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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

If the pastebinned tweets I've seen are really his then he was clearly unhinged when he made them. Whether that is due to head trauma or if the problems with the police came about because he was already having issues, I have no idea.

Either way, while I totally understand his family's request for privacy, I do wish as a culture we felt more comfortable discussing things like this when they happen instead of basically all trying to sweep it under the rug.

People shouldn't be shamed for having mental health issues, but neither should we expend so much effort on pretending like we don't have something of an epidemic going on in this area these days.

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He sounded extremely angry, but unhinged isn't the word I'd use. If what he said was true, he had every right to be extremely angry.

Nobody is trying to sweep anything under the rug but Christ, the man has been dead for less than 48 hours. I don't think giving people a few days or a week to process it and grieve is an unreasonable proposition.

It is probably not so much discussing health issues as them having lost a loved one and don't want the Internet probing them for questions about him.

You make a bunch of speculation, use slurs ("he was clearly unhinged") to talk about him, and then wonder why people ask for privacy?

At least from a .uk idiomatic POV (or at least from mine), 'unhinged' is a description of a potentially temporary mental state (hence 'unhinged when' making sense as a conjugation) rather than an attempt to attack the mentally ill. I'm not fond of the speculation, though, but can find nothing to say about it beyond that that wouldn't merely be adding my own speculation and thereby exacerbating that aspect.

Or: You can apply the principle of charity to somebody's choice of words and still critique their point, and that often works out better in terms of constructive results.

Mental illness is primarily characterized by temporary states. Personally I don't think you can be "unhinged" without being mentally ill. It's better to use language that more accurately characterizes the situation, than something which is just a synonym for crazy.

> Personally I don't think you can be "unhinged" without being mentally ill

I consider that attitude to be deeply unfortunate and to be unfair both to the temporarily unhinged and to the long term mentally ill. If you had a term that was an alternative to unhinged that didn't make your socially conditioned prejudices twitch, I'd have preferred you shared it rather than simply attack both groups for using language that they consider to be accurate (because then you wouldn't've managed to insult most of my friends in one tone deaf unconstructive reply)

I'm long term mentally ill. You don't know what you're talking about.

Well, of the six long term mentally ill people I've asked if there was a better term now, I'm at zero suggestions and all of them except you said 'unhinged' was great.

So unless you're actually going to suggest something, I'll be keeping with the term they're happy with, I'm afraid.

That is exactly why I tried to admonish people in a top post to avoid doing this. Maybe it is just me being naive, but it seemed an "in memoriam" article would not be the place for this, and was hoping people would instead choose to share something positive about his life. But you know, internet happens...

I read the article, which says nothing about the cause of death. I decided to check HN comments, and I am grateful for various interesting facts about Ian, his life and accomplishments. But still, the main question on my mind is - what the fuck did happen? Maybe it's a bad part of being human, being curious about the reason for the tragedy. I suppose others also feel like this, and so speculations always start quickly.

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