Sinister: I wouldn't normally do this, but...

[Kieran Devaney]

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 at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at 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!                +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+