most random startup bs just wasting resources.

I definitely do, I would rather work in the military than Meta/Amazon/Microsoft/Any online gambling/and loads of other shit companies.

It’s wild to, in a thread about an unusual number of suicides among a branch of government doing secret stuff, say that folks talking about that secret stuff would be a good idea.

I am absolutely not saying that is what’s happening here, suicide of folks put in stressful situations is to be taken seriously. But like… c’mon guy, surely this exact premise has been a direct-to-Amazon-Video release.

… you might not.

Have you noticed the current executive administration in the US?

Cool things are not necessarily illegal. You ever done anything cool in your life?

Way to pull a Tokyo Rose; the GP was alluding to "cool" and "impactful" things they had done to keep us all safe from malicious actors and you try to twist it into "illegal activities" and "unlawful orders".

Do not think we aren't catching on to this kind of nonsense.

You’d likely get Snowdened in.

I don't see anywhere that OP mentioned illegal activities or unlawful orders. Sounds like they're quite proud of what the accomplished.