A friend of mine sent me this article, I imagine I'm breaking copyright by pasting the whole thing here, but it's worth it I think. Most intriguing and disturbing. Does anyone here have a livejournal account at all? Hmm... Cincinnati Girl Committed to Mental Institution For ‘Schizophrenic’ Online Diaries. April 11, 2002 Posted: 9:07 PM EDT (0107 GMT) Cincinnati, Ohio (CNN) –Sarah Currie (17) was yesterday committed to The St Luke Mental Facility in downtown Cincinnati after her parents discovered disturbing Internet diaries on Sarah’s computer hard drive. The diaries, which had been posted on the popular ‘Livejournal’ site, featured two characters made up by Sarah, and, according to Dr. Adrian Yates, her psychoanalyst, these characters represent two conflicting sides of Sarah’s personality: “What we find most interesting here,” said Yates “is that Sarah not only posted two radically different diaries on the site, but also had the two different characters arguing and debating with each other over what had been written. This is really indicative of her own internal struggle, and the diaries are a kind of cry for help.” Sarah started the two diaries almost simultaneously in October of last year, and though she only updated them sporadically, the diaries contained everything from suicide threats to vivid confessions about how she hates her parents. One of the characters, ‘Louise’ whose invented home was in Leeds, England – the place where Sarah was born – would post about hating school, and feeling constantly alienated, while the other ‘Claire’ whose invented home was in New York, would update her diary with tales of not being able to get a boyfriend or worries about her weight. The discovery that Louise and Claire were one and the same was made by 19 year old Programming student Adam Jackson: “I have a livejournal myself, so I’m on the site quite a lot, I get a kick out of reading other people’s diaries and trying to help them out if I can – I first came across Sarah’s stuff with her diary for Louise and the two of them - Claire and Louise were having this argument about whose pain was more important – I made the point that they were in different situations and should try to help each other instead of just fighting, but they just ignored me. I didn’t think much of it at the time, people are always arguing on there, but then a week or so later I noticed a different post, from Louise on someone else’s journal, but it was typed in a completely different style to the one she had used in her own journal and in the argument with Claire – the style was closer to Claire’s, Claire used a more traditional method of typing, with proper capital letters and stuff whereas Louise was looser, and with really bad spelling. I thought this was a bit weird, so I did some digging on both Claire and Louise and found that the two IP’s matched, so I was pretty sure then that they were the same person. From the IP I got an email address, which belonged to Sarah’s dad and, well, I don’t know if it’s really proof that she’s crazy, but the doctors know that better than I do.” This is the first case of its kind recorded, and treatment has so far been slow. Yates: “Sarah seems very reluctant to recognise her own illness, in fact she denies it even exists. This is quite typical of schizophrenic patients though, they might seem totally normal in some situations, Sarah herself acted perfectly normally at school and with her parents, it was only her internet behaviour that showed her true inner turmoil. At the moment she is insisting that the livejournals were just jokes, and that the reason she did it was to show how stupid the people who use the site are, but I think once we get past this we’ll be able to make some real progress with her. “ The site, which has become a popular cultural phenomenon among young people started up in March 1999 to instant acclaim. Site founder Brad Fitzpatrick had this to say about Sarah’s case: “Obviously we’re all very concerned for Sarah’s well being and I hope she makes a swift recovery. I’m glad no one is blaming us for the incident, since we have come under fire in the past for the confessional nature of some of the diaries. But in terms of what we set out to do, the site has been a great success, there’s a real community atmosphere of people helping each other solve problems, and occasionally it’s just a good place to vent as well!” There has been some consternation from human rights groups over the decision to keep Sarah on full time at St Luke’s, but Sarah’s parents Laura (46) and Alan Currie (48), fully support the decision. They issued this statement yesterday: “At the moment we’re still slightly shocked by the discovery, but we want everyone to know that we love our daughter very much and we’re not going to let her illness tear us apart. Together we’re going to beat this thing. And to people who have been questioning our decision, we appreciate your concern, but we only want what’s best for our daughter.” Blimey - Kieran _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+