Is it just me, or is that, perhaps, not the best choice of words?
Back on topic, I wouuld also like to see the thread re-opened. It seems more of a place for people to learn than to seek advice. Plus, as OneCentStamp points out in the thread (post #24)…
bolding mine. Certainly the mods could at least consider the possibility that the OP and other SI sufferers consider the Dopers to be a group of trustworthy friends, despite the anonymity of the board. I believe a couple of people even said that it felt good for them to be talking about this with people who understood, or at least were trying to understand.
I realize I will probably end up getting flamed for this, but I’m afraid I have to take the dissenting view here. Please bear with me, it may not come out exactly right.
On this board, we have a great deal of compassion and tolerance. They’re both wonderful qualities. However, I think we sometimes go overboard with that tolerance. There is a difference between depression and physically hurting yourself. While one may lead to the other, causing physical harm to yourself is not “okay.” I won’t speculate on the reasons why; I’m sure the reasons for doing so are as varied as the ways in which self injury is performed.
There are many people on this board that I’ve met IRL, and many that I correspond with. I can say in all honesty that I would be deeply concerned were I to learn that any of them caused themselves physical harm. At no time would I think they were “perfectly functional.” Self harm is not a functional reaction to any situation. And while I feel compassion and empathy for people who suffer from this affliction, I don’t believe that creating an atmosphere that it’s alright is a good idea.
I deal with a couple of teens who self injure. They’ve seen several family members do it. I wanted some information as to how to head things off at the pass, and I received some very much needed insight.
However, I did see the potential for minors reading to say “hey, biting? I never thought of that, and the marks might not show as much” or “hmm, stanley knife? dads got one of those in the kitchen drawer, it’ll be so much better of a fuck you when he finds out”
I worried that the ‘me too factor’ could turn into a bragging fest,.
Many posting to the thread posted as adults with hindsight. LunaV noted:
This is something I’ve tried to drill into someone’s head over the past year. They refuse to accept any part of it no matter how true. Most admitted in the thread that the age of cutters was 12-15. They just don’t have the wisdom to take the inforamtion intended from the thread, instead of what may seem to them as a bright idea.
also,
Is not a bright idea that a kid with issues needs either. As I’ve explained to my ladies, “How can a sick man get better if he doesn’t eat the soup that’s put in fromt of him?”
Maybe we could ask that the thread be reopened as long as discussion stays away from how, where and with what it was done, but I doubt that would be able to be followed.
That thread is very upsetting to read, and I can understand the impetus to close it, but it was a bad move because it didn’t advocate anything illegal, encourage anything damaging, and maybe most importantly it denied the rest of us an opportunity to understand other people. There is plenty of insight to be gained on that topic.
I don’t think that thread was creating any such atmosphere. It seemed like a reasonable, factual, mature discussion of what it’s like to have this condition. I learned a lot from it, got some insight into why my father may have been cutting himself after my mother left him, and I’m very thankful to have read it. I think that shutting down discussion of anything that isn’t healthy and normal would eliminate many truly interesting and/or entertaining threads.
I don’t know for sure, but here’s how it works in the community:
We have explicit instructions on the community info page that any comment a person makes that might be triggering should be put behind a cut tag and a trigger warning should be included lest anyone see something they’re not ready for. People who SI, it is my understanding, do not all of them want to see writing glorifying the practice, going into deep detail or otherwise sharing experiences akin to someone writing about how good a drink tasted or whatever. We have that policy on trigger posts to guard against the possibility of setting off people who are trying to quit.
It is also generally the policy that anything written in the community in question is friends-locked, meaning you can only access an entry if you’ve gained entrance into the community. If I were to link here to the community (and I’m not going to do that), you’d be able to see two of the last 20 entries.
's that answer your question?
If you’re talking about the likelihood of people’s desire to read something here increasing if it’s behind a spoiler, I think it’s possible.
I think it is completely absurd to suggest that thread had any place here. How about these:
“Ask the Anorexic” his favorite tricks for making it look like he’s eaten.
“Ask the Junkie” where she injects now that she’s blown out the veins in her wrists and ankles.
“Ask the Sex Addict” his favorite spots to cruise.
The poster openly stated that she has no intention of getting help. Many of you are acting like this is some kind of lifestyle choice over which others shouldn’t sit in judgement. What the fucking fuck? If it had been ‘Ask the Former Cutter’ I might feel differently, but to suggest that we should all sit around having a polite chat about her dangerous, untreated mental illness is ridiculous. Tuba’s stated reason for closing the thread seemed a little off-point, but the closing was completely valid and necessary.
I appreciate that you found some useful information in it, and that it was helpful to you. But although you didn’t perceive the thread was creating that atmosphere, does not mean no one else did. Certainly, the tone of compassion may well have reinforced the feeling in that poster who stated they were not on meds and were not getting help that it was okay not to do so.
A great many people who post here work in healthcare. They’re all familiar with the term “professional detatchment.” It allows us to maintain some perspective and objectivity when dealing with our patients. It’s also the reason that thread had so much potential to go boom. There was no objective detatchment. It’s possible that a person becomes so emotionally or personally involved in the topic, they don’t realize that their views on the subject, while very valid, are colored by their personal experience. This is true of just about every subject, but this particular subject is a very delicate one, and it’s easy for people to become offended by an inoccuous (sp?) remark, as it seems you were by mine.
My point is this: I think that if people are going to seek out information on this subject, especially because they or someone they are close to suffers from this problem, then they deserve to have as objective information as is available. That thread was not it. Sorry for belaboring it.
But nobody asked what the best tool is to cut. Nobody asked the best way to hide the scars. It is not clear to me that the thread was evolving the way you describe it.
The poster did get help! As re-posted earlier in this thread:
That IS help. She also said
Is a recovering alcoholic barred from posting about alcoholism for the same reason? She seems to have the problem under control, as do all the other SI people who identified themselves in the thread.
So all this is for the omission of a single word in the thread title? Because she clearly identified herself as a former (“recovering”) cutter right there in the OP, and others concurred with her characterization of cutting as being like alcoholism.
See, this is why I think the thread was really valuable. I don’t know much about it, but I wouldn’t think that someone who describes herself the way the OP did has a “dangerous, untreated mental illness.” Part of the benefit of the discussion was to demonstrate that people who do (or have) self-injure(d) are not necessarily suffering from a dangerous, untreated mental illness. I was very interested to find out more about it, since I don’t know much and I hate that the only impression I get from any media source I’ve ever seen (other than that thread, of course) has been that anyone who does it is a dangerous lunatic.
Sometimes it is more harmful to be labelled as suffering from a dangerous, untreated mental illness, than it is to self-injure. But I guess we can’t talk about that on these boards.
I recently discovered that I know someone who cuts. For various reasons I won’t go into, this is not a situation where I can just ask them about it offhand.
This thread was very informative and helpful in starting to understand the situation from their point of view, which may make it possible for me to talk to them about it without driving them away. While it’s possible to find factual information elsewhere on the subject, it’s not always easy to find subjective, personal-perspective information.
You don’t seem to understand. My problem is not that people would ask those things to find out how to do them. It’s that by chatting casually with her about it, the impression is created that it’s something it’s perfectly okay not to treat the right way, or something that can be made to “go away” on its own safely. And frankly, dumping your health problems on your friends and family is ABSOLUTELY THE WRONG ANSWER. Having a support system is fine, but using the people who love you as your medical team is not. I don’t know which of these categories the OP falls into, but I do know that without a detached advocate she remains in danger, as she herself admitted.
No it isn’t. It may have worked out for her, but her audience here should not get the false impression that that is a typical case.
She also states, in your own quoted statements, that she still feels it “lurking”. And frankly, since the attitude is that cutting is a choice she has a right to make, or so it seemed to me, I don’t see why she wouldn’t start again. You’re confusing me. Is it a problem or isn’t it?
Do you really believe that “all this is for” the “omission of a single word”? Is it actually unclear to you in any way how my position, and that of those who agree with it, differs from nit-picking over vocabulary choice?
That was the DANGER of the discussion. And you don’t have to be a dangerous lunatic to be mentally ill, where ever did you get that idea? That is precisely why some of us feel it had to be shut down. Just because a person is functional doesn’t mean they aren’t ill, or that their illness isn’t potentially dangerous.
Now I’m really confused. What are we talking about right now if not that? And can you please do me the favor of expanding on this point? I find it fascinating but I want to be sure I understand you. You’re saying that an anoymous stranger’s opinion could somehow be injurious to someone in sound mental health, and more so than if that person regularly indulged in secretive self-mutilation? Can you describe what you believe the mechanism for this phenomenon is?
I suppose you mean that not being allowed to talk to anonymous strangers on a message board about a problem that isn’t actually a problem might create a problem, but since that doesn’t make a lick of sense I’m trying to figure out an alternative.
Things are what they are. If someone drinks too much they are an alcoholic, and need help. Same goes for hurting yourself. Pretending a S-I doesn’t need help, helps no one. I recall two people who have posted in either of these threads that have lost a S-I friend to cutting. How is that not dangerous?
It is more harmful to perpetuate a false belief that you don’t need help if you are injuring yourself.
There is so much misunderstanding when it comes to this issue, and the ignorance is coming out in the dissenters in this thread…
Maureen, no one in that thread is saying it’s “okay,” or asking for “tolerance.”
The place the ignorance lies is that people who don’t know about this illness just automatically equate it with a suicide attempt. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Whoever said they were perfectly functional? It’s an illness - and for me it was a symptom of really bad depression and anxiety problems. But what you have to understand is for most people, the injuries are only superficial and very minor. They’re not trying to kill themselves. So why the huge overreaction? It’s definitely not healthy, but it’s not life threatening. Phyiscally, it’s no more damaging than a piercing or a tattoo (for most people).
Again, whoever said the thread was creating an atmosphere that it’s alright? It was purely an informational thread. I don’t see the difference between this and an “ask the alcoholic” or “ask the prescription meds addict” or “ask the person with 20 body piercings.”
And therefore all discussions of alcoholism should end after 2 seconds with “STFU and get help”?
That’s the vibe I get from this closing. We can’t talk about this issue except in the abstract, because it involves people who have serious problems. Because we all know that the last thing people with problems need to do is talk about them. That would be wrong. We should just continually remind them that they’re sick and need help.
Ah, I get it now. After much wondering about how (and why) an administrator would be intentionally insulting for no reason, I see that perhaps Tuba just instead wishes to be viewed as the perpetrator of the virtual smack-down on the board. Kind of a latter day seeker of the throne of Manhattan, but more so on the side of eschewing unnecessary facts in attendance. Like the fact that the poster in question wasn’t “seek[ing] attention” here. I mean, explaining one’s self is always looking for adulation, right? Trying to help others, too. Of course, that’s just my humble opinion to the contrary and I’m certainly not arrogant enough to claim it without realizing that’s exactly what it is… my opinion, and mine only. Plus, it truly IS humble.
So now that I understand things as they are versus how I’d like them to be, I only lament the limitations of the few features we are given on here to operate with. I suppose I’ll have to employ a more low-tech device for dealing with my high blood pressure and simply choose to, unless spoken to directly, avoid any posts by TubaDiva.
Oh, and as a note to LunaV, your thread was incredibly knowledgeable from one perspective and not in the least what you’ve been accused of. Good on you for sharing and remember to not let the aspersions cast your way to get you down. In stead, simply consider the source.
[And yes, this is another highly emotional button for me. I suppose if that’s a problem, you’re more than welcome to pit me or call me names or whatever. Feel free.]
One could equally say the last thing they need is for their problems to be swept under the rug. At what point was help asked for, or given?
Just as a FYI, I’ve always believed that if you use CAPS TO MAKE YOUR POINT it’s because what you have to say isn’t worthwhile on it’s own. Just something to consider.
