It SeeMS tHAT whENEVEr A PerSON WITH SOMe UNDIAgNOSED MENtAL illNESS Posts An INCOHErenT Rant On My MESSagE BoArd THEY AlMOSt AlwaYS PoST THe MEssAGE in ALL CAPS or with IRREGUlAR CapITALIzATION AND OFTEN with no PunctuatioN WhY???
Certainly it’s an antisocial (and/or perhaps sociopathic) thing to do, but not all antisocial people are mentally ill; some of them are just wankers.
Not exactly on-topic, but close. Whenever I’ve found a closely packed bit of writing* (writing crammed onto every possible square millimeter of paper), the writer has been…in need of mental health care. Punctuation and capitalization seem to be freeform in these writings, too. The same goes for people who post large signs in their yard or on their vehicles, containing much too much information in too small a space. My WAG is that is has to do with “pressure of speech” and maybe a touch of obsession in the mix.
Of course, some people do it just to be noticed, as Mangetout correctly noted.
I am not a mental health professional, although I am related to one. IMHO, YMMV, and all that.
*except for cheat sheets, that’s just being prudent to make that puppy as small as possible.
Assuming you’re not joking, elmwood,(and if you are, I’ve been whoooshed) you’re making too broad a generalization. I know some very intelligent and sane people who can’t spell or punctuate worth a nicked pluggle. In person, these folks are quite cogent, but when you filter them through a keyboard, they seem pretty goofy. There are also those bleetsp33Krs who insist on being hard to read. There’s a difference between those folks and the truly daft.
The purity of the well-clear-of-sane mind is a wonder to behold. It’s not someone you want to be close friends with, but the raving is entertaining, and it helps to know that you’re not that daffy yourself.
The ALL CAPS people just are lazy and don’t care about netiquite or are deliberately rebelling against it and are not that crazy - just a tad on the obnoxious side.
I’ve been noticing that sort of weird user who uses iRREGulAr capITALISatiON tends to be either a 16 year old kid thinking that it looks cool or one of the two types below who are definately are mentally ill:
1.) their writing resembles the poetry of ee cummings but without style or talent (and always seem to think they can write and are working on a novel) This type posts between 17 and 40 times a day, and my guess is that they are bipolor or manic depressive, perhaps with strong delusions involving their own talent. They often claim to have met famous people (who they have only met at an autograph table), and have strange obsessions with fame, and famous people. They also could be on your site to stalk another user who they are in love with.
2.) their writing resembles a random note, they use way too much punctuation marks, often intentually misspell certain words, and have strong delusions about government conspiracies, and most likely are paranoid schizophrenics. If you have images enabled on your board. they will also sometimes use the largest image possible to express a point where one word would have done. When frustrated at the fact people are annoyed by him, they may resort to threatening to burn your dog, or call you a fuxxor. When banned from your site for violation of the rules, they will tell you if it wasn’t for their thought proving political “essays”, your forum would have floundered long ago.
Type one, you can keep around as comic fodder, type two needs to be banned as soon as possible.
Oops
random note == ransom note
I know that there’s people out there that can’t punctuate and use proper capitalization for squat, along with the AOLspeak/leetspeak crowd. Using strange capitalization isn’t necessarily a sign of insanity, but when insane people post to the message board I run, it’S ALMost ALWAyS wIth THIs TyPE oF STRanGe CApiTAliZatIOn. I can also confirm the sightings of Cub Mistres; the packed signs written by those who aren’t all there.
Actually, I work with a couple of ALL CAPS people; the first thing they do after switching on their PCs in the morning is to hit the Caps Lock and they’ve done this since the days of MS DOS; probably before that too, on a typewriter.
One of them hates email - complaining that it makes people so rude and tetchy (as evidenced by all the terse replies she receives); I tried to explain that when you write CAN YOU SEND ME THE COPY INVOICES?, it reads as a shouted demand and if you try to temper it verbally (PLEASE CAN YOU SEND ME THE COPY INVOICES WHEN YOU GET A SPARE MOMENT?), it reads as sarcasm. the penny stubbornly refuses to drop though.
I remember the documentary about R. Crumb had his mentally ill brother Charles “Treasure Island” comics where the written dialog progressively become more cramped & compressed as his illness progressed. It was quite dramatic.
I hold a decently impressive set of psychiatric diagnoses, the most intimidating of which is “paranoid schizophrenic”. (I am nevertheless not sufficiently lunaticos to suit some board members, who would prefer that I either be drugged to the gills with psych meds or have the grace to decompensate as an example of what happens when you don’t take yer meds, etc…)
In my presumably semi-relevant if not necessarily humble opinion, most of “sanity” consists of integration with the surrounding matrix of people you interact with and communicate with; we can make sense to each other and feel comfy predicting each other’s behaviors (within limits) based on sharing a common mindset, which we’re reassured about from receiving little confirmation-signals of a mostly trivial nature. Lots of little shit that verifies “OK, we’re all the same kind of people here, thinking the same kind of thoughts”.
If you’re not watching the same channel and aren’t thinking the same kind of thoughts, well…
• You find this constant request for confirmation of shared-trivia-mindset creepy as all get-out. You feel like you’re surrounded by The Borg, or The Body, or some such thing. It’s really really fucking easy to develop a serious Category-5 no-kidding freaked-out belief that them normalfolk are all in undead-cahoots and you, alone, remain free…until they surround and absorb them or something…
• Phrases or expressions start to take on meanings. If you were chatting with other folks who were on the same general page as you were, some portion of those meanings would become part of your group mindset (kind of like “Hi, Opal” or “Sequential Threads” here on this board, or “blog” in the larger web-using milieu) due to confirmation that others Got It, while other stuff would get discarded cuz they didn’t, but because you’re on your own, you build your own without reflective feedback. For some REASON, emphasis tends to be high on the list. So do puns, in my experience, and embedded acronyms. If you’ve developed a messy sprawling theory in your head about “adultism” and the “myth of adulthood” and “the oppression of children”, mixing political and Freudian-pop-psychological and new-age developmental ideas and metaphors right and left, you might think it cute and powerful to say that something is apPARENT, if you’re going to follow that by a conventional statement and then try to upend it with something that’s true but not “apPARENT” in the next paragraph.
• OTOH, …umm, OK, some of it is just plain screeching, the way folks who have had a lot of experience of not being listened to tend to get REAL-ly draMATic (complete with gestures) in order to retain your attention a little longer. If you’ve been recently thought by most folks an ignorable nutcase, you might tend to do this more than the typical person who is listened to with appreciation cuz they’ve had useful and coherent insights to offer (or were entertaining and amusing and not just weird as batshit and inclined to cause discomfort if allowed an audience)
• Aside from all of which, if you aren’t part of the general mindset of the folks you’re trying to communicate with, unquestioned baseline stuff (incuding priorities) they hold in common may not be held by you at all. What, paragraphs? White space? Oh…well, sure, but I wasn’t thinking about that, I was all wrought up in real important stuff, I mean if you have the secret to the universe you shouldn’t have to put it in a binder with exactly 1" margins, right? I could’ve done paragraphs but once they started reading none of that would matter because THIS IS IMPORTANT SHIT and we don’t have time for trivia like the Queen’s English and indentation of exactly 5 spaces so I didn’t bother, ya know?
THat’S eXaCTLy wHAt I Was gONna SAy!
I’m Surprised At How Often You Encounter People On Message Boards Who Capitalise Every Word, Headline Style. Don’t Be Too Hard On Them - They Are Probably Reformed No-Caps People Who Are Really Trying To Type Properly But Haven’t Quite Grasped Correct Capitalisation.
aS fAr As AlTeRnAtInG cApS aRe CoNcErNeD, iT dOeSn’T sEeM tO bE sO mUch A rEfLeCtIoN oN tHe WrItEr’S mEnTaL sTaTe As It Is On ThEiR eNjOyMeNt Of TrEnDy NeT sPeAk. I hAvE a FrIeNd WhO i LoVe To PiEcEs WhO wRiTeS lIkE tHiS, bUt I dOn’T hAvE tHe HeArT tO tElL hEr It’S mAkInG mY hEaD eXpLoDe.
I Used To Do The Headline Style Capitilization. Heh.
What do you mean by "SOMe UNDIAgNOSED MENtAL illNESS’?
From my limited experience in JROTC and ROTC, all Air Force officers over the rank of Colonel seem to send emails in all caps. I figured it was one part holdover from some old standard, and two parts everyone who knows better being of lower rank and thus not willing to tell the General that he’s doing it wrong. 
“Multiple exclamation points are a sure sign of a deranged mind.” - Terry Pratchett
I rest my case!!!