Hey, remember that Reed College student who somehow got national attention for being booted from a class discussion section because he wouldn’t shut up about rape? The guy that right-wing news outlets — including The National Review and the New York Post — heralded as a martyr to free speech, even though it was clear to anyone who looked into the story even a little bit that the guy in question was a bit … off?
Well, Katie Baker at Buzzfeed now reports that Mr. True, now an ex-Reed College student, “was arrested on Thursday by the Portland, Oregon police for alleged sex abuse, harassment, and disorderly conduct” after, er, behaving inappropriately at a girls’ rugby game.
As Baker explains,
According to an employee at Rugby Oregon, a youth rugby organization based in Portland, True was arrested for disrupting a high school girls’ rugby practice. He was restrained by a coach who called the police, the employee said.
I wonder if the New York Post will be writing an editorial this time, like they did last time, demanding Congressional hearings and declaring that, well, whatever it was he was doing at the rugby game was a bold act of self-expression.
Your friend who coughs every time they take a deep breath or laugh could be just fine and the cough has an origin completely unrelated to their health. It could be a twitch. It could be intentional. That’s why we investigate the cause of symptoms – because sometimes they have nothing to do with health.
Sometimes being an asshole is a personality trait of a healthy mind too. Some people are just impulsive or dumb or obstinate and behave badly in spite of the consequences. Some people dont care about the consequences. It is by no means necessarily mental illness for someone to behave badly. It may be worth investigating the possibility. The fact it happens certainly isn’t sufficient evidence to determine there is anything wrong at all though.
I just fucking contributed to the detail like a giant asshole. Fuck this.
@ sunnysombrera
One of my pet peeves is the term “split personality” – a lot of different diagnosis have splitting as a component. So I’m not sure whether you mean DID (dissociative identity disorder) or are lumping together BPD and DID and various trauma disorders?
Holy mother of god. It is literally terrifying to me that someone with the attitudes you’re expressing here is going to be working in the judicial system. The judicial system already treats mad people horribly, and you’re certainly not going to make it better unless you realign your attitude.
What do we gain by not assuming that bad behavior = mental illness? How about I gain the ability to BE BELIEVED? I want you to try to imagine what it would be like if you could say the weather is sunny and people don’t believe you until they verify it for themselves. I once went to the doctor with an open wound leaking pus, and the doctor treated me like I was making shit up, even though I had an open wound visibly leaking pus, and wrote me a prescription for psychiatric medication instead of an antibiotic. Maybe you need to sit down a few minutes and think about what it would be like if that sort of thing happened to you literally every time someone finds out that you have a mental disorder.
That is what you do to me when you make these kinds of statements. This is literal harm, that you, personally, do to me. If you wouldn’t purposefully gaslight me, maybe you shouldn’t purposefully encourage other people to gaslight me.
I also would like you to sit down and think a few minutes about selection bias and confirmation bias, which you might actually be experiencing if the terrible people you encounter are frequently mentally ill. Because you’re training to work in law enforcement, maybe you’re not seeing the vast majority of mad people who are not terrible people, and because you’re training as a psychologist, you’re not seeing the vast majority of terrible people who are not mad. You’re seeing the small overlap of people who are both terrible and mad and extrapolating a generalized rule that does not actually exist.
Do you think you could maybe consider that might be a possibility?
Jebus. Nothing annoys me more than repeated strawmanning.
You know jack shit and your uninformed opinion is worth nothing. Go tell some African Americans that the word “boy” is totes harmless, and it actually helps them to have white people treating them kindly in the way they treat favorite pets. Because that has as much validity as what you’re saying here.
If this guy is mentally ill, that’s for a court-ordered psychiatrist to judge…when determining if he is fit to stand trial.
But mentally ill or not, I’m going to judge the hell out of this guy’s behavior, because it is just asinine and there’s no excuse for it. I’ve known lots of mentally ill people, and even been one myself. None of them (or myself) ever saw it as an excuse to make a wanker and an ass of oneself.
As for that color-coded wristband thing, it’s too much like the Nazis’ pink triangles and yellow stars to be worth considering, much less enacting. Not only is it morally horrific, it’s also redundant and just plain boneheaded. Anyone who’s on medication for a mental illness should be advised to wear a medic-alert bracelet with their condition/needs engraved on it in case they are found unconscious, incoherent, or just a paralytic, catatonic heap of misery. But medic-alert bracelets are also worn for things like diabetes, hemophilia, etc. — physical conditions that aren’t stigmatized the way mental conditions are. They’re to alert anyone who finds a person in medical distress to call for help or provide first aid if they know how. The emphasis should be focused on helping a person in distress, not on running off scared because you see a colored wristband and realize they’re anxious, depressive, bipolar or paranoid-schizophrenic and you’re clueless as to what all that means except ZOMG CRAZY!!! Nobody that I know of has ever freaked out over a medic-alert bracelet. And they’re a solution that’s been around for decades. Offering them to mental patients whose condition may have them needing help on a frequent basis would be more compassionate than this inane wristband proposal, which I sincerely hope will die a swift and painless death.
According to that metric, practically every MRA and every incel would appear to be mentally ill. Every racist and sexist asshole on facebook. Every person who commits pretty much any crime would be engaging in “aberrant behavior that is a detriment to [their] personal and professional life.”
Sorry, but “aberrant behavior” =/= “mental illness.” In fact, that attitude is what has historically lead to so many “different” behaviors to be called mental illnesses simply because it is different. Behavior that is a detrimental to one’s personal or professional life can be that way because of external social disapproval (rightly or wrongly), not just because of some direct self-harm.
We don’t do diagnosis at all here because we know we’re only seeing a small slice of real events and real people. Maybe there’s something going on mentally, maybe there isn’t, but the very attitude that people have that makes them want to leap immediately to mental illness whenever something happens that they don’t understand is what we’re trying to counter.
And people who have tried to diagnose? Keep in mind that we aren’t saying you’re awful people for doing so. Like a certain dude in a viral video about racism that has been going around recently said, “stop being defensive.” Just listen to the community and stop contributing to society’s association of any bad behavior with mental illness, whatever your motivations were. Your transgressions will be forgiven and forgotten by tomorrow. 🙂
Although the details in the initial report about him being banished from the college class was scant it really did give me the impression that he was being pretty over the top obnoxious. I am glad to see that those tutors were clearly right to make that decision, it HAD to be more than just your average trolly type wanker.
Clearly it was decided that feeling unsafe around this man was perfectly understandable, and I am glad to see that for once a woman feeling safe was brought above a mans ‘right’ to ‘freedom of speech’ (inverted commas as I thought that his freedom of speech was not really being violated).
I’d just like to thank all the people who speak up and try to make this a safer space for readers living with mental illnesses, etc. You’re awesome.
Now let’s try to get back on the rails, if at all possible.
@anemone
Oh. I guess you could say that part of the comment was based on a lack of understanding about those kinds of disorders. I know more about BPD than any of the others, I must have been lumping together.
Same here. And not just women, but all of the group in general. He was disrupting an entire class, getting in the way of their right to learn. And then he went and disrupted an entire rugby team’s right to play. Obviously, whatever he has to “say” (note the quotes, there for a reason) is trumped by the rights of others to do what they came to do, which does NOT include having to put up with his shit. Whatever its origins.
portlantonio
What exactly is difficult about telling the difference between:
1) In this particular case, we don’t know enough about this specific person for anyone to make an assessment about their mental health. Further, we are not qualified to make such an assessment, even if we had the necessary information.
And
2) Mental illness never contributes to people committing crimes.
????
And this is the other baffling thing that you “it must be mental illness!!!” types always do. Why do you think that is a useful observation to make?
He was over-the-top obnoxious. According to the prof, he made (without exception) every other student in the discussion group sufficiently uncomfortable that they would have preferred not to come to the group if True was going to be there. At other times, he would stand in the hallway yelling at the top of his voice to get attention and disrupt other students.
He’s also being misleading by saying he was banned from class. The class is structured as a lecture-hall lecture, and then after the lecture students break out into discussion groups (or “conferences” as they’re called) to discuss the material in smaller groups. He was not banned from the lecture portion, only the discussion group, and he was given the opportunity to switch to a different discussion group or have one-on-one conferences with with prof in order to complete that portion of the class. He declined, and instead demanded to go back to the conference where nobody wanted him to be, apparently specifically so that he could be refused and put up a giant stink about it on the internet.
Also, rape statistics are not even close to on-topic for the class in question.
That’s from here. It’s an article written by someone who went to Reed College and is familiar with the class in question. Spouting about rape statistics would be a massive derail even if True was completely respectful about it. Which he apparently wasn’t.
Reason has an article about this with a few more details from the email the prof sent to True to notify him that he was no longer welcome in the discussion group. Note that I endorse NOTHING of the opinions expressed in the article, and am linking it only because it contains useful factual information.
Jesus, this kills me. Mental illness does not preclude, predict, explain, or excuse bad behavior anymore than diabetes or colitis. It is irrelevant. The same number of non mentally ill and mentally ill people do bad shit. In fact, mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence. I guess we should start being scared of non mentally I’ll people.
Are you shooting all the emblems? I had to look up a walk-through for them so I could get them all, because some of them are in absolutely ridiculous places.
OK, I know the answer, but am I slightly addicted to DA:I ? Since it came out I have played nothing else except for one go of DA:O and one of DA:2
Policy – thanks for the extra info – obviously what I had read was biased in his favour, as there was no mention of ALL the class being uncomfortable with him being there.
On the current situation – I would not be at all surprised to see the stuff at Reed being used to explain his behaviour at the high school – because threatening sexual actions are perfectly understandable when we are feeling a bit stressed! I just hope that the jury doesn’t buy it, it is all part of the same behaviour as far as I can see from my limited knowledge of what is going on.
So apparently he went up to a 17 year old girl there and caressed her hair and arm, and made an inappropriate comment to her http://www.kptv.com/story/28835442/court-docs-reed-college-student-arrested-for-sex-abuse
Yeah, just a wee bit creepy.
The first story (Jeremiah True harassing folks in his seminar) reminded me of something that happened when I was a teaching assistant.
It was a first-year English Lit course on writing genres, and a TA running a different seminar had this guy who kept disrupting the class by complaining that the readings were “too feminist” because too many writers were women. Women writers = feminism, because logic! Thankfully the prof took her (the TA) seriously and moved this disruptive guy to another seminar… run by a man. I’m not sure that sent exactly the right message, but it worked, since Misogynist Guy seemed to respect other men more.
I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with any students like that, and now I’m imagining what would have happened if Misogynist Guy had gone on to complain widely about getting “kicked out” and having his “free speech” trampled on. That’d cause lots of stress for the educators, not to mention all the other students. It definitely is a problem of entitlement, thinking that your own rights trump everyone else’s.
@Paradoxical Intention
I’m still on the 7th and last campaign on normal difficulty (Sherry). After this I’m planning to do the amateur difficulty just for skill points, completion and emblems. I think I got about 50/80 emblems so far through casually playing through normal mode just to get through it. When I go through amateur campaign I’ll definitely use a guide to find the emblems. I did the same thing in RE5. Some of them are just not meant to be found by mere humanoids.
Somewhere, someone has already made the assertion that this is bullshit because manhandling a 17-year-old shouldn’t be a crime, and also free speech.
Here’s hoping he is charged, and that the judicial system takes this seriously and doesn’t try to pull a boys-will-be-boys. This dude clearly feels entitled to do whatever he likes to women, and will only escalate from here.
Usually a lurker, so I don’t know how to do blockquotes. But it’s so important that Policy of Madness said this:
“I want you to try to imagine what it would be like if you could say the weather is sunny and people don’t believe you until they verify it for themselves. I once went to the doctor with an open wound leaking pus, and the doctor treated me like I was making shit up, even though I had an open wound visibly leaking pus, and wrote me a prescription for psychiatric medication instead of an antibiotic. Maybe you need to sit down a few minutes and think about what it would be like if that sort of thing happened to you literally every time someone finds out that you have a mental disorder.”
I had a doctor who seemed like a good doctor, but wouldn’t believe things I said, and I think it was because I take medication for a mental disorder and because I’m a woman. I have migraines, which are also invisible. How do you prove that? How do you get help from a person who has all the power and believes nothing you say (even if you have literal pus coming out of your arm)?
Ironically, my “mental illness” got much harder to deal with, because I had to navigate a system that assumed I did not know my own brain/body. I found I had to constantly tease apart whether I was being “irrational” – which is what I was told – from the broken medical systems in place that were exerting power by refusing to listen.
I will also point out that I was unfailingly polite to the staff and the doctor, because I learned quickly that other people see me as irrational, fragile, and even scary no matter how friendly or grounded I am. I can’t speak for other people, but I am realizing that the amount of self-policing I do around this is bullshit.
So, no bad behavior, is what I’m saying. And conflating bad behavior with mental illness is directly harmful, is what I’m saying.
My hope is that he gets to a point where he can look back on this period of his life and wonder if it actually possible to die of shame, guilt and remorse. Then he doesn’t die, but goes on being a better human being. I sincerely hope that.
In other news, my now eighteen year old son is on new meds and doing better.
@portlantonio and Squidface
There’s a difference in discussing how society treats people with mental issues and trying to use mental issues as an excuse for bad behavior.
Again, a few articles about a person doesn’t give you a proper insight into their mind. I mean, I could say from the few posts you two have done here that you have some sort of learning disability or ADD because you don’t fucking listen to people, but I may in fact be completely wrong and you two are just stubborn and refuse to listen.
You two are NOT psychologists, and even if either one of you were (which I really fucking hope not) neither of you CANNOT figure out if someone has a mental problem over a couple of articles over the internet. If he DOES have mental issues, it is up for an ACTUAL TRAINED PSYCHOLOGIST WITH A DEGREE THAT TOOK A DECADE TO GET TO DECIDE IN PERSON, NOT TWO RANDOM PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET.
And even if he DOES have some sort of issues, THAT DOESN’T EXCUSE HIS BEHAVIOR amazingly enough. Assigning him some sort of mental disorder doesn’t make his behavior negotiable just because there’s something “wrong” with him. Human behavior is NOT black and white. You guys just want to “diagnose” him so you have something to point the finger at instead of realizing that some people are just fucking assholes without rhyme or reason.
Just really let that sink into your heads for a bit: People can be fucking assholes without rhyme or reason.
I mean, it’s amazing that the only behavior people try to diagnose as some sort of mental disorder is BAD behavior. I think I’ve read about something recently called “possession purging”(?) which is when people have the compulsion to give away things they own all the time to the point where they have nothing at all, but I guess if you read about someone who frequently donated almost all their shit to charity, you’d think they’re just a stand up person with absolutely nothing wrong with them, would you two?