Okay, so. I was probably a bit aggressive in my OP because I was highly upset. Let me take it from the top.
There is stigma and fear regarding approaching psychological practitioners or helplines about depression (or a few other things, especially psychosis). People who have not had experience of those professions, and even some people with limited experience, are afraid of being committed and/or being nonconsensually medicated (particularly relevant given permanent side effects of some psychiatric drugs) and/or being shot by trigger-happy police and/or being blacklisted from jobs. Some of these worries are even well-founded, because national practices, individual practitioners, and the mentally ill all vary. I've been committed myself following a suicide attempt, and I happen to know from that experience and from osmosis that the simple logistics of hospitals being overtaxed keeps involuntary admissions rare and short, but this isn't common knowledge - and some of the other issues are real, if perhaps overblown and/or dependent on one's location.
There are a few main categories of people who are likely to vent about depression on a public, anonymous, non-professional venue:
1) People who are afraid of engaging with the psychological system for the above reasons,
2) People who cannot access the psychological system for financial, logistical or other reasons,
3) People who are already accessing the psychological system, but feel like speaking about it elsewhere as well.
(There is theoretically a #4, "people who don't know the system exists or any way to access it", but these are rare nowadays and particularly so among forum-goers.)
#1 generally could use a push toward the system - this is true. The problem is that boilerplate about "take it to the professionals if you are thinking about harming yourself or someone else" doesn't necessarily address their concerns. Someone who thinks "if I call a hotline saying I'm thinking about killing myself, they'll call the police based off tracing my number and the police will shoot me" - for the record, this exact situation has actually happened in the USA - needs a rather more elaborate breakdown of what risks are and are not real and what the safest methods are to make contact with the system.
#2 and #3, on the other hand, derive no benefit from being informed the system exists. They know.
And meanwhile, the placement of that text is confronting to all three categories. It's phrased in a way that seems hostile, dismissive, and critical toward people who want to pour their hearts out, even though it's probably not intended as such.
As I have said, I agree that having a link to system resources easily available in the thread is a good idea. My objection is to forcing literally everyone, in all of those categories, to read that text every time they post in the thread. I do not believe that this is in the best interests of the thread's participants, and I do not believe that a threadmark - indeed, the only threadmark in the thread - would be insufficient to do what good it can.
I was and am especially upset due to my own association with the thread as OP. I feel responsible for what comes of the thread I made, and my pseudonym is what people see when they're browsing Rants. It is deeply distressing to me to have something tied to me be used in ways I believe harmful; to borrow a vulgar metaphor, it's as though someone's lecturing me out of my own arse. I also tend to get a bit prickly regarding apparently-bureaucratic things in general (and am more broadly kind of abrasive); that's
mea culpa and I apologise if I overstepped.
As such, I am begging you to reconsider on this. I'm quite willing to compromise and to advise on this, but I can't just let it be as-is; it's been most of what I can think about since I first saw it.
TotalAbsolutism alethiophile tehelgee
