XTC: Mental Health in Software Development

Topic: Mental Health in Software Development
Presenter: Alex Wilson

Firstly, what is mental health?

Mind, the mental health charity, defines "good mental health" as "being generally able to think, feel and react in the ways that you need and want to live your life", and mental health issues are ones that can interfere with these goals.

According to the NHS, one in four adults experiences at least one diagnosable mental health problem in any given year, and these problems can affect anyone at any point in their lives - anything from anxiety, to depression, to addiction, to bipolar disorder, and more.

In this session, we'll be thinking and discussing questions like:

In what ways can the environment created by XP practices be harmful to the mental well-being of its practitioners? How can we change this?

How can we, as XP practitioners, create an environment that supports everyone regardless of their mental health?

Note: While mental health and neuro-diversity have some common ground, it wouldn't do justice to the topic of neuro-diversity in software development to cram it into the same session as mental health, and deserves its own session.

About XTC

The eXtreme Tuesday Club (XTC) is London's oldest agile meetup, and has been meeting since 1999. Initially the meetup was focused on discussing Extreme Programming (XP), but it has expanded to include anything XP, agile, lean, or the larger context in which we do software development activities.

We welcome all software development newbies, practitioners, and experts to discuss topics of interest over drinks.

Follow @extremetuesday (https://twitter.com/extremetuesday) on Twitter for announcements and updates, or use the hashtag #XTCLondon (https://twitter.com/hashtag/XTCLondon) to find and share insights.