>I don't understand why people think I'm against helping people.
For the purpose of trying to fill in that knowledge gap, let me say that as someone that just casually browsed the comments, you originally came across as tone-deaf and disconnected from reality. After the comment attempting to dismiss mental disorders, you came across as actively malicious.
If you're serious about just trying to help people, try harder than telling them to work harder on a forum almost exclusively populated with well-off professionals.
> You know what? I'm glad someone spoke to me that way. It got me up and motivated to work on myself. I can't imagine how poorly I would have turned out if I was coddled and allowed to stay in bed and read about all of these new pop-psych diseases I could blame. But that's just me. Maybe I can reach someone the way I was reached.
I think that is the problem. Maybe it is just you. The language you use, coddling, and how you speak of mental diseases as if it's some made up thing suggest maybe you weren't going through what others are going through.
> Maybe I can reach someone the way I was reached.
I doubt it. I read your first comment and then the edit, and thought maybe you'd come to your senses, but no. You do lack empathy and understanding. You sound very like your not trying to reach some one, instead, you're trying to tell them how it is from your point of view. No empathy. People actually suffering don't need that from you.
>But I suspect that is rarer than you expect (look at how we went from mental illness in general, to schizophrenia, now to coma patients).
I think it's relatively common for people with mental illness to end up in a situation they themselves can't recover from, and my examples were hyperbolic as you seemed to deny the very existence of such people. They generally recover with help from those close to them, medical experts, and government support.
>Unless you’re intimately familiar with someone’s situation, how can you judge?
I don't need intimacy with anyone's situation, all I said was that some portion of the 30,000 incidents of mental illness could not control their disorders and would need help.
>I’ve found it more helpful to focus on how one can succeed, whether for myself or loved ones
I'm guessing my post was misunderstood, as here you seem to be trying to help others rather than forcing them to accomplish it by willpower alone.
> Comments like these are hurtful. I ask myself the question the commenter asked me every single day. I just try to approach them with care and the assumption they are coming from a good place. I know that isn't always the case, but it's the best I can do.
I try to as well, I had to rewrite that comment several times to be bit more generous but had to leave it where it was. It's hard - Ironically it comes from a place of wishing the world would be more generous to you. Beyond regular therapy I don't talk openly about this, both for this reason, and as I had been struggling with, and treated, for depression for over 20 years (which it now turns out is exacerbated or even caused by the untreated ADHD).
I've spent an incredible amount of effort and energy actively hiding this fact and any consequences from employers, teachers and loved ones out of fear of what it would mean for my already difficult to maintain status quo. I've seen what the stigma of mental health can do to ones career and future opportunities (unless of course you are an active and visual advocate, campaigner as well as your normal role).
> I don't understand the distinction you are making. People with mental illness make choices, are lead into things, etc.
> People who are expelled from school or incarcerated don't want to be in that situation but they are anyway. That seems like mental illness to me - counterproductive behavior that can't be willed to stop.
Fair point. I probably shouldn't have made that distinction.
> The tragic fact I'm trying to communicate about attempts to help people is that the first step is to get someone who is vulnerable to trust authorities. And then that trust is necessarily betrayed, because the whole point is to try to help people without their consent. Not being able to trust is a primary cause or contributing factor to being unable to function properly in society.
In many of the more extreme cases that is true. However it doesn't always work out that way. Realistically this is a far to broad a topic to be generalising the way we have but it's still been a read regardless.
> The fact that you don't realize you are being offensive is just so... chef's kiss.
I'm certain that you're offended by my statements, but only because of your aforementioned arrogance. Telling unqualified individuals to seek help from qualified individuals about matters regarding mental health isn't offensive. I'm sorry that I don't have the faith in random unqualified individuals that you do.
> Please continue your crusade against negligence elsewhere. You've added absolutely nothing here.
I ended our conversation previously and you chose to revive this discussion. You're welcome to see yourself out whenever you're ready.
> Mental illness is not a monolith and it does not present the same way for different people.
I agree. Of course it isn’t. However, saying that people affected by severe mental illness are able to think clearly and rationally is almost definitionally false.
If their ability to think clearly and rationally were not afflicted, they wouldn’t be experiencing a mental disorder.
Further, just saying that I have misunderstandings, am spreading FUD, and should stop commenting without yourself providing cogent reasons why I am mistaken helps nobody.
> Ohhh. Dammit. My apologies, I thoroughly misunderstood you and was arguing from a faulty premise
No worries at all; judging by the other comments on my post it appears I didn’t explain myself terribly well.
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I sadly don’t know many solutions to this either; I think making mental healthcare more accessible to people would be a good place to start( e.g. publicly funded psychiatrists) but I don’t think that financial illiteracy is really a “mental illness” in the classical sense.
>Also, I think commenting on voting activity is considered bad form here.
OK, sorry if it was a personal attack.
As far as the actual commenting on downvotes - well, if such downvotes are in support/defense of obvious signs of mental illness (e.g. the exact term in this case is "learned helplessness") then I will point that out even if it is against the HN culture.
Medical reality trumps culture any time, at least for me.
>Whether I'm /s or not is, frankly, immaterial. My comment is true de facto.
It actually matters, a lot. If a significant portion of the population acquires "learned helplessness" that will in and of itself lead to collapse. I have to ask - does this approach work for you? Namely, being disengaged from life and trying forcing yourself to enjoy it when it is quite obvious things are pretty bad right now? So bad in fact, that 1 in 4 young Americans are seriously contemplating suicide - an "unraveling" of the social fabric?
I would gladly trade places with if you you honestly think this. I am homeless living with a mood disorder caused by an Autoimmune condition (Neuropsychiatric Lupus) that was misdiagnosed as Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder for the last 30 years of my life. I cannot work.
So I kind of understand how you came to have this point of view. Since anyone on the internet, and usually some of the most successful people, can put up a blog and complain about their very common phenotype to moan about how losing their gloves amounts to a disorder.
And any short amount of research on nutrition could probably fix their issue but instead they go to pharmaceuticals.
> I'm "pulling [that sentence] apart" because it's the very pivot point of the issue. The core, the crux, the interpretation of which is purely subjective, so where things can go bad.
It's not the pivotal point and it's not subjective. There is an intended meaning which the author of that post, namely me, specifically wrote. That was then clarified in every subsequent post where you've repeatedly argued a contradictory meaning.
Furthermore I would consider myself uniquely qualified to comment on what was meant in that post - and all other posts by me - because I specifically wrote them. So arguing with me - the author of those posts - about the meaning of those posts is just absurd beyond comprehension. Please stop it.
> When I was concerned about was the fine balance between helping and suddenly forcing 'for their own good', hence in my original post I said "That's ripe for abuse". I was not initially criticising you, just saying it's frightningly abusable; be cautious.
You don't need to tell me this - I wrote literally that in my very first post (and again in a subsequent post too). Hence why I keep saying that you're taking that sentence of out context when parade it around in isolation like you have.
> Then you posted this "That's [suicide is] a mental illness". Now it seemed you opened the door to 'helping' whether they liked it or not.
No, I did not. I specifically and repeatedly said "I'm not going to argue about mental illness" - even after you directly asked me to talk about mental illness. I did suggest maybe you could benefit by talking to someone if you were sincere about your own mental health problems but I'm not forcing you to do that either (though I would recommend it - talking does genuinely help).
> Maybe you didn't but that's how I read it, and it did not play well with me. I don't think you got how badly that scared me. Well, that's ok.
Again, I think I - of all people - am uniquely qualified to tell you what I meant and if I tell you that you've misunderstood me, then you have misunderstood me.
> If everyone's entitled to their own perspective and experience, isn't this person entitled to theirs?
The downvotes (not mine) aren't for their experience, they're for the dismissiveness. It's like the paradox of tolerance; you shouldn't be surprised if people don't support your viewpoint about not supporting other viewpoints.
> Because it doesn't fit into the modern mental-health-awareness agenda?
Because it doesn't actual contribute anything substantive; it invalidates the author's experience seemly just to make a point that the author already acknowledged ("It seemed the only real difference between us was that I knew something was wrong")
> being told your problems are non-problems compared to someone else's is a helpful thing
How so? Far more often, people tell others that their problems are non-problems in an attempt to shut them up, not to help them. What actual value comes from attempting to precisely determine who has it worst?
> "I would recommend against having dealings with the obviously mentally ill. I'm not sure in what sense you might be legally liable (for a civil suit) if they happened to commit suicide a week later and mentioned you in the note. ... Leave the clearly crazy to the professionals."
> "Though if this is your first real crazy caller I could understand where the fascination came from. ... It took me a while to get that this was not someone I could save by argument."
Here's a bit of Hacker News "empathy" that I find fascinating. Likely in the same sense that you find the mentally ill fascinating.
The comment reads like some kind of bizzaro water-cooler advice on how to deal with that neighborhood "crazy caller" problem. Like when someone commiserates with Jane from accounting when she tells them she's worried because she can't keep the neighborhood kids out of the family pool.
On the surface, it's empathetic: "If this is your first... I can understand..." In fact, the comment does (correctly) assert that professionals are better inclined to help the mentally ill than the lay-person. But underneath, the comment reeks of an unseemly attitude that suggests the mentally ill are a burden to be cast aside at all costs (with the requisite sigh).
Perhaps it's a bit unfair of me to parse out those bits of your comment and infer so much. But, seriously?
Have we really reached the point where we are calculating the likelihood of "sav[ing] someone by argument" vs. the risk of civil liability?
Are these people merely objects of amusement and fascination?
I wish I were a better writer, so I could flesh out exactly why your comment bothers me. I think it has something to do with the clinically detached tone and the casual implication that the mentally ill are at best a passing amusement; and, at worst, a liability to be avoided.
Maybe I just need to take a break. I must be misunderstanding your comment.
> I just tend to be a little on the defensive about it
Completely understandable! Most people seem to have such a frustrating inability to understand that other people can have very different experiences of the world to their own, and that those experiences aren't wrong.
I am lucky enough that most of my friends do understand mental illnesses a bit better than the average person out there. Some of them who confided their mental health problems with me about the kind of reaction they tend to get, and it's just amazing how ignorant the natural state of the human mind is.
> that I’m taking the “easy” way out through medication.
Call me crazy, but I partially blame the dualist world view of the Western world for that, even if most people aren't even aware that they have been raised with a dualist mindset. This whole mind/matter division makes people think that mental problems have to be solved by thinking.
> One simply cannot reason ones way around the emotional core that drives us as humans.
Found the flaw in your argument. I am not driven by emotions. If therapy is all about that then all the more reason to not waste time with it.
My (accurate accounting of) history with building and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships is fine. Why do you assume I need help with that?
In these comments I see a lot of imagining problems I supposedly have right now, when all I did was share the problems I used to suffer from, in the context of a discussion about the systemic, environmental deficiencies in how society is structured causing massive waste of human potential.
Therapy takes time and money. I don't use emotions to make decisions on how to invest my time and money. You're arguing in favor of investing my time and money into a questionably effective solution to an imagined problem.
> I really think this view is more indicative of a peer enabled personality disorder than insight or compassion.
I really think that diagnosing random strangers with mental disorders without ever meeting them is rude and unkind, in addition to likely being completely erroneous.
For the purpose of trying to fill in that knowledge gap, let me say that as someone that just casually browsed the comments, you originally came across as tone-deaf and disconnected from reality. After the comment attempting to dismiss mental disorders, you came across as actively malicious.
If you're serious about just trying to help people, try harder than telling them to work harder on a forum almost exclusively populated with well-off professionals.
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