[0xbadcafebee]

> I wish we had just left Terry well enough alone.

That would help Drew, but not Terry. Terry would remain on his own to struggle in silence, but Drew could sleep soundly without noticing him.

There've been many outsider artists over the years ("Artistry of the Mentally Ill", (c) 1922) whose schizophrenia has led them to lead tragic lives. But they also created amazing art that is celebrated around the world. I do wish Terry had gotten better treatment, and I'm also glad he gifted us with his art.

[delusional]

The text already responds to this concern

> The press and fan attention was deeply harmful to Terry and likely exacerbated his mental illness.

I don't know if that's true, if Terry would be better off, had the internet not found him entertaining. I also don't know if this is an internet phenomenon, or if we haven't always poked and prodded at the "different".

What I do know is that Drew thinks Terry had it worse because of this attention.

[cedws]

IIRC 4chan was indirectly responsible for his death. An anon bought him a drum kit and Terry annoyed his parents with it, to the point that there was a heated argument and I believe violence. After that, they kicked him out of the house and gave him a van to live in. That’s when he started to really spiral and how he eventually ended up sleeping rough.

[0xbadcafebee]

It's equally plausible he would've gotten worse without the attention. Suffering in silence doesn't make the suffering easier. Other artists who were institutionalized continued to suffer and make art. If they'd been alone without help, they might've lived shorter lives. Software was clearly Terry's artistic outlet for his pain. I'm glad he got to communicate with other people. It sucks that some of those people were dicks to him. I hope the lesson we take from this is we should help more, not shun and ignore.

[narrator]

> The press and fan attention was deeply harmful to Terry and likely exacerbated his mental illness.

The article writer turned his normative beliefs about the situation into prescriptive mental health advice.

[vidarh]

I don't know what attention he got on 4chan, but here he was shadow banned (rightly so; his comments were frequently full of slurs and more), and quite a few people had showdead on in part to see his comments (me included) because they occasionally let through things that were worth it. I think that was perhaps a reasonable middle ground. He wasn't on full display, and it avoided some of the worse responses he'd have gotten if his comments had been on full display to people who had not explicitly chosen to see them, but TempleOS was and is also fascinating separate from his mental illness and legitimate to post about here.

[trumpdong]

> (rightly so; his comments were frequently full of slurs and more)

Isn't it so interesting how bans are deserved based on the form of a communication rather than its content

[mplanchard]

Form and content are not perfectly separable, especially when we are talking to people, where the purpose of language is often to create a lossy expression of our thoughts. Content expressed with a slur for an ethnic group, for example, says something about a person’s underlying thoughts that the use of a more neutral term does not.

[trumpdong]

It says he's schizophrenic, at least.

[mplanchard]

Haha yeah, in this case. But that’s hardly the norm, and it would be a weird thing to assume any time someone starts hurling racial epithets or whatever. It makes sense to me to ban that type of “hot” discourse from a community, because it doesn’t contribute in any way to productive conversations, even if it is sometimes caused by something the poster doesn’t control, like schizophrenia.

[vidarh]

I don't find it very interesting at all. The slurs were distressing to a lot of people, and people don't have an unlimited right to access to private spaces if they can't behave.

If I were to invite you into my space, I get to tell you to fuck off if you behave in ways other guests find hostile.

People have various degrees of ability to stomach vile language based on special circumstances like his illness, and it would have been incredibly unfair to a lot of people if those rants were imposed on everyone and would have seriously negatively affected the discourse here.

If anything, HN was exceedingly tolerant of Terry's outbursts because of his illness - while he was shadowbanned, it was clear a quite significant number of people read his comments despite the language, and while his comments did come up on threads about TempleOS etc., there was almost always plenty of people defending him.

It's also worth adding that while I do believe a lot of it was down to his illness, most schizophrenic people don't behave like that, so it feels like assuming it was all down to his illness also goes too far in relieving him of responsibility.

For my part, I feel mostly sad for him, while I'm also impressed by what he did. Yet I'm not at all upset that he was shadow-banned here.

[SturgeonsLaw]

Not just outsider artists either, Vincent van Gogh is one of the most widely known artists in history and he was dealing with increasingly severe mental health episodes over the years. A large amount of his art was produced while in varying states of psychosis. Starry Night was painted in an asylum.

[mid-kid]

In Terry's case, the attention visibly fueled his delusions, providing clamoring approval for many of the self destructive things he did, eventually leading to his death. I don't think Drew means he should've been fully alone, but that he'd have been better off without the kind of attention he got from strangers on the internet who largely fall into two camps: people who are amused by his antics and provoke him, and people who apologize for him because of his impressive feat, both of which validated his behaviour.