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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Please keep internet psychiatric diagnosis off HN.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not psychiatry, it's psychology. Not even remotely I'm making an attempt to diagnose a psychiatric pathology as in no way I'm qualified to do that. You are giving me more credit than I actually deserve.

I mean "psychiatric" ironically rather than literally—adding "internet" to a word is sort of an instant ironizer. You can read it as "psychological diagnosis" if you like. The point is that making remarks about someone's psychological issues as you perceive them, suggesting that they need therapy and so on, is unduly personal. It crosses a line that is better not to cross, even if you're right, because it frequently lands with the other person as a kind of violation or attack.

We don't know nearly enough about each other from an online text forum to be able to make personal statements, so making them is presumptuous. If there's a substantive point beyond that, it should be easy to express in an impersonal way, and if there isn't, not posting anything is a better option.

If you read the comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... you'll see a history of explanations about this.

Ah that's a well written and thoughtful response to my comment. Thank you for that! However I can’t say I agree with the trigger premise though, even if suggestion perceived as personal. Psychological problem suggestions, gentle nudges if you will, are inherently beneficial even if those generate a defensive response. Defensive response is a response! That response is a deliberate thought in itself, an analysis. In modern, developed societies, it seems that the only appropriate time to suggest therapy is when the following sentence includes a suicide hotline phone number, how crazy is that? Therapy or any psychological self-care should be normal, and not in any way different from a regular, scheduled visit to the dentist.

From my perspective this line of thinking makes more sense for in-person contact, where it's possible to read the other person's state more accurately and get a feel for whether or not one's helpful suggestions are actually helpful or not. What matters is not the message you send, but the message the other person receives, and a lot can change from one to the other.

Here on an internet forum, we have almost no information about each other. The risk of such comments doing more harm than good is much higher, partly because the potential for misunderstanding is so high, and also because people have often used this language in snarky ways, for personal attacks, and so on.

That doesn't mean you can't reach out to someone you're genuinely concerned for, but the burden in that case is on you to disambiguate your intention from anything presumptuous or malicious, and that requires a different communication style—much less generic and casual.

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