I would have been more inclined to leave it open if it had been a long term member asking for help, for whom we knew some background, rather than someone who just signed up and was asking complete strangers for input.
The counterargument to this is that to a message board for help could be detrimental if it delays the person seeking the professional help they clearly need.
Thanks. I hope they take the advice.
I think a response such as this would not be helpful for the poster.
“I need help, I think I’m a computer simulation”
“Maybe you are!”
I’m not a mental health professional but I have training in mental first aid (as well as personal experience; my brother has schizoaffective disorder) and strongly recommend NAMI.
As with like situations we’ve faced before, it really is the best we can do.
I’m not a schizophrenic, but there was a period of time some years ago (I was in Iraq at the time) when I was seriously contemplating (not certain, mind you, but contemplating) the possibility that, contrary to certain bald assertions made by one who is, in my view, a vastly overrated 17th century philosopher (but I’ll grant a fair mathematician for his time), I did not exist. I spent many a long night thinking through how my thoughts, far from being my own, could be part of some flash program run within a computer simulation or, at best, the fancies of some other mind, like existing within a cloud.
Now, I’m past all that, but can you all imagine if someone like me, experiencing dissociative episodes as I was, had stumbled across the thread in question and replied with “Gosh, you know I think you’re right! You might just be living in a computer simulation, and I think I might just be a figment of your imagination.”
No wink emoticon, just straight-faced and totally sincere.
Closing the thread ASAP and directing to seek professional medical help was the right response IMHO. If they’re serious, they need it far ore than they need even the best kind of internet vibes. If they’re not, then they’re a troll and they’re not doing anyone any good.
NAMI is a helpful referral.
The idea that we are in a computer simulation is not entirely crazy and unprecedented. But it does become a sign of mental unwellness if you believe you’re in a simulation that targets or harms you in particular. In a simulation of our size, it’s extremely unlikely for any of us to be singled out for that kind of treatment.
Yeah, if you want to be subjected to medical model psychiatry, with or without your consent.
We’ve found them to be totally rigid and uncompromising and vehemently opposed to patient self-determination.
AHunter3,
What resource with national breadth would you advise to someone disturbed by their delusions and looking for help? I readily admit to my bias in favor of the medical model but is there an alternative resource that comports better with your preferred model? If not do you believe that no help is preferable to the medical model!
What do you mean by “we”, Kimosabe?
:rolleyes: with a bit of :mad:
Or, what the good doctor said.
I’d advise NARPA.
But yeah I believe no help is immeasurably an improvement over medical model help for the generic lunatic about whom I know nothing else. There appear to be those that have been helped by it but I"m far more acquainted with those who have found it devastatingly destructive to their lives. And until it ceases to be coercive, yes, I would warn people away from it even without a substitute to offer.
Schizzy lib front. Lunatic radicals.
Number or link in which they offer individualized support services to someone in crisis requesting help please. Because such is not on their website. Their focus is advocacy against forced treatment. Not helping individuals in the midst of a psychiatric crisis who are asking for help dealing with the crisis. I don’t think they advocate for keeping information on medical model treatment options hidden from “the generic lunatic” and thereby forcing a decision of no treatment upon them.
No hijack needed as to the evils of the modern mental health system (a debate not suiting for this forum I’d guess). But someone who wants help managing the distress that they are experiencing should not have a decision to not get that help forced upon them by having information about the medical model treatment option kept from them. That’s not a advocating for a right to refuse; that’s forcing a choice on them because of what you think is the choice they should make and you know best.
NARPA’s Facebook group is populated wall-to-wall with other people who have been given a psychiatric label. Some, admittedly, have no interest in seeking or receiving any help other than getting the psychiatric system off their backs, but there’s a large population of self-helpers, some of whom meet in groups, many of whom find solace in posting to each other online and being supportive, and there’s also a lot of herbal-alternative, nutritional, lifestyle, and other coping-with-it type of advice to be found there.
Yes, it would be massively better if we had more of a direct clearinghouse for folks who want or need help first and foremost and who aren’t primarily seeking political alliance. We’ve had it at times in the past, dating back to the pre-internet print periodical era. We’ve had national orgs that were funded for that purpose, even. Things fall apart sometimes. (Amazingly enough, if you throw a large batch of social misfitty people together, people whose cognitive and/or emotional patterns are atypical and problematic when they interact with the mainstream, we don’t always slide neatly into comfortable communication, effective planning, etc… no herd of cats has got anything on us [sigh…] ). Funding sources have also been very fickle.
I know this is your bête noire but you aren’t helping any.
Yeah, I’m going to call time out on that. Take any discussion about the efficacy of one model or other of mental illness treatment to Great Debates, please. ATMB is not the place for that discussion.
I believe closing the thread is the most pragmatic policy.
Someone using the nick **Melbourne **suggests he lives outside the USA, do you know the equivalent number for Australia? I do not.
The response to the closing of the thread suggests how quickly the thread itself would have become a trainwreck. I doubt we wouldn’t have gotten ten replies before fights would have broken out over medical vs. non-medical approaches, intellectual musings from someone that they, too, think we’re all in a simulation, and eventually someone swearing by the peace of mind they achieved from goat yoga. Throw in a couple of posters who just can’t resist the urge to say something less than helpful, and pretty quickly everyone will have forgotten that the OP was describing an acute attack with physical as well as psychological symptoms and the only thing we will have accomplished was to earn ourselves a lot of well-deserved mod notes and warnings before Colibri (or the mod in whichever forum the thread ended up in) shut it down with exactly the same words used to lock the first thread.
Face it folks, this is not a situation where our ability to whip up a “need answer fast” response is a good thing.
No, but it was easy to find.