No. Medicating is not a form of art, unless you dress funny and do it in front of an audience.
I noticed that comment, Lib, and thought it was in pretty bad taste.
But, continuing similar arguments i have made in other threads this week, i don’t think the job of the moderators here is to save us from our own loquaciousness. It’s made very clear to everyone who joins these boards that you post information about yourself at your own risk, and that the SDMB is not going to engage in post-hoc deletions just because you happen to regret something you posted.
If that’s the practice—and i think it’s a good one—then i also see no need for pre-emptive thread closures based on fears that some members may reveal information about themselves that they’ll later regret, or that might be used against them in the future.
Also, as others have noted, there is (or, at least among intelligent people, should be) no stigma attached to the use of psychiatric medications. I’m not naive enough to believe that no-one will ever try to make hay from such admissions, but my belief is that we should treat such instances with the contempt that they deserve, rather than trying to prevent them by closing threads about medications.
And where, then, do we draw the line about admissions from the past?
I’ve admitted on these boards to having been a rather unpleasant racist and homophobe as a youth. It’s not something that i’m proud of, but i am somewhat proud that i’ve overcome those character failings (although i still have other failings, in good measure), and i’m not concerned that someone might dredge up my admissions and use them against me.
I agree with CarnalK. If revelations like these are taken advantage of for the purpose of stalking or making pointless ad hominem attacks, then that behavior can easily (and appropriately) be reined in by the mods. And if people are worried that their admissions might come back to haunt them in some way, they have the very simple option of not posting on the subject. I know this is a private message board, not the wider public realm, but i thought that pre-emptively protecting people from the consequences of their own freely-taken choices was somewhat antithetical to your philosophy.
Some people here seem to actually thrive on posting about their mental disorders, syndromes, diseases, etc and they seem almost proud about talking about all the meds they take.
Then they whine when somebody takes a shot at them. I have never understood why they bring this shit up in the first place. This is a general interest message board, not a support group.
Treat it like you’d treat gay or lesbian identity & experiences. One would not expect a thread about (for exampe) “Did you come out before or after your first gay/lesbian relationship?” to be closed & locked on the grounds that “Someone could harass you for being gay or lesbian after reading what you’ve written in there, it could even be used as grounds for discriminating against you in the workforce or in housing in some places”, even though that’s entirely true.
If such a thread and others like it existed (and of course they do), offhand comments in subsequent threads alluding to this or that poster’s homosexuality could run quite a gamut:
“Oh so you can see the cute same-sex salesfolks modeling them ::wink wink::?”
" ‘Girlfriend’? Sorry, I’m confused, I thought you were a gay dude?!?"
“Yeah, like we don’t know where you get those toasters!”
“I just bet you WOULD like to ‘adopt’. Well the adoption agencies know all about you people and what you like to do to kids, and frankly you perverts make me sick”
There has not been a need for some kind of official board rule explaining the circumstances and tone under which / with which a board member can reference another board member’s sexual orientation. We don’t need one. We don’t need something in writing to explain “Well that post was as hateful and mean-spirited as all get-out”. Nor for that matter is “the Board’s” response limited to how a Moderator officially responds: the general tone of reactions from the ordinary member saying “What’s that awful smell, oh, someone left a bigot on the floor” is very effective, leaving the Mods mostly to do cleanup on Aisle 4 when someone goes apoplectic when their hate-speech elicits only derision and catcalls from the audience.
I doubt that we need anything particularly formal for psych-stuff either. You all already know the difference between ordinary teasing of a person for being generically a nut (or genuinely & specifically a mental patient / specific diagnosis), on the one hand, and actually hurling psychiatric diagnosis, history, or meds taken/needed at someone as a discrediting device on the other. You know when it’s hateful when you see it, it constitutes “being a jerk” in readily recognizable ways, and that should be sufficient unto itself to explain any intervention that becomes necessary.
I agree completely with that. I didn’t call on mods to stop it, I just said that people can and do attack others for their illnesses.
OK, seeing as I’m the OP of that thread, I though I’d stop by and offer my thoughts.
If you do a search of my last 30 posts or so, you’ll see a lot of them mention my struggle with depression lately, which has gotten to be too much for me to handle on my own. Shit, if you swing my GQ I’ve got a thread where I’m asking about the timing of medication consumption for ultimate effectiveness where I volunteered the same info I did in that other thread.
Truth be told, with my lack of a phone right now, the fact that my best friend is now 3 hours away, my recent breakup, and that I haven’t been getting out much because I’ve been so miserable, the Dope is my one source of support and company. Despite my rather flippant tone in the OP, I sort of hoped that anyone who felt comfortable volunteering that rather personal information would be a source of advice, support, humorous anecdotes, something to help me through this rough spot. And since I’m sick of posting along the lines of “Gah, I’m miserable,” I though I’d poke a bit of fun at myself by asking others to join me in basking in our insanity.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have posed such a question. Maybe it wasn’t the right way to seek support. But it felt a lot better than wallowing in self pity.
I understand others’ points that such information could be used against me (and others) in the future. But honestly, I’ve seen plenty of posters volunteer exactly that information in scores of other threads.
Meh. I’m not too broken up about it. Guess I’ll just have to go post a thread in MPSIMS called “GAH! Look at me! I’m depressed!” 
Honestly, I hope the mods would never intervene for that purpose. It is good to identify those who hold human pain and suffering to be worth nothing more than an opportunity to craft a witty one-liner or outright taunt. I like knowing who the subhumans are. How could we tell if the mods held them at bay?
I’m not sure how that thread was any different than any of the many “What are your experiences with a colonoscopy?” type threads or some of the more TMI threads. I can see it warranting a mod reminder or warning to keep it on track and to remind people to think twice before posting, but locking it?
I’m sure I’ve seen threads discussing experiences and side-effects of medicince, medical procedures, preferred birth control, etc. I can’t see how it’s different and the topic could be interesting for people who’ve had to deal with side effects etc.
:: shrug ::
I don’t get this thread closing, either. Will all posts that reference a poster’s mental health issues be erased in the future, to protect them from backlash? I think that the folks around here are more than capable of deciding whether they want to take the risk of putting personal information out there.
I’m a big-enough girl that I wouldn’t have any problem stating what meds I take, and standing up for myself later if someone chose to ride me about it.
::shrug:: Some people are more sensitive about that stuff, though, so I make no judgment as to whether the thread should have been closed. I do think that closing that, but leaving open ones where we’ve talked about our dx’s or “quirks” is a lack of consistency that bothers me.
Now, that, sir, is None of Your Business. 
Shut up, you Waterworld watcher.
WTF? There have been meds threads before that were perfectly fine and didn’t get closed. What is this, the new world order? Bad call closing the thread.
Fuckity fucking fuck.
There is a thread that was just started about teens and depression meds. Someone better go shut it down before someone gets their feelings hurt.
For the record, I use everything anyone has ever posted against them.
It follows that all threads should be immediately closed.
Then I submit that you are not doing it correctly.
If threads like these have been caused problems in the past, then I don’t have a problem with this current thread being closed.
I also think it’s more efficient for mods to just shut down such threads than it is for them to police the boards for incidents where the sensitive information is thrown back in someone’s face.
People are saying that and politely not mentioning any examples but I don’t really remember any specific incident. Certainly many threads like it have been left open.
I talk about it to try to take the stigma away from a medication that is being used to regulate my body, just the way non-psych meds are. I talk about it because it took a lot of years of pain before I decided to try meds, because meds are admitting you’re weak and can’t just “get over it”. I like to think they, and psych issues, should be talked about like any meds or medical issues. And if enough people talk about like it’s not a big deal, and talk about how they have helped them, others may seek help. Plus, there’s the dissenting opinion that allows people to fairly judge docs who may be too quick to prescribe.
I agree with gigi. One of the reasons I stopped taking my meds in high school was several people whose opinions I valued told me that I shouldn’t have to take drugs, it was bullshit, I could deal with it some other way.
Well, I dropped out of high school. It took my forever to get an Associate’s Degree. I’m this close to getting kicked out of school. I’m back on medication, and I want to talk to all the smart, successful people on the Dope who are on/have taken meds too. Because there is a stigma attached to psych meds that isn’t to, say, heart or blood pressure medication.
I honestly think it was the tone of my OP. I was just trying to be funny.
Agreed. But isn’t it possible that Meds are over prescribed? I mean some people are just assholes…when someone says they are in pain or I have cancer, Meds are clearly indicated, but when someone says “I don’t feel like I think everybody else feels” maybe it is just their perception that is wrong.
I have no problem with the closure. Sometimes people need to be protected from themselves. I also feel that this place takes the place of good psychoanalysis for some. When people say they are on medication then say something I feel is completely batshit crazy, I see nothing wrong with pointing out that they may be off their Meds. It may be true.