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I was surprised how many people responded to my\xa0APA photo-essay\xa0with comments like \u201cSeems psychiatry as a field is broken beyond repair\u201d or \u201cThis proves you should never trust psychiatrists\u201d.

The mood I was going for was more \u201clet\u2019s share a laugh at the excesses of the profession\u201d than \u201ceverything must be burned down\u201d. Looks like I missed it.

I was disappointed to see a lot of the most hostile comments coming from people in tech. It would be easy to write an equally damning report on the tech industry. Just cobble together a few paragraphs about Juicero and Theranos, make fun of whatever weird lifestyle change @jack is supporting at the moment, and something something Zuckerberg something Cambridge Analytica something. You can even throw in something about James Damore (if you\u2019re writing for the left) or about the overreaction to James Damore (if you\u2019re writing for the right). And there you go! Tech is a malicious cancerous industry full of awful people and everyone should hate it. We\u2019ve all read this exact thinkpiece a thousand times.

I\u2019ve tried to\xa0push back against\xa0this line of thinking. A lot of the most visible and famous things in tech are bad, because scum tends to rise to the top. But there\u2019s also some extraordinary innovation going on, and some extraordinarily good people involved. \u201c@jack invents new health fad of rolling around naked on glaciers\u201d is a much juicier story than \u201cwe can now fit twice as many billions of transistors on a chip as we could last year\u201d, but tech journalism that only reports on the former is missing an important part of the story.

I feel the same way about psychiatry. There\u2019s a lot of cringeworthy stuff going on at conferences, but conferences are designed to be about signaling and we shouldn\u2019t expect otherwise. There\u2019s also a lot of great people working really hard to help fight mental illness and support the mentally ill. \u201cMost Americans remain alive and basically functional despite record-breaking amounts of depression and anxiety\u201d isn\u2019t sexy any more than \u201cInternet continues to connect billions of people around the world at the speed of light\u201d is sexy. But it\u2019s a much bigger part of the story than the part where silly people do silly things at conferences.