Mental Illness

Reading and seeing in the media about paranoid schizophrenia and then actually seeing someone you once knew suffering from the ravages of it are really two different things. :(

Recently on an online website forum, someone I knew from long ago started exhibiting these symptoms towards me. Looking back at the forum's history, this was something that seemed to be happening quite often towards other users but when I became next in the line of these unprovoked attacks, I never realized how abysmally crippling this disease could be for someone.

At first I was confused, then angered by this and was wondering if I really did provoke these attacks. I went back and re-read everything I've said but everything I said was precise and clear and not even remotely offensive in any way, shape or form... this website owner's attacks simply made no sense. I did notice other people in the past and even at the same time being attacked in the same fashion: Unprovoked paranoid reactions to things that weren't true and in the immortal words of David Lynch via Agent Dale Cooper:

"Gentlemen, when two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention."

Ironically, the person this website owner was attacking at the same time I was being attacked was someone who had just joined their forums and asked a harmless question about a local California outdoor event. Because the website owner had a personal beef with the organization running this said event, the website owner immediately accused this new user of all sorts of things from being a spy/plant from said organization sent to spam the forums to not even being who this new user claimed to be to the point of even accusing this new user of stealing other people's pictures from the internet to claim as their own picture on their user profile! That should of been my first real warning that this website owner was paranoid schizophrenic...

Later on I actually verified that this new user was in fact genuine and not an employee of said event as I thought this new user could be an excellent resource of information about this event and wanted to talk more about it. So in the end, this was a classic example on why this website/forum hardly has any users anymore - they get run off as quick as they sign up...

So now I feel bad seeing how painfully obvious the problem was. What makes it worse is that this person has local forum trolls (who are so utterly clueless as to what is going on) and they just exasperate the problem by supporting and playing into this person's schizophrenic hate. Then again, this type of sickness tends to attract those also afflicted by it.

It's sad as this website at one time seemed to possibly be quite large and for the most part was quite informative and amusing... It's been around for probably 10+ years if not longer but it has been reduced to maybe 15-20 active users out of probably thousands at one time and quite a few more have dropped in the short time I've been there...

I really feel sorry for this person and the hateful little world they've created. I've noticed more and more users of this site are still leaving all basically for the same reasons and symptomology... unprovoked abuse from this one website owner...

Sad... just sad...

Hopefully this person will get help one day...