Muschamp Rd

It’s Mental Health Week

May 6th, 2012
Why?

I learned long ago the dangers of electronic communication and just how debilitating mental illness can be. Depression isn’t something I talk about much these days, though there was an extended period when I wrote too much about the difficulties I was having and how I just couldn’t make people see how much they were hurting me. I gave up many times. Took down my blog, went about as low as you can go. I’m not cured…

I’ve absorbed a lot of abuse, a lot of unkind words, a lot of nasty looks. I bit my tongue and walked away from most every potential confrontation. I dropped out of school, but was talked into resuming, just to put up with all the nastiness in as much silence as I could for months. Things never got better. I didn’t attend the convocation ceremony. I don’t associate with my classmates or the university. I’ve taken down a lot of my more bitter posts and I gave up asking why. Some content remains online against the advice of many. This isn’t a good career move, but I refuse to engage in revisionist history for the benefit of people who hurt me.

Some people occasionally encouraged me to blog despite my many problems, I can’t say I recommend it for people dealing with serious health or personal problems. One thing it opens you up to is more abuse and ridicule from random strangers online. One particular group of individuals have taken great amusement in belittling me and my struggles. I called them out on it, but that just led to more abuse being posted under pseudonyms on Caltrops.com. So I ignored them for years, never even bothered to read what was being said. Why give them the satisfaction? They along with UBC however continue to poke me to see if I’m still paying attention, by sending unwanted emails and web traffic my way. I ask UBC the same questions I always do, they never answer. But folks on Caltrops.com are the exact opposite, they don’t shut up, they most definitely think it is amusing to poke the bear.

Caltrops is run by Robb Sherwin and has been for years. He has no problem with it being a forum where quasi anonymous individuals can post nasty hurtful crap about random strangers on the Internet. I’ve had enough of being the butt of their jokes and the target of their abuse. But I just can’t recommend using social media to mark Mental Health Week because rest assured even in 2022 random Internet handles will mock you on some forum you’ve never heard of.

The post that got me the attentions of the folks over on Caltrops.com, was this post about Christina Ricci and her then upcoming movie, Black Snake Moan. Eventually I noticed and wrote about it on my blog, this only got me more attention. I ignored them for about five years. One of the biggest loud mouths on the website claimed to be Wagner James Au, so when I recently discovered he was on Twitter I started asking louder and louder why this was considered acceptable online behaviour even in the gaming community. Finally I took to blogging, if the folks on Caltrops want my attention they have it, along with a lot of other people’s attention seeing as how the web is a lot more social and news travels a lot quicker than it did five years ago pre-Twitter.

Robb Sherwin knows who Fussbett Sanitario and Zensi are, he’s let them and others post nasty hurtful stuff about complete strangers on his website for over five years. This isn’t harmless fun and I know you’re not supposed to feed trolls, but given it is Mental Health Week, perhaps some people need a reminder that they’re not cool when they pick on random bloggers struggling with mental illness. What does that have to do with video games?

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