Mentally-ill indie dev passes away amid allegations

[Ostroeuropa]

I'd say there's a massive difference between what goes on on a Starcraft server when people shittalk each other, and when a person is literally abusive in the home to their partner.

And no, I don't see it any different when a woman does it to a man. On gaming servers I've been insulted by more men and women (in roughly equal proportion) than I could possibly ever count. Hundreds of thousands maybe.

It's part of the game.

It's a culture thing. You probably wouldn't understand.

See, the "it's just shittalk" angle would work wonders if we didn't have years of whiny, apocalyptic comments from gamers about how unironically anxious they feel about the mere presence of women and minorities in their games.

This is a lie and a strawman of their criticism.

Strangely, I've never seen any of that.

I've heard everyone scream about it, but no one could ever give any kind of a study with any kind of statistical methodology showing prevalence.

I can wine about women wanting men as a group locked up in camps just for being men, and I could find you a number of citations, but we all know that's not a majority opinion.

It's doesn't have to be a majoritarian phenomenon to be a problem. The vast majority of Americans aren't white supremacists, but white supremacists are nevertheless a national security and public safety threat. Much in the same fashion, while we don't know for sure if a majority of gamers are genuine shitheads (they probably aren't), there's a visible microcosm of "gamer" discourse online that's probably reaching the 15 thousand röntgen mark at this point in terms of ridiculously self-serious and bigoted catastrophizing.

Trans exclusionary stuff is everywhere mate. Pretending this is a gamergate thing is stupid and disingeuous. Moreover, the gamergate position on this has been consistent from the beginning; unless their demography is directly relevant to the story you want to tell, make it customizable. They oppose hamfisted attempts to make characters a particular demographic to pander to a hate movement is all.

Let's all not forget what happens when gamers feel like one or either of those groups have any say on a final product no matter how small it might be.

I would like to now direct you all to googles "Tifa's tits".

And "Tracer's butt".

Also, these beauties:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-P9_oUV9Gw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l63nY0AYebI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pStcIjzAWI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJKVQK-nVPI

You mean being opposed to sex negativity and disagreeing with attempts to make certain forms of artistic expression socially verbotten based on dubious claims?

Not watching those links, if you wanna summarize then go ahead.

Good, so we can attack feminism then for ever talking about rights and women's issues, because there's a visible microcosm of feminist discourse that's probably reaching the 15 thousand röntgen mark at this point in terms of ridiculously self-serious and bigoted catastrophizing about those issues.

Give me a break. That's absurd.

You are being awfully defensive for no good reason.

I'm not trying to cancel gaming, dude, nor am I trying to invalidate how you and other non-shitheads feel about your hobby and its surrounding subculture. But if you can't take the heat of at least a little bit of critical cultural scrutiny, then maybe video games aren't ready to be treated like a serious form of art.

You're uncritically telling lies and parroting nonsense, and you're ignoring that disagreement with that scrutiny results in harassment campaigns and being labeled far-right and so on. When a game dev even questions feminist dogma on these topics, they are actively targeted to be brought down. It is not merely criticism. It's also noteworthy that it is completely inundating the market. You can't claim it's "Just a critique" when it is monopolizing legitimate discussion and press.

[Gravlen]

There's many coincidences in this world, and correlation does not equal causation. Without knowing more about his state of mind, your theory remains pure speculation.

Right. If a kid struggling with mental illness has been the victim of extreme levels of bullying, both online and at school, commits suicide, it makes no sense whatsoever to assume that the bullying might have been bad for their mental state and contributed to their suicide.

Well...

Bullying is a truly horrific phenomenon that has a wide array of terrible consequences. One of these terrible consequences is an increased risk of mental health issues and even suicide, for both the person bullied and the person perpetrating the bullying.

But does this mean that bullying actually causes suicide? This is an incredibly complex question. There seems to be a lot of confusion about the relationship between bullying and suicide. News stories focusing on the tragic suicide of young children and teenagers often point to instances of bullying. The focus on these individual stories can easily lead us to believe that there must be a causal relationship between bullying and suicide. After all, we keep reading stories in which bullying occurs and a suicide follows.

These deaths are all horrible tragedies, and the bullying these children experienced is unacceptable. But we do have to be careful about how we report on the relationship between these phenomena. When news stories report on a suicide preceded by instances of bullying, the two concepts become inextricably linked in readers’ minds and the conclusion that follows—that bullying leads to suicide—may not be entirely scientifically accurate.

A proper understanding of the relationship between bullying and suicide is essential. If we believe that bullying is a sole cause of suicide, then we might spend a lot of time and effort on bullying prevention strategies as suicide prevention, only to find that bullying is only one of many factors that increase suicide risk and a focus on bullying alone is not enough to avert more suicides. In other words, our focus may become misplaced and we may ignore other important causes that must be addressed in order to truly lower the risk of suicide.

Focusing only on bullying as the cause of suicide also implies that a young person’s suicide is entirely the fault of his or her schoolmates. Instilling guilt in children following the death by suicide of one of their classmates is not an acceptable approach to dealing with the aftermath of a suicide or of preventing future suicides. Stopping bullying is essential, but blaming children for an acquaintance’s death is not the proper approach.

So what do we know about the relationship between the two? As stated earlier, we do know that involvement in bullying, either as a victim or a perpetrator, raises the risk of suicide. In addition, even witnessing bullying can lead to feelings of helplessness and poor school connectedness, which can be a risk factor for mental health issues (although it is not a sole cause). On the other hand, most youth involved in bullying do not display suicidal behavior, even though bullying may be one of many risk factors of suicidal behavior.

The mantra that “association is not causality” cannot be repeated often enough because in instances like the connection between bullying and suicide it is persistently ignored. Journalists must be taught to take greater care in how they report on correlations between two phenomena so that their readers do not infer that one is the direct and unique cause of the other.

With the relationship between bullying and suicide remaining complex and in some ways unknown, it is essential that schools not focus narrowly on bullying prevention as a sole means to prevent suicide. Rather schools should be focusing more broadly on helping students build and cultivate protective factors. These kinds of interventions hold the greatest promise for building a foundation of resilience among young adults everywhere.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/denying-the-grave/201902/does-bullying-cause-suicide

Also:

Overall, we found that youth involved in bullying in any capacity – both bullies and victims of bullying – were more likely to think about and attempt suicide than youth who were not involved in bullying. In short, bullying is bad for everyone involved.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bullying-and-suicide-whats-the-connection/

As an example:

Seth, Sam and Samantha are all equal in age. They all suffer from the same type of mental illness, namely depression. Seth is a bully, Sam is a victim of bullying, and Samantha is not at all involved in bullying. All three kill themselves.

Did bullying contribute to their deaths?



By the way you were very subtly moving goal posts ("bad for their mental state") and presenting a simplistic premise (struggling with "mental illness", but not saying anything about what the type or severity of mental illness) - but the conclusion is the same: Without knowing more we cannot say that bullying contributed to their deaths, i.e. that there was a causation between bullying and suicide (apart for Samantha, where bullying was obviously not a factor... as far as we know. Was she a witness to bullying? Did that have an impact on her?)


Back to Holowka:

- A man with a long history of mental illness (a lifetime battling mood and personality disorders)
- himself a survivor of abuse
- allegedly with a long history of abusive behaviour, is publically accused of abuse and sexual assault.

Did the accusations contribute to his suicide?

There's simply no way to know, given the information we have.

[Saiwania]

Well, in the old days- sexual harassment was someone coercing another person into sex. "Sleep with me or you won't get the job." or referred to someone that didn't take no for an answer after being rejected twice. Nowadays, it is often just Feminist speak for "a man making a pass at a woman that she doesn't like." It is more often than not just an attempt to keep a brother down or ruin him.

So forgive me for being a bit skeptical of an incident of sexual harassment actually being all that bad, if I hear about it. Most of the time only hearsay exists.

[Liriena]

(Image)

Gamergate aside, this is why trial by social media is a bad thing. And it's not the first time this has been an issue either. Gaming does not live inside a bubble.

While I still think that there is a place for the court of public opinion, specially in cases of extremely powerful people, the past year has given me plenty of cause for concern.

[Ifreann]

We, as a society, really need to figure out what we do about abusers. It's all well and good that they lose their jobs and public standing when their wrongdoing comes to light, but what then? There needs to be a path back from being outed as an abuser, and that path needs to account for the victims and their needs as well. I imagine that this will be enormously difficult and take years of trial and error to figure out properly.

But based on what I've read of this thread so far, we're just going to attack Zoë Quinn for talking about what happened to her, attack Eileen Holowka for not also attacking Zoë Quinn, posit feminist plots to murder innocent men, and other such shite. This thread is bouncing from complaining that mere accusations can destroy a person's life to accusing Quinn of fucking murder, from saying that we don't know for certain that Alec Holowka did anything wrong to pointing to conspiracy maps from 8chan of all fucking places. I don't think that any of that crowd really care that Alec Holowka is dead. I think they're mad that after all their years and years of harassing her, Zoë Quinn isn't.

[Gormwood]

We, as a society, really need to figure out what we do about abusers. It's all well and good that they lose their jobs and public standing when their wrongdoing comes to light, but what then? There needs to be a path back from being outed as an abuser, and that path needs to account for the victims and their needs as well. I imagine that this will be enormously difficult and take years of trial and error to figure out properly.

But based on what I've read of this thread so far, we're just going to attack Zoë Quinn for talking about what happened to her, attack Eileen Holowka for not also attacking Zoë Quinn, posit feminist plots to murder innocent men, and other such shite. This thread is bouncing from complaining that mere accusations can destroy a person's life to accusing Quinn of fucking murder, from saying that we don't know for certain that Alec Holowka did anything wrong to pointing to conspiracy maps from 8chan of all fucking places. I don't think that any of that crowd really care that Alec Holowka is dead. I think they're mad that after all their years and years of harassing her, Zoë Quinn isn't.

Nobody threated to rape and/or murder (not necessarily in that order) Holowka either.

[Ors Might]

That isn't what they meant and you know fucking well that isn't what they meant, quit taking the piss.

So what is their approach to actual sexual assault victims being deterred from reporting as a result of this scheme?

Do you think slander and libel should go without punishment? That’s basically what maliciously false accusations are, Vass.

[Esheaun Stroakuss]

If it makes you any happier, I totally agree with what you are saying.

[Saiwania]

I fail to understand why Gamergate ever became any big deal to begin with. We only have a bunch of hearsay about Zoe Quinn being a bad/shallow person and likewise for whoever is on the other side. So it is mostly a bunch of unimportant nonsense from my perspective. A private dispute they should work out.

[Gormwood]

If it makes you any happier, I totally agree with what you are saying. Demonizing people on either side is not going to do the trick, nor is "removing" or "cancelling" people. Get to the bottom of the allegation, prove it's true/false. Either way, this should be investigated by the police and brought to trial there, not on Twitter. No evidence, no prosecution. Evidence, prosecution. It really is as simple as that, and calling someone an abuser online should mean nothing. At the same time, accusing a potential victim of lying right off of the bat is damaging and scummy. By all means be sceptical and question details - whenever a public figure is accused of anything, for example, I reserve judgement until any proof is given.

As this thread shows, it's completely optional for That Lying Bitch ZOË QUINN.

[Hirota]

(Image)

Gamergate aside, this is why trial by social media is a bad thing. And it's not the first time this has been an issue either. Gaming does not live inside a bubble.

While I still think that there is a place for the court of public opinion, specially in cases of extremely powerful people, the past year has given me plenty of cause for concern.

I'm get what you are saying, and don't entirely disagree. But this isn't an "extremely powerful" person. Look, if you ignore that this has names which inevitably raise the spooky spectre of Gamergate, this is just another unsubstantiated accusation that has led to someone losing their livelihood, and ultimately their life.

[Ors Might]

Right. If a kid struggling with mental illness has been the victim of extreme levels of bullying, both online and at school, commits suicide, it makes no sense whatsoever to assume that the bullying might have been bad for their mental state and contributed to their suicide.

Well...

Bullying is a truly horrific phenomenon that has a wide array of terrible consequences. One of these terrible consequences is an increased risk of mental health issues and even suicide, for both the person bullied and the person perpetrating the bullying.

But does this mean that bullying actually causes suicide? This is an incredibly complex question. There seems to be a lot of confusion about the relationship between bullying and suicide. News stories focusing on the tragic suicide of young children and teenagers often point to instances of bullying. The focus on these individual stories can easily lead us to believe that there must be a causal relationship between bullying and suicide. After all, we keep reading stories in which bullying occurs and a suicide follows.

These deaths are all horrible tragedies, and the bullying these children experienced is unacceptable. But we do have to be careful about how we report on the relationship between these phenomena. When news stories report on a suicide preceded by instances of bullying, the two concepts become inextricably linked in readers’ minds and the conclusion that follows—that bullying leads to suicide—may not be entirely scientifically accurate.

A proper understanding of the relationship between bullying and suicide is essential. If we believe that bullying is a sole cause of suicide, then we might spend a lot of time and effort on bullying prevention strategies as suicide prevention, only to find that bullying is only one of many factors that increase suicide risk and a focus on bullying alone is not enough to avert more suicides. In other words, our focus may become misplaced and we may ignore other important causes that must be addressed in order to truly lower the risk of suicide.

Focusing only on bullying as the cause of suicide also implies that a young person’s suicide is entirely the fault of his or her schoolmates. Instilling guilt in children following the death by suicide of one of their classmates is not an acceptable approach to dealing with the aftermath of a suicide or of preventing future suicides. Stopping bullying is essential, but blaming children for an acquaintance’s death is not the proper approach.

So what do we know about the relationship between the two? As stated earlier, we do know that involvement in bullying, either as a victim or a perpetrator, raises the risk of suicide. In addition, even witnessing bullying can lead to feelings of helplessness and poor school connectedness, which can be a risk factor for mental health issues (although it is not a sole cause). On the other hand, most youth involved in bullying do not display suicidal behavior, even though bullying may be one of many risk factors of suicidal behavior.

The mantra that “association is not causality” cannot be repeated often enough because in instances like the connection between bullying and suicide it is persistently ignored. Journalists must be taught to take greater care in how they report on correlations between two phenomena so that their readers do not infer that one is the direct and unique cause of the other.

With the relationship between bullying and suicide remaining complex and in some ways unknown, it is essential that schools not focus narrowly on bullying prevention as a sole means to prevent suicide. Rather schools should be focusing more broadly on helping students build and cultivate protective factors. These kinds of interventions hold the greatest promise for building a foundation of resilience among young adults everywhere.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/denying-the-grave/201902/does-bullying-cause-suicide

Also:

Overall, we found that youth involved in bullying in any capacity – both bullies and victims of bullying – were more likely to think about and attempt suicide than youth who were not involved in bullying. In short, bullying is bad for everyone involved.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bullying-and-suicide-whats-the-connection/

As an example:

Seth, Sam and Samantha are all equal in age. They all suffer from the same type of mental illness, namely depression. Seth is a bully, Sam is a victim of bullying, and Samantha is not at all involved in bullying. All three kill themselves.

Did bullying contribute to their deaths?



By the way you were very subtly moving goal posts ("bad for their mental state") and presenting a simplistic premise (struggling with "mental illness", but not saying anything about what the type or severity of mental illness) - but the conclusion is the same: Without knowing more we cannot say that bullying contributed to their deaths, i.e. that there was a causation between bullying and suicide (apart for Samantha, where bullying was obviously not a factor... as far as we know. Was she a witness to bullying? Did that have an impact on her?)


Back to Holowka:

- A man with a long history of mental illness (a lifetime battling mood and personality disorders)
- himself a survivor of abuse
- allegedly with a long history of abusive behaviour, is publically accused of abuse and sexual assault.

Did the accusations contribute to his suicide?

There's simply no way to know, given the information we have.

Of course there’s no way to know for certain. But we can make an educated guess about the likelihood of whether or not events that would logically cause intense feelings of despair in a person would have contributed to their suicide. If I have stated that these events caused his suicide, then I was incorrect. But to simply shrug our shoulders and say “Well, we can’t know for absolute certain that a big source of misery that recently came into his life influenced his decisions” is also incorrect.

I do not think that these accusations caused his suicide, whether they’re true or false. I think that these accusations, along with the events swiftly following them, were likely a contributing factor in his decision to commit suicide.

[Ors Might]

If it makes you any happier, I totally agree with what you are saying. Demonizing people on either side is not going to do the trick, nor is "removing" or "cancelling" people. Get to the bottom of the allegation, prove it's true/false. Either way, this should be investigated by the police and brought to trial there, not on Twitter. No evidence, no prosecution. Evidence, prosecution. It really is as simple as that, and calling someone an abuser online should mean nothing. At the same time, accusing a potential victim of lying right off of the bat is damaging and scummy. By all means be sceptical and question details - whenever a public figure is accused of anything, for example, I reserve judgement until any proof is given.

As this thread shows, it's completely optional for That Lying Bitch ZOË QUINN.

If you chose to ignore all the posters in this thread not doing that, sure, I could see how you’d come to that conclusion.

[Ermarian]

Now for the subjective part. Eileen's announcement of his passing used his death as a soapbox to defend Zoe from "harassment", with a vague implication that her brother was abusive to Zoe, without any evidence besides her own word (which given that Eileen's twitter bio has "feminist" in it, kinda makes sense...)

what a trash-fire this whole thread is

okay for the people who seem to be incapable of believing any of the allegations because they were made by women, who obviously always lie, here is a write-up by Scott Benson of what the people working with him went through: https://medium.com/@bombsfall/alec-2618dc1e23e

[Ors Might]

Now for the subjective part. Eileen's announcement of his passing used his death as a soapbox to defend Zoe from "harassment", with a vague implication that her brother was abusive to Zoe, without any evidence besides her own word (which given that Eileen's twitter bio has "feminist" in it, kinda makes sense...)

what a trash-fire this whole thread is

okay for the people who seem to be incapable of believing any of the allegations because they were made by women, who obviously always lie, here is a write-up by Scott Benson of what the people working with him went through: https://medium.com/@bombsfall/alec-2618dc1e23e

I’ve not seen anyone in this thread claiming that women always lie. Could you please point us to these posts?

[Gravlen]

Well...

Bullying is a truly horrific phenomenon that has a wide array of terrible consequences. One of these terrible consequences is an increased risk of mental health issues and even suicide, for both the person bullied and the person perpetrating the bullying.

But does this mean that bullying actually causes suicide? This is an incredibly complex question. There seems to be a lot of confusion about the relationship between bullying and suicide. News stories focusing on the tragic suicide of young children and teenagers often point to instances of bullying. The focus on these individual stories can easily lead us to believe that there must be a causal relationship between bullying and suicide. After all, we keep reading stories in which bullying occurs and a suicide follows.

These deaths are all horrible tragedies, and the bullying these children experienced is unacceptable. But we do have to be careful about how we report on the relationship between these phenomena. When news stories report on a suicide preceded by instances of bullying, the two concepts become inextricably linked in readers’ minds and the conclusion that follows—that bullying leads to suicide—may not be entirely scientifically accurate.

A proper understanding of the relationship between bullying and suicide is essential. If we believe that bullying is a sole cause of suicide, then we might spend a lot of time and effort on bullying prevention strategies as suicide prevention, only to find that bullying is only one of many factors that increase suicide risk and a focus on bullying alone is not enough to avert more suicides. In other words, our focus may become misplaced and we may ignore other important causes that must be addressed in order to truly lower the risk of suicide.

Focusing only on bullying as the cause of suicide also implies that a young person’s suicide is entirely the fault of his or her schoolmates. Instilling guilt in children following the death by suicide of one of their classmates is not an acceptable approach to dealing with the aftermath of a suicide or of preventing future suicides. Stopping bullying is essential, but blaming children for an acquaintance’s death is not the proper approach.

So what do we know about the relationship between the two? As stated earlier, we do know that involvement in bullying, either as a victim or a perpetrator, raises the risk of suicide. In addition, even witnessing bullying can lead to feelings of helplessness and poor school connectedness, which can be a risk factor for mental health issues (although it is not a sole cause). On the other hand, most youth involved in bullying do not display suicidal behavior, even though bullying may be one of many risk factors of suicidal behavior.

The mantra that “association is not causality” cannot be repeated often enough because in instances like the connection between bullying and suicide it is persistently ignored. Journalists must be taught to take greater care in how they report on correlations between two phenomena so that their readers do not infer that one is the direct and unique cause of the other.

With the relationship between bullying and suicide remaining complex and in some ways unknown, it is essential that schools not focus narrowly on bullying prevention as a sole means to prevent suicide. Rather schools should be focusing more broadly on helping students build and cultivate protective factors. These kinds of interventions hold the greatest promise for building a foundation of resilience among young adults everywhere.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/denying-the-grave/201902/does-bullying-cause-suicide

Also:

Overall, we found that youth involved in bullying in any capacity – both bullies and victims of bullying – were more likely to think about and attempt suicide than youth who were not involved in bullying. In short, bullying is bad for everyone involved.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bullying-and-suicide-whats-the-connection/

As an example:

Seth, Sam and Samantha are all equal in age. They all suffer from the same type of mental illness, namely depression. Seth is a bully, Sam is a victim of bullying, and Samantha is not at all involved in bullying. All three kill themselves.

Did bullying contribute to their deaths?



By the way you were very subtly moving goal posts ("bad for their mental state") and presenting a simplistic premise (struggling with "mental illness", but not saying anything about what the type or severity of mental illness) - but the conclusion is the same: Without knowing more we cannot say that bullying contributed to their deaths, i.e. that there was a causation between bullying and suicide (apart for Samantha, where bullying was obviously not a factor... as far as we know. Was she a witness to bullying? Did that have an impact on her?)


Back to Holowka:

- A man with a long history of mental illness (a lifetime battling mood and personality disorders)
- himself a survivor of abuse
- allegedly with a long history of abusive behaviour, is publically accused of abuse and sexual assault.

Did the accusations contribute to his suicide?

There's simply no way to know, given the information we have.

Of course there’s no way to know for certain.

Then you cannot say that the accusations contributed.

But we can make an educated guess about the likelihood of whether or not events that would logically cause intense feelings of despair in a person would have contributed to their suicide.

First of all, you can't make an educated guess, since you don't know the facts, including his mental state, his history, and his current state of mind. You're making an uneducated guess. That is, you're simply speculating.

And, you're speculating based on your own emotions, because what "logically" causes certain feelings in you don't necessarily cause the same feelings in someone else - in particular someone who's mentally ill.

If I have stated that these events caused his suicide, then I was incorrect. But to simply shrug our shoulders and say “Well, we can’t know for absolute certain that a big source of misery that recently came into his life influenced his decisions” is also incorrect.

Wait, now you've gone from "we can't know for certain" to saying it's incorrect to say we can't know for certain. You have to make up your mind, though one of these options is simply wrong. (Hint: the latter)

I do not think that these accusations caused his suicide, whether they’re true or false. I think that these accusations, along with the events swiftly following them, were likely a contributing factor in his decision to commit suicide.

Yes, you think that, based on your own feelings and no evidence. That's your prerogative.

[Hirota]

Now for the subjective part. Eileen's announcement of his passing used his death as a soapbox to defend Zoe from "harassment", with a vague implication that her brother was abusive to Zoe, without any evidence besides her own word (which given that Eileen's twitter bio has "feminist" in it, kinda makes sense...)

what a trash-fire this whole thread is

So you decided to try and raise the standard by completely failing to read. Well done.

[Neutraligon]

Now for the subjective part. Eileen's announcement of his passing used his death as a soapbox to defend Zoe from "harassment", with a vague implication that her brother was abusive to Zoe, without any evidence besides her own word (which given that Eileen's twitter bio has "feminist" in it, kinda makes sense...)

what a trash-fire this whole thread is

okay for the people who seem to be incapable of believing any of the allegations because they were made by women, who obviously always lie, here is a write-up by Scott Benson of what the people working with him went through: https://medium.com/@bombsfall/alec-2618dc1e23e

That was a hard read

[Gravlen]

Now for the subjective part. Eileen's announcement of his passing used his death as a soapbox to defend Zoe from "harassment", with a vague implication that her brother was abusive to Zoe, without any evidence besides her own word (which given that Eileen's twitter bio has "feminist" in it, kinda makes sense...)

what a trash-fire this whole thread is

okay for the people who seem to be incapable of believing any of the allegations because they were made by women, who obviously always lie, here is a write-up by Scott Benson of what the people working with him went through: https://medium.com/@bombsfall/alec-2618dc1e23e

It's a sad read, and some bits stand out. Like these:

In the summer of 2015 I began having panic attacks just about every day, out of nowhere. I’d never really had that before. I started having sleep paralysis, which was also new. Alec had been a nonentity on the project for a while, and was straight up abusive when he was. The guy I’d met in 2013 had transformed into this nightmare to be around. Just pure toxicity. More threats of suicide contingent on mine or someone else’s actions. He’d say something cryptic about that and then disappear, popping back up sometimes days later, to our relief. Made it hard to talk to the guy about his actions. He’d just disappear again, with the promise that if something happened to him it was our fault. And beyond that, we were now in a position where we were on the hook for a videogame, and I’d stopped whatever career I had been building elsewhere to do it, and Bethany and I were going more and more into debt despite our publisher’s miraculous ability to find us funding. And because of this I had to keep a sunny face about the entire thing in public. Alec held our future in his hands. And he’d become a nightmare.

Like a lot of people who do this, I don’t think he ever consciously did any of this in some knowingly evil way. He was aware that some of his paranoia was due to conditions he suffered from. That’s understandable. But that didn’t stop him from behaving the way he did. This is how he could physically menace people while still thinking he was under constant threat. This is how he could entrap multiple women over the years and still think they were all out to get him. When I’ve talked to people this week a thing that’s been common was his threats to commit suicide if someone didn’t do what he wanted. If someone held him responsible for his actions. Several people messaged me to say that they knew about him, and apologized for never telling me. Now I find myself writing this. Too late. Whatever Alec felt in his heart about what he did to people, what actually made it out into the world was often abusive. Alec is gone. What he did to people remains.

Over the course of a week a lot of this became public knowledge. People who had been abused by Alec began talking to one another. I was one of those people. I didn’t know how to talk about it. I’m talking about it now. I didn’t know about the depth of what he’d put other people through.

To tie it back to what I've been saying above: If he had carried out his threats to kill himself earlier, it would be wrong to say that people not doing what he wanted had contributed to his suicide. It would clearly have been about his mental illness, and not what the people around him did or didn't do.

[Gormwood]

Now for the subjective part. Eileen's announcement of his passing used his death as a soapbox to defend Zoe from "harassment", with a vague implication that her brother was abusive to Zoe, without any evidence besides her own word (which given that Eileen's twitter bio has "feminist" in it, kinda makes sense...)

what a trash-fire this whole thread is

okay for the people who seem to be incapable of believing any of the allegations because they were made by women, who obviously always lie, here is a write-up by Scott Benson of what the people working with him went through: https://medium.com/@bombsfall/alec-2618dc1e23e

Scott Benson is an SJW white knight hoping a feminist will sleep with him. /s

[Ors Might]

Of course there’s no way to know for certain.

Then you cannot say that the accusations contributed.

But we can make an educated guess about the likelihood of whether or not events that would logically cause intense feelings of despair in a person would have contributed to their suicide.

First of all, you can't make an educated guess, since you don't know the facts, including his mental state, his history, and his current state of mind. You're making an uneducated guess. That is, you're simply speculating.

And, you're speculating based on your own emotions, because what "logically" causes certain feelings in you don't necessarily cause the same feelings in someone else - in particular someone who's mentally ill.

If I have stated that these events caused his suicide, then I was incorrect. But to simply shrug our shoulders and say “Well, we can’t know for absolute certain that a big source of misery that recently came into his life influenced his decisions” is also incorrect.

Wait, now you've gone from "we can't know for certain" to saying it's incorrect to say we can't know for certain. You have to make up your mind, though one of these options is simply wrong. (Hint: the latter)

I do not think that these accusations caused his suicide, whether they’re true or false. I think that these accusations, along with the events swiftly following them, were likely a contributing factor in his decision to commit suicide.

Yes, you think that, based on your own feelings and no evidence. That's your prerogative.

I can say that there’s a likelihood that the accusations, along with everything else that followed, did little to help him. Christ, it’s almost as if horrible experience influence people or something, even if they aren’t the sole or main reason why anybody does anything. Odd that.

And of course I’m speculating. That’s what these threads amount to on topics like this.

[The Derpy Democratic Republic Of Herp]

^ This is a good point.

Not really. CALM and other MRM backed mental health charities have shown that most mental health services are gynocentric and there are institutional barriers to men obtaining help from them as well as benefiting from that help. While it's useful in some cases, in others it isn't. That's already true for women, it's even more true for men.

In this case you've got mental illness stacked on top of alleged questionable behavior, the loss of a job, public harassment and humiliation, and so on.

His sister contends he was trying to get better. What that entails is up in the air.

I don't think so, those investigations might have been conformation biased.

Mental health affects everyone and needs to be treated to everyone.

[Galloism]

Not really. CALM and other MRM backed mental health charities have shown that most mental health services are gynocentric and there are institutional barriers to men obtaining help from them as well as benefiting from that help. While it's useful in some cases, in others it isn't. That's already true for women, it's even more true for men.

In this case you've got mental illness stacked on top of alleged questionable behavior, the loss of a job, public harassment and humiliation, and so on.

His sister contends he was trying to get better. What that entails is up in the air.

I don't think so, those investigations might have been conformation biased.

Mental health affects everyone and needs to be treated to everyone.

Indeed true, but mental health services are tailored to how the average woman needs to receive that healthcare, which is different than the average man. This means typical men and atypical women are shortchanged by the system.

This disproportionately affects men negatively.

(There's also social shame factors, etc, that also disproportionately affect men)

Just as if we didn't screen for breast cancer as a policy because men rarely get it, this would disproportionately affect women, not offering project type therapy as a policy disproportionately affects men.

[The Derpy Democratic Republic Of Herp]

I don't think so, those investigations might have been conformation biased.

Mental health affects everyone and needs to be treated to everyone.

Indeed true, but mental health services are tailored to how the average woman needs to receive that healthcare, which is different than the average man. This means typical men and atypical women are shortchanged by the system.

This disproportionately affects men negatively.

(There's also social shame factors, etc, that also disproportionately affect men)

Just as if we didn't screen for breast cancer as a policy because men rarely get it, this would disproportionately affect women, not offering project type therapy as a policy disproportionately affects men.

That mostly is a fault of the stigma around mental health. It's a side affect of the idea that "Manly men don't cry, don't feel sad!".

Again, stigma and a backwards idea of the "popular" men concept that holds back men from getting the healthcare they need.

While work should be done to make it more accessible to everyone, the ideas of men being emotionless and not ok to feel sadness needs to be destroyed.

[Vassenor]

Indeed true, but mental health services are tailored to how the average woman needs to receive that healthcare, which is different than the average man. This means typical men and atypical women are shortchanged by the system.

This disproportionately affects men negatively.

(There's also social shame factors, etc, that also disproportionately affect men)

Just as if we didn't screen for breast cancer as a policy because men rarely get it, this would disproportionately affect women, not offering project type therapy as a policy disproportionately affects men.

That mostly is a fault of the stigma around mental health. It's a side affect of the idea that "Manly men don't cry, don't feel sad!".

Again, stigma and a backwards idea of the "popular" men concept that holds back men from getting the healthcare they need.

While work should be done to make it more accessible to everyone, the ideas of men being emotionless and not ok to feel sadness needs to be destroyed.

And those ideas are what we mean when we say that toxic masculinity harms men too.