Jobs For Schizophrenics

One of the most challenging aspects of having schizophrenia can be finding gainful employment with the illness. This is especially difficult if schizophrenia hits you later on in your adulthood after you’ve already started to establish a career. This is what happened to me.

After graduating from Cornell University in 2010, I managed to find some work as a web developer/DevOps shortly thereafter. Already, my illness was peeking through, and I had great difficulty at these jobs, but things really got derailed when I had my first hospitalization in November 2013. As I was working in NYC at the time, there was a period before my hospitalization where I was homeless. My friends tried to help me (unsuccessfully) at the time, and it wasn’t until I was homeless for a few months that my parents told me (edit: I should say, finally convinced me) to move back in with them here in Rochester, NY. That is when I had my first hospitalization.

Since then, my work history has been spotty at best, although I did manage to set up an LLC in my name before the hospitalization. I have been blogging about web development and other programming topics on the company’s website for a few years now, although the history on the site only goes back a few months: Daniel Jaouen Development.

All of this background information has been to set up the following: web development, whether through freelancing or blog ads can be one source of additional income for people with schizophrenia. Having a blog can be a great boon because you can write whenever you can, which is great for when your symptoms are kept at bay. Some freelancing sites, like Fiverr and Upwork don’t require face-to-face interaction with clients or bosses, which can be helpful if those are triggers for you.

As I have been doing web development for some time now, I have gathered some resources for you, which I hope can help you start your own web development journey. They are as follows:

• Introduction to Linux (video)
• Command Line Fu
• Mastering Emacs (book – costs money)
• Mastering Emacs in one year
• Python for Beginners (video)
• Django Documentation
• Front-end Roadmap
• freeCodeCamp JavaScript Algorithm and Data Structures
• MDN CSS

In addition, I recommend the following books from The Pragmatic Programmers, which is a great resource for cheap books on programming:

1. tmux 2
2. Programming Elixir 1.6
3. Programming Phoenix 1.4 (though this might be outdated by now – buyer beware!)
4. Programming Phoenix LiveView

I know this list can look intimidating, but if you take the information in bits and chunks, and work to eat a little bit of information a day, you will be on your way in no time. I also add additional resources I find on my link website, LouLinks from time-to-time. Feel free to check that out, as well.

That’s it. Hope this helped!

If you found this post useful, you can always Buy Me A Coffee. As always, you can contact me at daniel@danieljaouendevelopment.com

Cheers!