[DanielBMarkham]

>>Money alone can't guarantee good outcomes in cases of severe mental illness sadly.

An important point. I am not talking about giving people money. I'm asking if we care enough to try to figure out how to help them. I make no assumptions on what kinds of help would be useful or not.

[saalweachter]

There's going to be four things you have to confront when it comes to helping people.

1. Resources. Money and people are the two hardest resources, although space can also be a problem, especially when you start taking eg homeless shelters. It's not enough to have a big pile of money to spend on the problem, it's hard to find people who want to take on a front-line position in solving it.

2. Morality. It's odd to say, but one of the harder questions when trying to help people is how to do so morally. What if someone doesn't want help? What if they don't want the sort of help you want to give them? The low-hanging fruit of helping people is giving help to people who want it. What to do when someone refuses to leave a dangerous situation or refuses medical treatment is a hard question if you still want to help them.

3. Information. Having resources available to provide help to people who want it is all well and good, but if you don't know who needs help and people who need help don't know about you trying to give it, it doesn't do much good. Knowing who needs help is a really hard problem. Even if you have a vague notion that your neighbor is having a rough time of things, you don't always know how rough of a time, and they don't always tell you.

4. Risk. When you put yourself out there to help, you make yourself vulnerable. That scares a lot of people. Most people are nice people and most people aren't dangerous but some people aren't and are. If you do anything in the world that involves people, including helping them, problems will crop up. The challenge here is mitigating the risk of them without losing your humanity in the process.

If the four points above don't daunt you, then the next thing is to avoid the classic hacker mistake: reinventing the wheel unnecessarily. There are countless organizations already trying to help people out there. Can you join one and help it help more hackers?

[DoreenMichele]

I know an awful lot about helping people with special needs, including mental health issues.

I learned of Terry only after he was shadow banned. I don't know what went down before that.

How a person's issues are addressed by others can amplify or mitigate their issues. The dismissiveness, social isolation and similar typically exacerbate their problems.

If Joan of Arc were alive today, she would be in some psych ward getting her meds adjusted, not playing handmaiden to the birth of a country.

In order to reach someone like Terry, you need to genuinely respect them. This means entertaining the possibility that something real and meaningful is happening that isn't mere insanity. Even if you aren't comfortable calling it "God actually talks to this person," you have to allow for the idea that they are experiencing something meaningful and not merely chalk it up to insanity because it falls outside of our current mental models for certain things.

That's a rather tall order.

When I was homeless, a different forum actively heaped abuse upon me and told me it was my fault. They did that to a lot of people. I wasn't the only one.

That sort of behavior is super common and can drive you crazy if you don't start out as such.

(I will add that they ultimately banned me for basically bullshit reasons that boil down to "No, you just aren't allowed to have a positive experience. There is no redeeming yourself in our eyes because you never did anything wrong to begin with and we aren't willing to admit it's us, not you." Many people get behind the 8 ball socially and find that no matter what they do, the world won't let them get out from behind it because the world is racist, sexist, classist, whatever. It's designed to justify their abuse.)

I don't fit in anywhere. I never have. I have a lot of (personal, not financial) assets in some sense and I'm still struggling to make my life work.

It's hard to find a place to talk about my experiences and make sense of them. The fact that I was homeless for nearly 6 years makes it hard to relate to anyone.

If I talk about those experiences, I'm assumed to be complaining, a drama queen, a political activist etc. You talk about going to the office and no one thinks that's some bid for attention or whatever. I talk about my life, it's somehow a problem to say it at all, no matter the framing.

I'm extremely fortunate that I was on the street with my adult sons. They knew me as something other than a total fucking loser. That helped enormously with preserving my identity and head space from the worst of what can happen to your mind on the street.

My sons also knew to just not leave me alone and also not engage the crazy when I was suicidal. It was a best case scenario that most people will never see.

I'm also fortunate to have reconnected with a forum I participated in years ago that is full of really great people who are actively helping me try to figure out how to socialize "normally" again.

Spending a lot of time homeless creates an inherent barrier to feeling like society cares about you, you are acceptable etc. Every time you open your mouth, you have to decide between denying those experiences happened or accepting the stigmatization that goes with admitting to it. It's psychologically a no win situation.

That's kind of rambly. I'm trying to engage your question in good faith, but it's a difficult thing to talk about because people want to act like mental health is something bad happening in that one defective person's mind. They don't want to hear that there is a huge social component and how we treat such people is part of the problem.

I wasn't here before Terry was shadow banned. I don't know if the forum could have handled it better. But I have seen far too many cases where people who are different are mistreated and then told it is their fault. And I'm absolutely certain that's literally a crazy making experience that helps paint people into a corner from which there is no escape.

Thank you for asking.