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      unmedicated schizophrenics to find each other and thereby elevate their delusions into national movements

      This line really irritates me. The tone of it was unnecessary.

      Schizophrenics are victims of their own minds (and often other people).

      It’s not their fault that they’re delusional, they can’t help it.

      Also, from my own experience, it’s usually stupid people making national movements.

      The actual crazy ones end up drinking or drugging themselves to death.

      I’m speaking from experience as a schizophrenic, who also has friends and family that are schizophrenic.


      I know that this is off-topic, but that line really threw me off and I can’t stop fixating on it.

      The whole article kinda got ignored when I read the line.

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        Agreed. That statement is in poor taste and makes it sound like mental illness is just a malicious choice people can make.

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        While I do understand your reasoning, he was explicitly speaking of unmedicated schizophrenics. While many possibly don’t know of their disease and don’t seek professional help (or even outright refuse it), which is also the case with depression leading to many preventable suicides, I understood this section not only to be a singular criticism of those schizophrenics, but of the general online culture where it’s not prevalent for content consumers to reach out and ask those they’re following to seek professional help when they exhibit pathological behaviour, but instead often even cheer this on, leading to a vicious cycle.

        One good example for this is Nikocado Avocado who literally eats himself to death. There may be some in the community asking him to stop and seek help, but the majority seem to close their eyes for this and only see the entertainment.

        Schizophrenic traits seem to be beneficial for a career in social media, and there’s this clear dichotomy where very successful social media persona possibly know of their disease but knowingly don’t seek professional help out of fear of changing and becoming uninteresting.

        To support this point, there’s even an extreme where streamers like ‘Sweet Anita’ market themselves with their mental illness. Even though I neither know her medical history or am a medical expert, there’s a residual doubt that she might possibly choose a weaker medication or no medication at all for the aforementioned reasons.

        The author was a bit careless in his formulation and I understood him to mean ‘willingly unmedicated schizophrenics’.

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          Tbh to me it read a lot like usage of a mental illness as a slur targeting the “conspiracies” crowds.

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            Why did you scare-quote conspiracies crowds?

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              I wasn’t scare-quoting, merely regular-quoting, as a way to refer to what the author seems to be implying. Maybe wrongly so, too; it’s what I interpreted.

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      Meta: man do I wish we could filter host URLs as well as tags. JWZ hasn’t written anything I’ve wanted to read in 15 years.

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        You might be able to write an adblocker rule to hide them.