Why are people on these forums so mean?

We're not required to "support" people with ED. We're to inform them in love that they are damaging themselves. Offense seems to be taken when someone fails to agree with their poor decisions and with that the ED person thinks that individual is being mean when they are actually are being loving . This forum was set up for people to get healthy and maintain being healthy, not to "support" bad choices. I'm sorry if you think my comment is mean. I will not apologize for the truth. Be blessed!

It's not mean - but it is as simplistic, irresponsible, and potentially harmful as a church committee deciding they will help the homeless schizophrenic man by informing him 'in love' that he really isn't Henry VIII - and that, hey, if he refuses to believe them and help himself, then, well, that's his poor decision, and the church have done their bit by telling the truth in love.

Your post actually illustrates well the point I was making in my last post. Hope you don't mind me pointing this out. Guess I'm also telling the truth in love.

Sounds like your problem is with Churches and God. Just saying it in love.

I have not figured this one out myself yet....what happened to if you can't say something NICE then keep your mouth shut.

I tend to not comment if it is gonna be ugly....opions are like buttholes everyone has one but it does not mean we want to hear yours:laugh:

Fortunately for us adults, since Thumper's rule sometimes get in the way of healthy adult discussions, we are not bound by it. (If, however, you still feel you need to follow it, for whatever reason, then by all means, please do.)

edit- wrong post.

There are those who are helpful & there are those who are just rude, attacking & derogatory. I agree with you that there a # of the latter on this site even though it should be a place for supportive & helpful people. I was chased off from posting on here by the rude & nasty snake pit of vipers. It was very disappointing.

Welcome to the internet.
I see a lot of support here....maybe just ignore the 'meanies'?

Sounds like your problem is with Churches and God. Just saying it in love.

Nope - I love my church and I love God. I was giving church as an example as I thought it might be something you could relate to, from your username. I could have equally used a secular group and the point would have been the same.

Sadly, you appear to have completely missed the point of what i was saying about mental illness. And you don't seem to have read my previous post either. The only word you seem to have read was 'church'. If I'd said a group of liberals rather than a church group, maybe you'd have read with a more open mind. Try substituting that, if you're genuinely interested.

My point is not to attack anyone, nor do I have a 'problem' - I thought maybe you were genuinely interested in helping people in love, and I was illustrating that the way you do this will have to differ according to the person's mental status.

It sounds like you don't have a lot of understanding of mental illness, but you are still very confident that you knew how to treat it. That can actually be dangerous, no matter how loving your intentions. Just as dangerous as a layperson claiming to know how to treat someone's cancer.

:laugh:

Sometimes, you have a choice between the right answer and the "nice" answer.

Any man who has ever been asked "Does my bum look big in this?" or varients of that, will know that the 'right' answer, and the 'nice' answer, are always the same

I have to say I haven't noticed too much meanness here. The one weightloss forum I noticed it was on Weight Watchers. It kind of surprised me so I was pleasantly surprised when I did not see the same behavior here. I feel there is a kind bluntness here. We are all in the same boat and I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want any sugar coating. I want the truth. I love reading all the different ideas and approaches people take. I learn from them. If it seems right for me I may even try it. Weight loss for me is partly a journey of learning how to read my own body and actually listen to it.

what happened to if you can't say something NICE then keep your mouth shut.

People on here ask questions, other people answer answer them.

Sometimes, you have a choice between the right answer and the "nice" answer. If you "keep your mouth shut" when faced with an answer that is not "nice" then members might get a pile of replies that are dangerous to their health.

It's not always easy to give the right answer, instead of the fluffy one that someone wants to hear, but as a caring person I am proud of always giving the right answer, whether in real life or on the internet.

Don't like it? Go ask a sycophant!

I this.

People tend to think others are being mean when they disagree with them.

Personally, I've found that people disagreeing with me is one hell of an amazing way to learn.

People hate having their beliefs questioned. Whether it's politics, religion, relationships, or fitness & health.

I'm glad my beliefs were questioned. It's how I learned. Here's my success story post I made yesterday, on my 600th day in a row of logging into MFP, which pretty much shows that everything I thought I knew about fitness and weight loss was WRONG!

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/709987-how-wrong-i-was-600-days-of-mfp-lotsa-pics

I'm so happy I was wrong. Because what I believed to be true didn't work for me.

To be fair, people who glamorise a harmful mental illness that they have usually have another sort of mental illness as well. They're not mentally well at all. They need help, not judgement - and it's part of their illness that they won't accept help.

I'm not condoning people being cruel. But people are going to be honest here. Someone who posts something pro-ana, then gets upset because people aren't being supportive in all responses, they need to find a better site.

To give a different sort of example, I have Asperger Syndrome (now does saying that mean I'm 'advertising' it? [/quote]
Of course not. You may not have seen all the posts and threads that some of us have. I have a son who has autism, so I understand your point, but it's not really what we're seeing here.

If told someone since April, I had Fast food 94 times so far and lost 89 pounds they'd have a brain aneurysm.

That's great! Never having my favorite foods isn't going to work for me. I just manage my intake and balance it out with exercise. Your weight loss is awesome!

@opuntia: I think you make a valid point about mental illness and ED. I often find that people who haven't dealt with mental illness themselves often have a very difficult time understanding it. However, I think that harshness and judgment are not entirely separate from helping the ill person; there is a lot of blending of the two.

I have suffered mental illness for years. I've had OCD since childhood, social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder, and most profoundly, severe depression for the better part of the last nine years. For the last several years, I had serious alcoholism in relation to these issues. I drank constantly, blacking out by early afternoon every day, lying about it to the people who loved me, hurting those closest to me with my own attempts at self-destruction.

The mentally ill part, the part people didn't understand, was why. And I didn't know. I hated myself. I knew I was a horrible person and deserved suffering, though I couldn't articulate why this was so. The mental internal pain was unbearable; I was suicidal all the time, for years on end. But in my mind, that was reasonable. That was good. No matter how many tears I saw on the faces of those around me, I knew they'd stop being sad once they were finally just rid of me.

This year, after a horrible incident (one I don't remember but saw all the evidence of the aftermath), my boyfriend, the last person who was putting up with me and caring for me day in and day out (I'd long since stopped taking my parents' calls and pleas for communication out of shame) gave me an ultimatum. He said, "It's this or it's me. If you're so set on killing yourself, I'm not going to watch it happen. If you want to keep going, I am getting on a plane back home tomorrow and you can do whatever you want here. If you want me, this stops now and it will never happen again."

And that cut through the thick fog of the mental illness. Not in the sense that I suddenly loved life or felt any less self-hatred, but in the sense that I was suddenly very afraid. I knew that if he left, I'd die and no one would know. No one would find me. My family 2000 miles away was used to me not responding. I have no friends. No one would find me for weeks, maybe months. As screwed up as it was, that wasn't okay with me.

So I stopped drinking then. I cried all the time. Then, weeks later, something changed. I suddenly burst out of depression without warning. Everything was clear. I realized I didn't have to hate myself. I realized what had caused it. I realized I didn't deserve any of this. Since then, I've changed my entire life, dropped 50 pounds, and started working on building my confidence and self-worth up from less than nothing. It's extremely slow going, but I can now recognize that it's worth it when that was utterly impossible before.

My point is that sometimes harshness is the only thing that can bring a mentally ill person into reality, even if only in a small way. Sometimes shoving the consequences of their actions in their face is necessary. Sometimes telling them that they are toxic is the jolt that will allow them to change.

Help and compassion will only work once people want them. It's true that mental illness gets in the way of this happening; that's part of what makes them so horrifically destructive. But unless you have a good reason to ask for help, unless something shakes up the protective bubble you've built around your own self-destructive habits, the mental illness will seem attractive. It's comfortable; it's the default.

People who seem mean to those with ED are not being mean. They may be uninformed or have difficulty relating, but they are concerned. They want those people to understand that ED behavior is not okay. They don't want it spreading to others who are susceptible and putting them in danger. Sometimes that's step one. And that's the biggest, scariest step.

:yawn: ok here we go again with the same kind of rant

Can't we just simply ignore those that we think are negative & move on? Get a life.

You are so not alone in your thinking! Amen to all you said!