Dog Eat Diogenes

A Tech Worker's Descent into Psychosis

Why Am I Writing This?


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3 min read

A 1860 painting of the Ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes sitting in a jar, holding a lantern, surrounded by dogs.
Diogenes by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1860)


I’m haunted by one of my first Amazon performance reviews:

Amazon performance review reading “Jessica is too willing to sacrifice her personal time in pursuit of an answer. I’m concerned that she’ll burn herself out and we’ll lose one of the strongest team members I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with.”

They were right.

Why I am writing this

I am writing this so you don’t end up like I did: totally mentally broken. That might seem unthinkable to you right now. It did to me too, even after it happened. There’s growing scientific evidence that social defeat, especially in the form of low status, chronic humiliation, and perceived exclusion, can disrupt dopamine regulation and increase the risk of developing psychosis1. If you push yourself too hard in an unfair situation, your brain can snap, and once it does, it’s hard to repair. I want you to see the signs before it’s too late.

A scientific article published by Cambridge University Press about the connection between low status, humiliation, and the development of schizophrenia [1].

And if you are already broken, I’d like to share my recovery with you, and give you hope.

I’m also writing this because despite everything that happened, I still have love for Amazon and its former and current employees. I want to see them better. You can’t see my smile on this college campus recruiting trip, but it was genuine.

A photo of a woman wearing an Amazon t-shirt next to an Amazon table and an Amazon banner. Faces are blurred out.
A photo of me proudly representing Amazon on a college campus. My enthusiasm was sincere.

My last reason for writing this is that my psychotic episode was public. It’s on the internet. But what doesn’t survive the screenshots is the context about how I ended up there. That’s what Dog Eat Diogenes aims to document. I hope that documentation will provide some closure to my family, friends, and former colleagues.

Why I am not writing this 


I’m not writing this to settle scores. Not against Amazon, not against any of its current or former employees. The people who hurt me deserve a second chance, and I can only hope for one too. I’m leaving out a lot of details and evidence that flirts too closely with ‘outing’ people. I’ve tried to keep things vague, even at the expense of my accomplishments.

Who was Diogenes?

Diogenes was an Ancient Greek philosopher famous for finding virtue in being dog-like. He was inspiring to me because at Amazon I often felt “lower” than the office dogs. Diogenes helped me re-frame that experience. If being “low” was my fate, maybe I could still find meaning in it. Amazon is often compared to a dog-eat-dog workplace, where employees are pitted against one another. Dog Eat Diogenes is what happened when I tried to survive that world by taking inspiration from Diogenes, and was devoured anyway.

A survey of Amazon employees on the anonymous workplace app Blind. Over 92% of respondents answered that dogs are treated better than employees. The response is partially sardonic, to be sure, but I feel it echoes a real sentiment. You wouldn’t yell at a dog.
  1. Selten, J. P., & Ormel, J. (2023). Low status, humiliation, dopamine and risk of schizophrenia. Psychological medicine, 53(3), 609–613. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291722003816 ↩︎