Don't worry. I took no offense at all. Instead, I felt you gave me an opportunity to explain further about Bipolar Disorder.

About your sons' friend who keeps calling for their support: There is nothing wrong with telling your sons that it is okay to set boundaries with their friend. Setting boundaries is an important skill for all young people to know and it is appropriate to treat their friend not much differently than they would anyone else.

You might help to educate them on mental health issues. If you think it is appropriate you might also mention to them the serious warning signs of possible suicide.

1) Does the person feel completely hopeless.

2) Does the person feel or act helpless.

3) Does the person talk about hurting herself.

4) If the person actually has a mentioned or threatened a detailed plan for suicide, then this is a real danger point.

You do not say how old your sons are, but if they are still in their teens or younger, they need to know that some emergencies are better handled by adults.

Also, leaving the Virginia Tech killings aside, it is terribly common for young people to write about suicide. It is usually nothing more than a flirtation with the idea.

I still remember a part of a poem I wrote in my teens. It was truly awful. "Come heartless water! Take life without remorse!" I lived nowhere near an ocean or lake. Every publication I sent it too rejected it. Good thing, huh?

Bauer's article is proving so important to some people. I hope you sort things out for your son.

At first I did not know what HFA was, so I Googled it, and after getting past something called the Home Finance Association, scanned to High Functioning Autism. This is what I think of as Aspergers. I know this is part of what they call the Autism Spectrum. However, I don't know much about Autism.

It would be great if someone who does could enlighten us a bit.

I also wonder if there might not be many undiagnosed cases of HFA. I have certainly known people who have this, but they can function so well intellectually usually that I think there could be many more people like your son and Bauer's son who may have this and not even know it themselves. They would certainly want to avoid such drugs.

That is why the article, while it is interesting to many of us, may be absolutely crucial for others to know about.

I like your advice to the LW. If she can get all the sisters together, it may open things up to useful discussion on other fronts. I suspect it will work best if all sisters can avoid any attitude of confrontation. Perhaps they would enjoy remembering their childhoods together. Who knows what they might learn?

I want to explain to you my distaste for Freud. While I recognize the contribution he made (Who cannot?!), much of my feelings about him come from a book I read years ago called "The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory," by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Masson argued that early in his career Freud changed his ideas on the origins of hysteria in order to gain more professional acceptance.

I can’t say I necessarily feel that Masson’s case against Freud was completely substantiated. However, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Freud was confronted with women’s personal testimony of sexual abuse and chose to see it as fantasy.

and I am confused both by the LW and most of the replies. I can only come to two conclusions:

1) Thank God I spilled water on my keyboard two days ago and couldn't participate in the farce sooner.

2) Mercury must be retrograde.

Owe money - This means someone has offered one money that one has agreed in advance to pay back. Only under these circumstances can one actually owe money.

Bad faith move # 1 - Taking money from someone when you know that they assume that their giving you the money will elicit certain behavior or feelings even though you have no intention of following through. Note that this is not the same as an actual loan.

Bad faith move # 2 - Giving someone money while hoping to elicit an obligation of behavior or feelings without explicitly stating that you expect such behavior or feelings to be given.

Gold digger - Very peculiar term, which is almost never applied to men even though they may act just like women who "merit" the term. Usually it is applied to women who live in unequal financial circumstances with men without benefit of marriage. (The fact that women make less money than men still for doing the same work or same type of work seems never to abrogate this curse.) Marriage usually ends the curse -- unless one party is an millionaire octogenarian named Marshall and the other is a tall blond named Anna Nicole. Note well, in such circumstances, even death does not end the curse.

Poverty, mental health problems, and inequality - Things about which Salon readers/responders have great compassion, in the abstract.

Poverty, mental health problems, and inequality - Things about which many Salon readers lack all compassion when confronted with them in reality. I guess you could call these readers/blamers compassionate conservatives.

Borderline Personality Disorder - A problem that my mother has. She tried to kill me when I was eleven. Also a problem that a good friend of mine has. She saved my life three years ago.

Diagnostic and Statisical Manual - A book that can be wielded like a weapon. In the hands of the clever, it could be used to diagnose absolutely everyone in this thread of suffering from some psychological problem.

Human - Creatures who make mistakes.

Mecury retrograde - Alleged to cause all sorts of communications mishaps. Oh, the other hand, Mars retrograde is alleged to cause people to be generally nasty to one another.

So if Mercury isn't retrograde yet, is Mars?