How I Deal with Harassment, Abuse, and Crazies in General

Personally? meatspace threats aren't the problem for me. Which is important, because I think that in a lot of contexts, your "real name" conveys a lot of credibility. I mean, sure, _why could write a technical book and have it be accepted without a real name, but I'm not nearly that good. I also, uh, I really like bragging about the technical book in real life, so compartmentalization would remove some of the reward I get. It would probably make me a less irritating person, too, but hey, I'm talking about me here.

The part of the article that really struck home for me:

> They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.

It's largely an emotional issue... but when I create, and I think when most people create, it is for largely emotional reasons, too.

Of course, it's also, uh, well, I feel kind of embarrassed for admitting that anonymous words can make me feel anything. And it's not like I want to silence thoughtful criticism, even if it's hurtful. (I think there's a line in there somewhere; part of that line is content... how well thought-out is the meanness, and part of it is repetition.)

>Suppose someone gets angry at me for what I write. He gets a bunch of friends together and they give my games bad reviews on Steam and iTunes.

>This is really mean and genuinely harmful, and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. They will cost me earnings, and I have no recourse. They walked up, punched me in the nose, and strolled away, and I could do nothing.

which isn't something I've personally experienced, but is something I feel some fear of. Probably not as much as a real creator would feel, just because creating, for me, is almost entirely social; my living expenses come from elsewhere.

I mean, yes, I think that there is a place for a nom de plume, especially if you are working in two different areas with two different or conflicting generally accepted social mores, That helps, I think, mostly by setting expectations with your readers; It's not so much that your pen name is especially secret, but that it gives the reader an idea what to expect, and if they don't like the sort of thing you do under one particular name, well, there's a convenient way to avoid it. Ian Banks and Ian M Banks are a particularly not-secret example of this; choose the former if you like literary fiction, the later if you like science fiction, and it's pretty obvious that if you just enjoy the man's writing more than you care about genre, you can pick both.

More commonly, you see writers penning erotica under an assumed name, and then later, after they have made it with regular novels, their real name is revealed, like Anne Rice/ Anne Rampling

But... the point here is that if I'm creating for public consumption, and a big part of the return is the public reputation, then compartmentalizing, sure, can make the loss of one persona less catastrophic, but it's still a pretty big deal, and for a lot of people, changes the equation to the point where it doesn't make sense to have a public persona at all.

I'm bipolar too, I appreciate you trying to educate people. This place is pretty hostile when it comes to understanding.

First about violence: You're wrong. Mental illness does not predict violent behaviour. Someone with a mental illness is not more likely to hurt you than someone without a mental illness. This is very clear from all the statistics we have. You not knowing this is a concrete example of your ignorance of mental illness.

The fact that you don't care that vulnerable people are frequently the victims of violent crime (and partly because they've been dehumanised by people calling them crazies) says more about you than it does about predicting violence.

> If I hear someone say "that's crazy", I assume they mean "that's weird and I disapprove". (I haven't quite nailed it down. There's a bit more nuance here, in that if someone says "that's crazy", and then someone else says "it's not crazy, it's evil", then you can imagine the first persona conceding the point... so clearly "crazy" sometimes implies a certain degree of helplessness in the bad-weirdness.)

But in this thread someone isn't saying "these behaviours are crazy", they're saying "these people are crazies".

I don't care what language you use. But you need to know, so that you can make an informed choice about the language that you use, that when you use words like "crazies" to describe groups of people it's the same to many people as someone who says things like "I got jewed on that deal", or "those uppity negros". You're on the wrong side of history, and it makes you sound like an ignorant bigot. If you don't care about that then go ahead, but if you do care what people think of you then you might want to use different language.

Another reason to stop: by describing people who do things you don't understand as "crazies" you're promoting stigma against mental illness. Since you want people with mental illness to get treatment it seems weird to create a culture that makes it harder for them to do so.

Another reason: Severe mental illness (bipolar, psychosis, borderline) affect about 5% of the population. This will include people you know, or their relatives. You're inadvertently insulting your friends. You probably don't want to accidentally offend people you know. One of the reasons they haven't told you that they (or their loved ones ) are medicated is because your views are stigmatising and discriminatory.

I don't mind the double-post, but I'll reply to both of them at once.

I have mental health issues. Nearly everyone I care about has mental health issues. Some of those issues are moderately serious problems, some are minor annoyances. It sucks having problems. I'm sad you have problems. I'm sad I have problems. I hope your problems resolve themselves, and/or you learn better coping strategies, and that life is as nice to you as possible.

But none of that changes my perspective that it's reasonable for me to characterize the world around me. And I have a limited cognitive budget. There's a whole bunch I don't know about the world, including mental illness, so I by no means assume that my model is terrific, but I still need to make choices. Y'know, I don't know if it will rain today, but I still need to decide what jacket to wear. Identifying other human behaviour as extreme is useful. Identifying other human behaviour as harmful is useful. Identifying other human behaviour as extreme-and-alarming-in-ways-that-seem-like-maybe-they're-mental-illness is useful. Knowing more would be better, but I've got a whole bunch of shit to learn, and this is seriously not my top priority. Based on all of the above, it seems to me that the only sane thing to do is sometimes identify other people's behaviour as crazy. And since I live in a city, with millions of people, most of the people I meet get an instant shallow analysis, because otherwise I wouldn't get anything done. So for my limited-cognitive-budget purposes, some people are "that crazy person". I don't know if I've never called a person "a crazy", but I don't see a problem with doing so.

To your point in this comment, I never for a moment said that "just because someone has a mental health issue, they're violent". I encourage you to read more carefully. I said that arguing about their probability of victimhood is a logical fail that does not help address fears that such-and-such a person is a threat. It has no predictive value, and will not persuade most people that have the concern in the first place.

Seriously mentally ill, needs medical attention.