Certainly not every, perhaps not even most, people with mental health issues spew venom online. However, a disproportionate amount of the invective which I hear when walking downtown in a city, comes from people with obvious mental health issues. There may be many others who are silently struggling with mental health issues who walk by me on the sidewalk, but even a few people who are very much not silent can numerically overwhelm the amount of invective said by the rest of the population. Given that the online environment gives the online equivalent of these few people a bullhorn to broadcast at a much greater scale, the problem is likely disproportionately worse online.

So I had a whole bunch of questions but I couldn’t get around this one: why is the choice for people with mental illness invective or struggling in silence? Don’t you realize that’s incentivizing invective?

What do you want us to do, just die and be a “curious” story you read about after the fact?

>>most people with mental illness are already afraid of being blamed and targeted.

On what evidence do you base this on?

Being a person with mental illness in a community of people with mental illness and routinely talking about this all day long every day

It could be that the people who have the type of mental illnesses that are associated with fear of social persecution/rejection are the kind that seek a community of people with a similar affliction, while those with anti-social mental illnesses, like sociopathy, do not.

It could be that the people who don't understand mental illness characterize it in harmful ways and people with mental illness who associate together are readily familiar with that.

How do you know I don't mental illness? And how was the way I characterized it harmful?

I didn’t say either of those things. But in the interest of being candid, I think it’s harmful to categorize mental illness as socially bad versus socially good. My ADHD and Autism are both often characterized as socially bad, and I’m just a person who struggles to take care of myself or maintain communication with my friends and family.

> My ADHD and Autism

I can understand if you feel bad about the article, then. Autism is a bit often discussed here at HN, is it?

At the same time, the article focuses on borderline (BPD), which is very different from autism or ADHD, is it?

I had a mental illness too (something else than BPD, autism and ADHD). Like you, I didn't write or say anything bad to others. Still, I appreciate the article, I think it's a small step for me towards understanding the Internet even better:

I know a borderline person, and I'm not the slightest surprised if in some cases, such a person can write extremely mean things to others on the internet. The person I know, does this in real life to people s/he loves, when too stressed up (about minor things others wouldn't think much about). It's not her fault; instead, s/he had a bad childhood.

(At the same time, there're also, of course, many other reasons for bad behavior on the net.)

I know several people who are borderline. Some I know or have known quite closely. I don’t think it’s fair to characterize their contribution to harmful internet behavior as disproportionate without also quantifying their proportion of internet behavior (it’s small).

And I definitely don’t think it’s fair to qualitatively describe the relative level of bad internet behavior of people with mental illness based on the behavior of people with personality disorders, which is just a subset of mental illness.

Edit: and not all people with personality disorders just go around the world/internet acting harmfully.