shriekingviolet posted:

I can't possibly emphasize enough that this is place is not, and cannot, be a replacement for supportive real life interaction. Assessing someone's emotional and mental state accurately, whether to just comfort through friendly camaraderie or provide serious care, requires the empathy cues and immediacy of face to face interaction. The same goes for effective communication when dealing with life crises. You can't get that online. If someone doesn't have access to it in the real world, that really sucks, but they can't get it online. It does not work. Pretending it will work, hoping it will be different this time, won't help anyone.

Online interaction can be a nice accompaniment to real life interaction, but people need to be seeing people who care about them face to face.

The only thing I'd add to this is what I wrote in the one post I made in the sadbrains thread on old LF, back when I was working linking up people with others who could help them find coverage for mental health issues, which is that if people feel they're on the brink, immersing themselves in a forum where people jokingly wish death and suicide on other people from the pulpit of pseudo-semi-anonymity is likely to make things worse, not better, so much so that it's not only no substitute for face-to-face interaction but could also potentially diminish someone's drive to seek the help they need.

This is something that a lot of people notice about Internet shitfighting, that it can skew how they perceive face-to-face interactions when those interactions tend to carry at least a greater sense of social propriety and personal impact in a maybe no less hostile world, but the effect can be a lot worse if the person has already lost sight of that much. Trying to make a place that builds people up in the midst of all of that is like building a house halfway down a waterfall. That's probably one reason you end up with a lot of young Online guys feeling that gay Sulu is part of a worldwide conspiracy to keep women from marrying them and so on.

AZ_IZ_OT posted:

Every community has the right to expel a member, of course, but mania and psychosis can serve the same reconstructive function as ordinary depression when handled correctly. Handled incorrectly it just destroys the individual. And given the paucity of people who understand this, in anyone's general physical vicinity, I do see it as worthwhile for people to maintain communication with recovered MI posters (dm comes to mind).

this is not a psychosis support group, it's a place for cyber comrades to hang out and have a good time.

people who have their breakdowns in public forums online have formed a practically irrevocable link between their illness and whatever attention they received from the community they performed their breakdown in front of. receiving further attention from that community after recovery is only going to reinforce the legitimacy of the illness.

if individual posters have made connections with such people privately and wish to continue them, that's another matter and entirely up to them; there is and can be no such obligation on the community.

AZ_IZ_OT posted:

This is an extrapolation of the clinical saw that a patient should avoid all stimuli related to the breakdown. Prove that this is the case, and I could agree with you, but so far it's an unfounded claim. It's also a claim filtered down to general society by psychiatrists themselves. You're replicating hegemonic discourse, whether you're aware of it or not.

Comparisons to WDDP are also moot because there is a massive difference between reintegrating an individual into a community and allowing that individual to indulge their delusions via a judiciary system based around rectifying perceived oppression. If you're falling into that trap then clearly your community is already infested with some hero myth bullshit.

So overall, yes, this site is not able to reintegrate posters who've lost touch with reality. Which is an organizational failure, not a matter of necessity.

There are two points I want to address here.

The first is that I am not talking about avoidance of all stimuli related to the breakdown, but specific stimuli related to unhealthy behaviour during the breakdown. And I'm speaking really in terms of a general rule - I think it's safe to say most people in the situation I've described have nothing to gain from returning to an online community in which they've performed their breakdown, be it this or any other similar community. There are exceptions to every rule, and some people with that experience might be able to rejoin a community post-recovery and have a different relationship to it; I also said I felt that relationships made with individual community members might be maintained in a way that is good for all involved. I certainly don't think you can argue it would be good as a general rule for people in such a situation to subject themselves to that specific stimuli again without a good reason. So I don't think your characterisation of what I've said is really accurate.

The second is that my primary concern in these situations is not for the individual but for the community. Psychotic breakdowns played out in online communities like this are at best a minor disruption, at worst they are actively harmful to other members of the community and to the functioning of the community as a whole (we've seen that in this place). Most fall somewhere in the middle. I don't think it's overstating the case to say this is a kind of violence and it is not unreasonable to put the wellbeing of the community as a whole before either the immediate desire of the unwell person to keep participating or indeed the future desire of that person to reintegrate if community members are not comfortable with that. That's what I mean when I say this is not a psychosis support group.