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pachyderm: spiritual, can you discuss why you feel it useful to engage in the places that don't seem to give you much respect?

Overall, pachyderm, I don't. I usually leave those places fairly quickly. I think my actual term at schizophrenia.com was just over 24 hours. In just those 24 hours, I saw more posts edited, radically modified, outright deleted and locked threads by moderators than I've seen in the entire history of some sites. There's a part of me that can't help but be curious about that kind of behavior .

I'm also a little mystified as to why some people become so reactionary when the topic of schizophrenia and recovery is raised. I can't help but think that this would be encouraging information -- information that people would want to share with others. What I have found however is that some people find the very idea to be deeply threatening. They react with hostility and often will attempt to do everything in their power to keep you from "speaking" or "being heard".

One of the most common methods is to discredit what you have to say or to portray you as some particularly heinous kind of person. For example, here's what the moderator had to say about my brief run through the schizophrenia.com community.

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Similarly, we've had this person "spiritual emergency" come here and starting to spam the web site with all his blog posts, anti-science and anti-psychiatry invective. He quotes research from old and disproved people (Szazz for example - the lone psychiatrist of the past 100 years that stated in 1950 that schizophrenia didn't exist)...


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Notice how my name has been linked with Thomas Szasz? What's interesting is that I have never read Thomas Szasz and I don't think there is a single link or quote to him on any of my blogs, but that's not the important thing. The important thing is that the moderator seeks to discredit me and he does so by deliberately linking my name with the sworn enemy of the medical model and further, labelling me as "anti-science" and "anti-psychiatry". In his case, because he has moderator powers, he also edited my posts, deleted my posts and banned me.

Which begs the question... if what I might have to say is so worthless that no one should hear it, why did they go to such efforts to silence me?

Meanwhile, I'm going to keep on doing my thing which includes talking to people in places like this. At some of those places, I'll be allowed a voice. At some of them, I won't. But I don't recommend that people ever stay long in a place where they're not treated with basic respect.