Not too long ago, a poster found a mention I had made about wanting a counselor and decided to cite my mental health a derogatory slam. At the time, I found it in poor taste but completely in character for that poster. I also didn’t really care. I consider mental health part of, well, health. It’s part of who we are and deserves care.
Thinking about it afterwards, I have come to believe that a further reaction from me is important. I don’t want my silence to contribute to the pervasive idea that mental health “issues” are shameful, moral failures. Many, many people are hurt by these ideas, and some feel themselves less than because of it. They are not. Mental health care should be a right.
To be clear, attacking someone on the basis of mental health is ignorant and cruel. If people, like Naomi Osaka, want to prioritize self-care, good for them. I hope that they make it easier for other people to do the same.
People should be treated with respect and dignity. However, if we live in a world where it’s fine to shame folks over largely intrinsic characteristics such as one’s body or intelligence don’t be surprised when such ugliness is directed at the state of various organs.
I think you did the right thing by not engaging with the poster.
But, this is indicative of a larger problem here in the internets. Unlike in law; Silence should not be construed as affirmation. There’s many reasons a poster might not respond to some comment. Maybe they didn’t see it. Maybe some other poster came in and said what they were going to even better than they could. Maybe they just didn’t feel like engaging with a poster that was acting “completely in character”. Many reasons.
You took the high road, and you should feel good about that. Don’t let that poster get you a second time with the same comment by making you second guess yourself.
I’ll be the first to say that mental health issues are important, and there should be no stigma attached to getting help for mental health issues.
But let’s put this in context (I’m guessing this is the context). Sunny_Daze had just called a poster a troll and a racist out of the blue.
and then called the same poster a “dumb fuck” in the very next post
He responded with
Then Sunny_Daze came back with
I’ll have to say that if someone is insulting me out of the blue when I don’t even know who they are, I tend to wonder about what brought the attack on.
I’ve never said that mental health is something you should be ashamed of, as a health problem over which you do not exercise control, shame should not enter into it. However when some ignorant fuck makes stupid and nonsensical insults at me as part of a mouth breathing pile-on being waged against me by a bunch of lying race baiters like MrDibble and Euphonious Polemic, it stands to reason that I am going to fight back. When you’ve chosen to attack me for no reason, I’m going to seek to understand your reason for attacking me, when I saw that you struggled with mental health issues, I determined that might be some reason.
While mental health is nothing to be ashamed of, I am 100% justified in pointing out a poster’s demonstrated and admitted mental health problems to undermine their credibility in attacks made against me.
Note that if people would refrain from conducting random and unprovoked attacks against people in the pit, they themselves would not be insulted back.
No, you’re not. The point is that discussing mental health doesn’t undermine my credibility. It undermines yours for thinking that it does.
Roo you’re making a slightly different point. It’s valid to check someone’s posting history looking for something to discredit them. I have no problem with that. My argument is that it is not valid to state that mental health issues make someone less credible. FTR, I stand by my comments that MH is a troll and a fuckwit.
OK, so now you’re carving out exceptions for what makes someone less credible. But it’s very subjective over what mental health entails.
There was a guy (actually several, not on the Dope) who attacked me every weekend because he was drunk/stoned. If I pointed out that he was an addict, that might fall under the mental health rule. He could continue on merrily while I had no defense.
People could make excuses for all kinds of bad behavior on their own part that they could hide under the mental health rubric.
Hijack:
Speaking as somebody who thought that the attacks on you were disproportionate, I’ll observe that some of your come-backs struck me as petty and (worse) ineffectual. I know it’s no fun to be pitted (and coming up with wit on demand is hard for someone with eg my level of language skills) but some of your posts looked like floundering.
Yeah, yeah, everyone’s a critic. I generally sign off on the leaving yourself with the option of hitting back, but if you can’t do it properly you probably should consider other rhetorical strategies.
On the SDMB, there’s no good generalization. It depends on not only the nature of the attack, but also the poster attacking (and defending for that matter - self knowledge is underrated). That said, mixing up your tone is a good idea - show third parties you can be reasonable. If you have a winning argument against an insistent opponent, repetition is key: keep hammering on what they’re ignoring in different ways - let them build your case that they are cowards. That assumes you have sufficient self-knowledge to distinguish between winning arguments and merely your strongest argument.
Pausing and asking questions can sometimes work. Drawing out their stupidity then pointing it out can work. But so can identifying then granting that slice of their argument which is reasonable.
But if you merely throw brief non-germane insults at everyone who criticizes you, it will appear lame. Martin_Hyde knows calm and he knows irritation. I’m pointing out that the former is his greater weapon.
Overall, I didn’t think either side in the Martin_Hyde pit thread covered themselves in glory. Maybe one partial exception, dunno.
Ehhhh. Depends. In this context, no. But I can definitely think of scenarios where a tendency toward cognitive distortions or paranoid delusions could damage one’s credibility. But you can’t de facto assume someone is not credible because of a mental health condition. They would have to demonstrate a history of unreliability.
I’ve generally found that the most effective response to people trying to use my mental health, strong emotionality or whatever else to undermine my credibility, is to wipe the floor with them in reasoned debate. You can be extra passionate or angry or upset about something due to a mental health condition and still be right. Their “Oh, you’re not thinking straight” nonsense is so transparently stupid when you refuse to be baited. (I’m not saying you were. I didn’t read the thread.)
All that said, mocking someone for a mental health condition is shitty. That’s something that’s really out of someone’s control and doesn’t diminish their worth or value as a person. I would think less of someone for doing that.
So? No amount of context is going to make what he said okay. It wouldn’t matter how mean a black person was to you: it wouldn’t be okay for you to attack them for being black, e.g. by using the n-word.
And, like n-word, this shit doesn’t just attack the one person. Being derogatory about people seeking psychological care is an attack on everyone who seeks it out. That’s the nature of attacking someone for something. If someone is bad for being/doing X, then you’re saying anyone who is or does X is bad.
@Martin_Hyde was not justified in any way to say what they said. They were wrong when they started attacking anyone who disagreed with them as having a mental illness. When they did it to @Sunny_Daze is when I full on reported them.
And, if you’ll note, @MIller moderated it. He didn’t give him a Warning, but I took that as because he’d already gotten a Warning for that thread. @Shodan did get a Warning for this exact behavior.
This is why I didn’t pull any punches with @Martin_Hyde. He may mostly act reasonable on the rest of this board, but he revealed his true, disgusting thoughts in that thread.
And, apparently, despite a mod telling him he shouldn’t have, he still thinks he was justified. So it wasn’t just a one-off because he was angry and not thinking straight.
Like the OP, I can’t let that slide. It’s not okay to treat us like this.
How about this? I didn’t read the entire thread, but I haven’t seen any outrage in ATMB or a thread about this. The OP of that thread just called a black man “as black as David Duke”. I might be missing some context because I didn’t read the thread, but it looks like an insult from here.
How can you know who “us” is? Martin_Hyde might also be seeing a mental health professional. He shouldn’t have to reveal if he is or not. No one should have to. And revealing it publicly shouldn’t give someone an advantage to be insulting because they’re part of a protected class.
I cannot see anything in this post that actually addresses the topic of this thread nor what I said in my post. Someone said that they suspect a poster is not actually black… So what? That’s not attacking someone for being black, and it’s definitely not attacking them for having a mental illness. Sure, it’s a shitty thing to do, but it’s not anything we are talking about here.
Your other paragraph argued something I didn’t say, and seems contradict itself. I never said that @Martin_Hyde didn’t have a mental illness. It would be entirely irrelevant if he did. As you say, it wouldn’t make it okay. He would still have attacked everyone who has a mental illness with his statements. He would still have attacked me and at least one other person, which is the definition of the word “us.”
Look. This is an extremely touchy subject for me. I’ve made that clear on numerous occasions. It is morally evil to use someone’s mental illness as a means to attack them. Someone who does that is no better than someone who says the n-word. It is fucking hate speech, and should not be tolerated.
And it isn’t on the SDMB. @Shodan did it, and got a Warning for trolling. @Martin_Hyde did it, and only didn’t get a Warning because he’d already gotten a Warning for trolling that thread.
We are discussing something so awful you’re not even allowed to say it in the Pit. You have stated you don’t like when people are awful to others in the Pit. So it doesn’t make sense for you to be trying to defend someone saying this utterly disgusting thing.
There are no ways to argue around this. This isn’t a debate here. The OP and several other posters are standing up and saying “This is not okay.”
First of all, @Sunny_Daze, I fully support your OP and thank you for posting. I was initially thinking to myself that I had never seen anyone denigrated here for mental health issues, but on further reading, I see that @Martin_Hyde did just that. So in addition to his other mod notes and warnings, the ignorant fuckwit has thereby managed the unique achievement of actually getting mod-noted in the Pit!
It was well deserved.
Yep. Also a tiresome persistently aggressive asshole. I haven’t actually followed the asshole to any great extent, so I haven’t participated in his Pit thread, but I’m going to add a few choice words there now over a relatively minor matter but one which pisses me off.
Which if you note my post in ATMB in which I explained my reasons for disagreeing with Miller’s mod decisions, I explained that in the future if I’m mod noted by him in a thread I will just perma mute the thread–which I did in the thread pitting me. I’ll note that in Discourse, when you mute a thread it doesn’t even show up in that forum’s list of threads, you get 0 notifications for it etc. It’s essentially like it was deleted from the forums for you. So in threads where people are allowed to lie about me and troll me and I’m the only one who get noted, the result is I just don’t have to worry about that thread anymore, it disappears from my display.
I was unaware until now that Miller mod noted me for the mental health thing, and would have just added it to the ATMB thread talking about his moderation. But since I don’t plan to participate in threads in which he exercises moderation over me it is mostly irrelevant.
No, you really didn’t. If you did you would have provided a link and not parse it in terms that didn’t make it very clear you were complaining about something involving you.