This isn’t about everyone agreeing about anything. This is about the fact that too often, asshole behaviour is attributed to those living with mental illness, when too often it is just assholes being assholes, and somehow people “assuming” they are “crazy” is an excuse to let them be.
corroboration in the case is external corroboration - that is, either the article (or another) reports that they have been diagnosed, or they have self-reported the same. This is explicitly laid out in the linked post on our guidelines page:
Posts that make assumptions about anyone’s mental state, race, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, group affiliation or sexual orientation without it being explicitly stated somewhere (either in a post or other verifiable source) will be considered inappropriate.
If you wish to engage in collaborative speculation on someone’s mental state otherwise, you will have to do it elsewhere.
This is patently untrue, as evidenced by both the existence (and mod responses) in this topic, and the discussions in the General Moderation topic, the topics spun off from that, and the topics linked in our guidelines. You are welcome to let everyone know you are upset about the fact that we attempt to avoid labelling people here without proof, but the idea that we do not regularly have conversations in detail about these policies, why they exist, and our thinking behind them is laughable at best.
Thanks for taking the time to spell out for me where you come from.
I interpreted that the assumption about the man’s mental state had been made many times in the thread previous. My comment sought to say ‘if you all are correct that the man is having a psychiatric crisis, is it ok to broadcast his image on TV, as if it were different from someone having a heath issue with an organ other than the brain?’
Sorry for creating more work for you and coming off as an asshole.
No, really.
I’m conflict adverse and this level of exposure on a public forum is already scary as hell for me.
The comments were making fun of psych wards, psych evaluations, being so detached from reality that he could fly on his own, suggesting that it would be fun to watch other violent passengers and this man trapped in a small space together - etc…
The police have been murdering people having health episodes ranging from suicidal language to delusions, and that matters to me, so I felt it important to speak up and say that it’s not always ‘ha, ha; they get what they have coming to them’. That’s all.
It would be better for the community if members took their responsibilities to report specific items of concern seriously.
But not everyone is prepared to do so. In the absence of that ability; making vague unsupported allegations doesn’t seem a good strategy for improving the forum. Or respectful of one’s peers.
Yeah, I do take my responsibilities seriously, but I only flag when I’m really sure someone is being derogatory and meaning to be so. Otherwise I try to thoughtfully comment back. Because I’m not a person who is just always really confident about how I read something or what the ‘correct’ course of action is. But being slower to judge something as falling into a clear category isn’t a sign that I care less about the bbs or that I don’t take violations seriously. Just that I’m less sure of myself in these spaces.
Trust the flag. Let the mods sort it out. Personally I think some of those comments were probably out of line and people do indeed heap a lot of scorn and sadistic fantasy on people who end up having some kind of moment in their life that gets a lot of negative attention, and then a lot of the language for that contempt ends up being a sort of admission that “mental health” in popular thought is more about ridding us of degenerates than anything else. I too am sad when I see that.
I’m sure you’re right. From my side it seemed disingenuous for whatever happy mutant went reading numerous comments that basically said ‘haw haw look at the crazy person. haw haw, he’s sure in pain now’ and then flagged my post on the technicality that I actually typed ‘mental health’ instead of such ambiguous and coded dog whistles as ‘delusional’, ‘institution’, ‘psych ward’, ‘psych eval’, and ‘out of touch with reality’.
I think that the TV news should have blurred out this man’s face and tee shirt before airing.
I know that mental health is …health. So if you wouldn’t broadcast the face of someone having a stroke or seizure on a plane, it’s probably questionable to share the image of someone who was immediately taken for a psychiatric evaluation by the authorities.
I protested, not the mod removal of my post, but the flagging of it in the first place, because the outcome of this strategy is encouragement of making fun of a ‘crazy person’, but disciplines the only post trying to stand up for this man’s possible human dignity, right to privacy and to be forgotten and to come back from this day.
What makes you think you were singled out? Speaking for myself, I flagged about a dozen posts in that thread, including yours. Many were hidden, but since it takes multiple community flags to hide posts, it doesn’t always happen in chronological order.
I’d suggest a review of that thread to see where it’s at now. The few posts that even allude to mental illness are more questions than statements. Not great, but not quite equating this man’s actions with mental illness without a professional diagnosis. Which, it should be noted, is an assumption you are still making.
Mental illness is stigmatized, and making assumptions about somebody’s mental health based on their outward behavior (even if you are trying to stand up for that person by urging others not to mock them) only adds to that stigma.
In the future, you can say something to the effect that you sympathize with whatever this person is going through and aren’t comfortable with laughing at their distress. This gets your message across without making it about mental health (which again, only adds to the stigma).
It seems that some replies are not getting scrubbed when the original post is taken down (see example below). I myself got flagged for replies to two posts that had already been removed, but my replies were left up and became off-topic when not in response to anything.
The posts below are up as of this posting. Please let me know if you would prefer to have your names obscured. These posts are in response to some bullshit a fresh user named Simona-something said, but that original post is gone.
ETA: I have deleted the example picture, as it is no longer necessary.
That is correct. Do not reply to spammers. It is off-topic, disrupts the conversation, and your posts will be left behind when the account is deleted, and it is very likely your now out-of-context posts will be misconstrued as you being hostile to the original post or others in the topic.
Okay, that’s fair enough. I will resist the urge to respond with snark in the future.
I feel a bit bad for that User up there because of how that post looks without the context of the message to which it is replying, so I also wanted to let them know that that’s still up so they can delete it.
