She Wanted Help With Her Mental Illness But Ended Up Destroyed

Bowl of Cereal
Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:43:40 GMT

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a highly disturbing PsychForums thread on a mental health recovery message board. I usually don’t require content warnings, but I found the responses in this thread to be profoundly distressing, so please choose carefully before you decide to open it.

The thread begins with a user named AliceWonders who has histrionic personality disorder. This user noticed that many of her posts on this website were being misinterpreted as ploys to gain admiration and as products of her HPD. She explained that while she does has an obsession with compliment-seeking on other websites that cater to these cravings (such as dating sites and fan clubs), her motives for posting on PsychForums are completely different.

She proved this by giving real examples of advice she seeks on PsychForums and of advice she seeks elsewhere. She explained that she had to make this post so other members would know that her PsychForums posts are made for the purpose of gaining further understanding of herself and her disorders. As Alice explains, “it’s NOT the kind of attention I WANT but it something I NEED to figure this stuff out.”

Well, the rest of PsychForums ended up convincing her that what she was doing was not mentally sound behaviour. This is clearly and utterly false because if you come to a forum seeking mental health support, you’re going to want advice that is relevant to you. Personality disorders are very difficult to live with and require urgent care, so it’s reasonable for someone like Alice to feel frustrated that they don’t have the help they need.

Yet in the eyes of the sickos at PsychForums, Alice’s post was trying to manipulate the perception others have of herself, and was therefore a side effect of HPD. I’m sure the other members wouldn’t have said the same thing if the post was about a physical ailment and not HPD. At the very least, if someone DID respond in this way to someone seeking advice for a physical illness, it wouldn’t have gone over as well, and the manipulation would have been more obvious.

After first discovering this thread midday, I was a nervous wreck the rest of the day, especially since this fiasco took place on a website that advertises itself as a support group. I felt awful that Alice’s desire for self-improvement was dismissed as mental illness. I hated that her HPD was used as a tool to manipulate her into accepting advice based on misinterpretation. They convinced her that seeking relevant support is a sign of metal illness. Considering this, it’s sickening to consider how profoundly this thread must have destroyed her ability to navigate through difficult situations.

I felt like I had to find a way to help Alice repair the damage that was inflicted upon her mind. So, when I went home that evening, I created a PsychForums account and wrote a thread message that carefully and logically explained how Alice was being manipulated.

Well after all that writing, I pressed “submit” and you know what happened? I got an automated message saying something along the lines of, “this thread hasn’t been active in years so your comment has been deleted.” To make matters worse, I unwisely did not save a copy of my post, so it was lost completely! I was furious!

I could have tried re-writing my comment and posted it somewhere else in the hope that Alice would see it. However, I decided against that because I felt like my original post explained everything so carefully and clearly that if I tried writing the post again, it wouldn’t describe this complex situation as well as my original. I didn’t want to risk being misinterpreted and dismissed like Alice did.

Well, a few years have passed, and I am ready to give this comment another try. Since I first saw this thread, I wrote lots of posts for Nonmonetized Together, and this has allowed me to gain some confidence in my writing. I will write this LessWrong article in the hopes that AliceWonders will see it and begin a new rebuilding process.

Now, what does all of this have to do with LessWrong? I want to make a case for us to focus on resolving issues that appear in Internet communities. These challenges are less wide-reaching, and hence more easily solvable, than what is normally posted on this site.

I am putting Alice’s PsychForums username in this article to increase the chances she will find it. Just letting you know, Alice, I am always here to support you, and if you run into similar predators on LessWrong, I will make sure to protect you from them.

It’s not mentally ill to provide background information to other people so they can find you the help you need!

Here is the archived version of the first page in the thread. I tried to archive the second page but the Wayback Machine just brought up an error message. I noticed that the third and fourth pages had error messages already saved as their archived version so I figured that the same thing would happen if I tried making a new archive for those pages.

Discuss