HI @utopia 

I guess the problem about thinking carefully about what you write is multifold, it can lead to people censoring themselves and not feeling like they can express distress or strong emotion. It is also important to recognise that people might not be able to carefully vet things when really distressed - or whether they should? If so how should they vet them? Should they change what they say to make it factually inaccurate? It's a really slippery slope. I think its very, very dangerous territory in this context.

Unfortunately what the moderators aren't making clear is that they have been interpreting people actually reporting their own experiences of abuse and harm and asking for help and support in seeking safe help or calling for change in the system, or letting people know about help available (even really official help like the national hotline for abuse of people with disabilities!) as being 'against help seeking behaviour' and causing people further trauma by making people's attempts to talk about trauma and distress experienced in services disappear - often without warning or notification. This is really scary for me as a person who has experienced so much harm and attempts to silence that harm.

On the other hand I don't understand why it's considered to 'discourage help seeking'.

It's not criticism in the sense of 'being mean' it's reporting serious harm and abuse and discussing the impacts and the risks. It's seeking help, it's talking about what help is (or isn't) out there - it's raising problems that a person is seeking help for. I'd be far more concerned about preventing that: after all help seeking is supposed to be safe, if I learn that its  not safe to go to a particular service, and that prevents me from going to that service and instead seeking a safer one is that 'discouraging help seeking'?

If I don't seek help from that service and doing so would have landed me in an abusive and dangerous situation is that a bad thing?

There is an assumption that 'abuse doesn't happen to most' or 'abuse doesn't happen to all' makes it ok to ban talking about abuse because there is some perceived (slim or otherwise) chance that a person won't be abused in a particular service: or they might not consider the behaviour abuse.

The latter is particularly tricky: what if the person has been harmed and they don't know it yet? Eg. they might not know what psychological abuse is or how it has affected them? Does that make the abuse ok?

I guess a final issue - that's a really important one is that talking about harm and abuse creates the change we need - it is the sunshine that has long been accepted as an important part of social change.

Beyond Blue just launched a new life coach program which requires no medical referral and is completely nonmedical and doesn't call anyone 'mentally ill' or say they have 'mental health issues' I am guessing this is happening exactly because of all the people talking about how they don't seek support because they don't want to be drugged, labelled and medicalised and how harmful they have found that.

Talking about abuse and harm creates change which creates more services that cater to more non-harmful approaches for more different people with different experiences - so it makes no sense to me to say it is  discouraging help seeking rather than making it more possible and safe. What scares me much, much more is that the real agenda here is to silence people talking about abuse - to keep that abuse hidden and actually prevent people from seeking help for it. Sadly that's really common. Really common. So terribly common it breaks my heart. 

Sushine doesn't discourage help seeking it IS seeking help. Silencing abuse isn't encouraging help seeking - it is literally and directly preventing people who are currently seeking help by speaking out about their abuse and asking 'what do I do?' from seeking it.

It's also quite abusive to silence people who speak about abuse so I really don't know what sane is thinking! but I dearly hope they stop, because it's so scary that they are entertaining this reasoning that it's ok to silence asking for help in speaking about abuse in services - why should we not be allowed to seek that help or discuss the need or it or the resources available?