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Comment by spadros | Hacker News Reader

As somebody in a family with bipolar I have to disagree. Someone's schizophrenic episodes should be taken into account in judging their actions, just as one's manic episodes should be as well. This in no way excuses their behavior. Whether or not you want to continue associating with that person is a different matter.

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Why should it matter? I mean, if somebody tells me that they are intimate with the president, if they want to con me, or are troubled with mental illness, shouldn’t make a difference on the judgment of how trustable are their statements.

Generally, people are judged based on the "facts of the case". If I stole an iPhone from the Apple Store, you can call me a thief and demand I spend 6 months in jail. But if a single mother stole a loaf of bread from a store because their kids were starving and going to die without food, that same punishment might be considered unjust.

Context matters. The facts matter. Not just, "did you do this or not".

Because we as a society have determined that intent matters -- which is why we have the concept of manslaughter vs murder.

It's a hard thing to accept, but if you're wronged by someone in a state of psychosis, there is no true malice.

Does it change everything? Certainly not.

Change in trust in particular is a hard thing to determine here. You should trust that they're experiencing what they say they are. You should not trust that their statements are factual.

Change in response? It's the difference between if you should seek to get them help or muster some compassion versus whatever you might do if it was a healthy person acting out of malice.

That being said, mentally ill people can still be assholes, and can still act out of malice. So there's that. And that makes situations even more difficult to figure out.

I’m not talking about behavior nor judgment of him as a person, I know morality tends to equate this, but I don’t consider it to be the case. I just mean that I wouldn’t trust somebody who tends to lie because of mental illness, the same way I wouldn’t trust somebody without preparation to talk about theoretical physics.

The lies of a con man or an uninformed person are generally pretty distinguishable from the lies of a psychotic or manic person, especially in long form writing (isolated tweets are another matter). And for the type of writing deBoer does, which is quite well-sourced whenever he is making factual claims, I think dismissing it because he has a mental illness is kind of silly. Honestly I’ll take a bias of disorganized thought that is likely to be easier to detect over an ideologically motivated bias any day, and we certainly don’t prevent anyone from being published for the latter.

Are there medications you can take to make you drastically less likely to try to con people?

He's entitled to share his mitigating context. It may well be persuasively exculpatory for a lot of reasonable people. He goes far beyond that in this argument, suggesting that he would find dishonest any description of his misconduct that doesn't capture his full state of mind; for instance, any claim that he attempted to "cancel" Malcolm Harris.

Since a claim that he attempted to cancel Harris is a pretty strong claim about his state of mind, it would seem that omitting relevant information about his state of mind would indeed be dishonest with regard to that particular claim. Claiming that he attempted to cancel Harris is a stronger claim than just claiming that he falsely accused Harris; the latter claim does not carry any implications about his state of mind. It's even a stronger claim than claiming that he knew the accusations were false at the time he made them; that's a claim about his state of mind, yes, but it's a state of mind he's admitted to, as you point out. He has not only not admitted to attempting to cancel Harris, he has explicitly denied it and explained why that wasn't his state of mind at the time.

I would agree that any description of his misconduct not including reference to his literal bipolar manic state to be not painting the true picture. If we swapped “bipolar” for “schizophrenic” would you have the same opinion?

I don't have to consider that counterfactual, since deBoer himself stated clearly that he knew the accusations he was making were false at the time he made them.

I think you’re woefully uninformed about the nature of psychosis. Schizophrenic people are fully capable of telling intentional lies to combat a perceived threat, even when they are imagining that threat due to psychosis. Even for someone schizophrenic, not all psychosis is so dissociative as to not have a goal-oriented thought process at all.

deBoer isn't schizophrenic. Again: the counterfactual proposed here isn't useful.

Bipolar mania often comes with psychosis. The paranoia the author writes about is a classic symptom of both mania and schizophrenia.

The psychosis that schizophrenic people experience and that of bipolar people is not treated as two separate “kinds” of psychosis by medical professionals. They are treated with exact same medications. We even have a specific disorder name for people whose mental illness includes the overlapping features of both (schizoaffective). So I don’t think you can move the goalposts away from “schizophrenic people can’t intentionally lie due to psychosis” and pretend the counterfactual is totally irrelevant so easily.

I didn't say anything about what people with schizophrenia can or can't do. Please don't put quotes around things I didn't say when responding to me.

Perhaps I misunderstood you, but I think the claims you made were quite clear. In response to the suggestion of the schizophrenia counterfactual, you wrote precisely:

> I don't have to consider that counterfactual, since deBoer himself stated clearly that he knew the accusations he was making were false at the time he made them

My understanding of that was that you saw the fact that “ clearly that he knew the accusations he was making were false at the time he made them” as a reason to disregard the counterfactual. Can you explain what you meant by that other than the suggestion that the latter half of that sentence was sufficiently inconsistent with schizophrenia as to render the comparison meaningless?

I apologize for using quotes to distinguish the view I was referring to from the rest of the sentence. I thought it would be clear that I wasn’t quoting you since the comment I responded too was so short.

I used to get caught up by the same thing with quotation marks here. Not everyone loves the HN norm about it, but I've internalized it.

Thanks a lot for clarifying this. The meds a bipolar will take are identical to the meds a schizophrenic will take for handling psychosis and paranoia.

You're making the assumption that him knowing they were false meant he had a choice in saying them.

When it comes to psychosis, your knowledge and your actions can become completely disconnected. For my manic episodes, I'm fully conscious and aware of what I'm doing, with no ability to stop what I'm doing. I'm in the passenger seat of a car driving off the cliff.

Claiming he attempted to “cancel” Malcom Harris doesn’t just not “capture his full state of mind”, it ignores material facts to allege he was in a different state of mind.

And I have to admit I’m curious about what line you’d draw with other situations of omitting information to make one’s argument more persuasive. Do you feel writers are honest when they emphasize the increased rate of myocarditis cases in teens who take the COVID vaccine, while not including the fact that teens who get infected with COVID have even higher rates? I think you’re setting a pretty high bar for considering something misinformation in a way that is highly detrimental for forming accurate world views.

I'm not sure we read the same article. I didn't get a "you have to know the full contents of my mind" vibe, but I definitely did feel like he's making an appeal to know the full truth of what he did before you decide how bad he is. And asking people who would publicly write about / condemn him for what he did to at least tell the entire story.

Whether or not you want to continue associating with that person is a different matter.

Sometimes you have no choice.

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