Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

Note my name. I was shadow-banned for one sarcastic comment eight years ago, despite being an otherwise good-faith, decent contributor. Maybe things are different now, but I've never gotten over the feeling of wasting my time putting thoughts together and responding to a conversation and finding out I muted.

Hell, I'm a mod of a city subreddit, and one of the other mods has shadowbanned a complete asshat of a person. I don't have ban powers, otherwise I would ban them outright. It makes me uncomfortable to be a party to disrespect like that.

About ~40% of authors I worked with had diagnosed mental health issues, and were quite open about their struggles. Most were a delight to work with--I strongly admire people who can be open and honest about their struggles.

But about ~15% were... not so delightful. Working with them was hell, because they'd flip-flop constantly between treating me as sworn enemy or best friend.

Their twitter feeds reflected this attitude. They were quick to pick fights with bewildered victims, to scream to the skies how evil X person was, how they were the victim of X's behavior.

Having worked with them, I knew they were unstable and to ignore their online shrieking. But to an outsider....

All outsiders see is an award-winning author, touted as a genius, with that little blue check mark declaring that they're a respected member of their field. So of course they're going to listen when that author screams that they've been victimized.

Of course, pointing out that this person is mentally ill isn't an option--for one, it's confidential information. For two, you'll be fired for being "disability-phobic".

So there's no choice but to sit back and watch the unstable troll rip apart other people.

It's horrible. And it's one of the reasons I left the publishing industry. It's slowly and steadily being overrun by mentally unstable trolls, and it's starting to have a serious impact on which books get published and which don't. (Hint: anything that might possibly trigger the trolls will NOT get a publishing contract.)

I did not know this and am glad to hear it. Yes, I've wished for a long time that Reddit would make all mod actions visible in diff form. Not being able to tell without opening a post/comment while logged out whether it has been hidden by a mod without any notification is maddening.

Reason that diagnosis from afar is illegitimate isn't just that you don't have enough information (but there's that). Just as important is that "real", official, mental health diagnoses generally don't make sense without the context that a given person isn't functioning in society, has violated some institutional norm, etc.

The role of mental health basically is to look at someone who's considered non-functional and classify how they're non-functional. If someone, mental health professional or otherwise, looks at someone in society and doesn't like how they're functioning but society is OK with this, that person can say society or some part of it is insane but collective insanity is a manifestly different phenomena than an individual diagnosis.

Edit: Behavior some consider bad, that some people get away with and that is actually prized by some other section of society (whether it be hitting on women or taking ultra-moralist stances or trolling generally or whatever) can't be official, institutionally defined insanity, even I don't might informally various actions "crazy" (which indeed occasionally offends people in the present context).

Edit2: Another I'd put is that the specific tools of the mental health professional aren't tools for understanding people in general and aren't tools for understanding bad behavior outside a context where it's debilitating bad behavior. In those contexts, sociologists, maybe, something specific to say but to a large extent, specialized knowledge by itself may given an advantage and someone tossing around psychiatric terms in this is kind of engaging in pseudo-science.

I would say engineering has more rigour because almost everything that really matters is based on rigorous science. Engineering also includes a certain amount of artistry, but that's generally within a rigorous framework that allows this. But, yeah, as I said, psychology is pseudo-science.

> Because we've figured out what the underlying pathology is many (not the majority, but many) cases

Again, how many cases? If you've figured out the underlying pathology for 1% of cases (which is still many), how can you claim that underlying pathology is 'almost always benign'?

> and almost every underlying pathology we've discovered is something benign: e.g. a genetic mutation that causes your synapses to produce less of some messenger-chemical. Such mutations have no long-term effect on your health, other than affecting your psychology.

First of all I would question the accuracy of these diagnoses. Second, I would question the classification of these pathologies as benign - a more accurate statement is probably 'we don't know'. Third, you say 'other than affecting your psychology' - so they often do actually have long term effects on the person?

> Like I said, psychiatrists pre-screen for non-benign pathologies first, often too widely. You can't get diagnosed with clinical depression (by a psychiatrist who's doing their job) until you've been checked for vitamin deficiencies, hypothyroidism, anemia, diabetes, etc. Even in cases where you have 100% of the symptoms of clinical depression, including ones that have no organic basis. They'll still do the pre-screen, just to be sure.

This is the only reason why psychology is even able to exist - because all of the heavy lifting is done in the realm of real science, and once real, understood pathologies are excluded the psychologists/psychiatrists can do their thing. That is, until yet another real pathology is discovered and the guidelines have to be updated such that psychologists don't end up mistreating people with the condition as they were up until then.

> But once you're known to not have any of the known-malignant pathologies, then they can and will treat the symptoms, because at that point the only problem they have left to treat is the symptoms.

So, basically, once the real medicine and science find they cannot solve the problem, the patient is left with the psychologist, who drugs the patient to mask the symptoms?

> (What else would you expect them to do? Biopsy your brain?)

Well, I don't expect a psychologist to have enough expertise for a biopsy, but could I expect to at least have a couple holes drilled in my skull, or maybe some electroshock therapy?

> There's also just by the simple observation that these syndromes aren't degenerative. People can have e.g. untreated ADHD all their lives, and they won't live less long or end up in the hospital more often than people without ADHD.

ADHD isn't a pathology, and 'live less long & end up in the hospital more' are not the only criteria I would consider required to label a disease as benign - they must have ongoing issues affecting their qualify of life in order to be diagnosed with ADHD in the first place. That being said, your statement is a pretty good argument for why psychology is irrelevant.

> When we treat a syndrome, what we're treating for usually is our best understanding of the etiology.

When you say 'our best understanding' you mean a psychologists best understanding? The question is how good is this 'best understanding' really?

There are many different fields involved in modern medicine - biology, chemistry, neuroscience, physics, statistics, etc. What does psychology add? From where I'm sitting it adds absolutely nothing, and is far less rigorous.