A remarkable depiction of how status (celebrity) seeking and stigma interact to destroy people's lives.....
One way editors may indicate the presence of a mood or personality disorder is to copy a snippet of code that displays a small box on their userpage. “This user suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder,” one box reads, in white text on a black background; some 30 editors have chosen to include it. “This user lives with major depressive disorder,” reads a blue box accompanied by a bulbous blue teardrop, which is used by around 20 people. These mental health boxes are an old trend, however, and are rarely seen on new editors’ userpages.
Buried deep in the site is an essay named ‘Wikipedia Is Not Therapy.’ It is not an official policy document or guideline; a banner at the top of the page notes that it may represent either a widespread norm or a minority viewpoint. First created in March 2006, the essay has been alternately expanded and truncated over the last decade, and debated in the accompanying talk page. As of August 2016, its second paragraph reads, “The phrase ‘Wikipedia is not therapy’ should not be taken to imply that editors with mental disorders are incapable of making constructive contributions to Wikipedia, or of collaborating with other Wikipedians. Editors with disabilities should not be banned from Wikipedia simply because of their disabilities.” At the bottom of the page, the essay concludes: “Wikipedia offers users the chance to practice being sensible, sane, and productive, but one’s psychological state is not an acceptable excuse for disrupting the encyclopedia.”
“A lot of people will bandy about these essays as if they have some form of authority, because Wikipedia is really a lot like a role-playing game,” says Scott Martin, a London-based archivist who has been an editor since 2002. “People take on roles and they’re competing for recognition.” To “win the game,” as Martin puts it, editors might try to write a featured article; create a page that doesn’t get deleted; or influence policy of the site. Essays such as ‘Not Therapy’ fall in the “influence policy” category. They only accrue authority when other people refer to them.
The ‘Not Therapy’ concept has proved to be unusually sticky since its creation. “I’ve seen this essay mentioned in the sense that there might be a discussion about someone behaving in a weird way,” says Martin. “Someone will pop up and say, ‘It’s not therapy — just block them!’ Where is the empathy? Where is the spark of feeling for your fellow person?”
At the bottom of his essay, which he published shortly after Elliott’s email to the public mailing list, is a list of things for online collaborators to keep in mind. Number six notes that mental health carries a powerful stigma, and that the more open we are about it, the less it weighs all of us down. Before he hangs up, he says, “From what I’ve seen of the highly active community, there’s no expectation that all of us are ‘normal.’ I mean, we obsessively, passionately, idealistically — and often in a contrarian fashion — spend our free time writing an encyclopedia. I don’t think any of us assumes ‘normality’ is the standard of a Wikipedian.”