This is a safe place to discuss, vent, support, and share information about mental health, illness, and wellness.
Thank you for being here. We appreciate who you are today. Please show respect and empathy when making or replying to posts.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
1-Posts promoting paid products and services of any kind are not allowed here.
2-All posts and comments must be helpful and supportive. Do not put vulnerable people at risk.
3-Do not DM or ask to speak privately to any of our members unless they specifically request it.
If a person from this community disturbs you in a comment, please report the comment. If you receive a DM you did not request, send a screenshot of the DM in a message to a moderator. This is a bannable offense.
4-Suicide, Self-Harm, Death-- Extended discussions are STRONGLY DISCOURAGED here. First, mods and community members are caring people, but not experts in crisis situations. Second, we want to avoid Lemmy becoming like many commercial social media platforms, where comments can snowball into counterproductive talk.
If you or someone you know needs more help than can be found here, please refer to the pinned resources.
If BRIEF mention of these topics is an important part of your post, please flag your post as NSFW and include a (trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, death, etc.)in the title so that other readers who may feel triggered can avoid it. Please also include a trigger warning on all comments mentioning these topics in a post that was not already tagged as such.
- Therapy
Neurodegenerative Disease Support
Friends and Family of People with Addiction
To partner with our community and be included here, you are free to message the current moderators or comment on our pinned post.
Some moderators are mental health professionals and some are not. All are carefully selected by the moderation team and will be actively monitoring posts and comments. If you are interested in joining the team, you can send a message to ZenGrammy for more information.
cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/1360444
For context: One of the rules in that community is that you aren't allowed to post anything related to suicide. In a mental health community.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have updated rule 4. Posts that mention suicide are now allowed with proper flags and warnings so people who may feel triggered can avoid them.
They're not trying to be a crisis intervention space, but more of a maintenance space for people that aren't that bad off yet.
You have to pick one as a small community, you can't be both. Because the internet-community-available tools (listening empathetically to the problem, mainly) to help at one phase can potentially hurt at another, and there isn't just one set of tools that always helps all people suffering different stages of difficulty, that can just be universally employed. Particularly at this young-community scale, where there just aren't that many participants yet.
It's regrettable, and I think this should probably be explained in the rules so they don't come off as arbitrary, but it is the way it is.
If this was a private therapy space, where "patient conversations" were private, we would not have this problem.
I briefly tried creating a comm specifically for this that I titled "Void Screaming" so that you could go let it out and keep it out of the other subs and ideally not even follow that sub. Kind of like a specialized mental health grease trap. People were worried it was unhealthy but tbh ime working in mental health you gotta let it out, it's just about making sure you do it in the appropriate places and appropriate ways then go back to the positivity once the ick is out. But I get that that's a pretty complex topic for laypeople.
Well what were you expecting when you choose "mentalhealth" as the community's name? People who are that bad will show up.
Very likely. I'm not sure if there is another space to redirect them to yet, though. Lemmy doesn't have everything yet.
The mod team and I have been working hard at making this a space where everyone feels heard and supported. It's difficult to make sure we are allowing people to talk freely about whatever they need to talk about, but not ending up with a time-sensitive crisis that we as volunteers don't have the tools to manage properly. We will definitely rethink that rule and ways to re-word it. We are always open to talking about the rules and what needs to change to make people feel comfortable posting here.
It does seem bad, but there are reasons why that rule is there. Anyone who is acutely suicidal needs urgent guidance and help, but places like Lemmy/FV or Reddit are not that kind of help. We are all inherently "randoms on the internet" with no (or no easily provable) credentials.
People running and participating in these kinds of communities are volunteers and not trained in mental health. As such, they are not equipped to handle anyone acutely suicidal, and should definitely not try to - for whomever's sake and their own. Pointing people towards any qualified help is about the best one can do. Any other advice is unqualified, and either offering, accepting or enabling any would be irresponsible.
I suppose in a vulnerable state of mind, that itself can seem grim or dismissive, but it really isn't. It's a matter of protecting vulnerable people from potentially shitty advice which could endanger them. Mental health is serious, you wouldn't go to Reddit or whatever with an acute heart attack, so don't do it with an acute psychological crisis either.
What the fuck kind of rule is that?
I get why they do this, suicide prevention is no joke and should be handled by people that trained for it, some commenter trying to help could cause a lot of harm without meaning to do so and someone that's not in a good mental space could become triggered and/ or spiral into suicidal thoughts themselves after reading these kinds of subjects.
That said, perhaps the mods could link suicide prevention hotlines from all over the world (as you already do for different resources on -TherapyNeurodegenerative Disease Support, ADHD, Autism, Fibromyalgia, etc.). If I were me, Id put those as front and center as posible, and as easy to find as posible by those who need it (say, quote it after the rule about suicide, include it in the resources given, maybe highlight it).
Suicide.org has some great guidelines on how to mention suicide in the media (not the same thing as a mental health forum, I know, but I personally find them very useful regardless when it comes to discussing anything suicide-related on the internet, where you never know who is reading your content).
And remember, if you or someone you know is feeling suicidal, there's help out there! there's people willing to work with you to get through this, please reach out to them.
That seems… Counter productive since that’s part of some mental health issues/crises but okayyyyyy
You can see the rationale for maintaining different communities with different purposes though.
If someone goes there feeling depressed or whatever, being greeted by a wall of posts by people contemplating suicide might be somewhat counterproductive.
sounds like they should get new mods