The thing is, Hesperis made sure NOT to see an LSW. By posting here, she availed herself of what is more closely approximated by the term "pastoral care." It isn't religious care, it isn't proselytizing, it's compassionate care of the person. She cast us all in that role. Some of us have experience with it.

In pastoral care casework, it's considered a courtesy to others who do that work, to let it be known when it seems an individual may be abusing the system. At this time of year, for instance, xeroxed "personal" letters go around to all the churches with a hard luck story and a request for some specified form of assistance. Then it turns out, when one tries to visit the home where "the heat has been disconnected," for instance, to bring blankets and a check for the heat, lo and behold! The whole place is ablaze with bright lights and the smoke of a toasty fire is pouring out the chimney.

People in the helping professions will tell you, when REAL help is needed, the people who really need usually ask in person, and within a relationship of trust. And with a little looking into it-- to see what other help might be possible for instance, not to bust them-- you find that the reality is consistent with the stories.

Now I don't know about you, but I find it hard to label it "consistent" when one says she is too sick to function-- and yet no one is taking that person to the ER for life support-- and meanwhile the person is writing pages and pages of energetic prose all about how they are being ignored.

I don't doubt Heperis has health challenges, but I have seen her scarf down a hotdog in the noonday sun while complaining that she can ONLY eat such and such, and that the sun is poison to her. OK, that isn't from a PM or from the casework, it's an example of someone who is bullshitting either herself or the crowd of sympathetic people scrambling to give her the narrow band of shade and to proffer the required food-- and somewhere in the mix you see real clearly that this is someone who craves attention more than vegetarian food in the shade. And someone who thrives on a hotdog in the sun, as in fact it turned out.

So no, I will not quote PMs, but I am not going to tell my guts to shut up and be quiet when I see someone take a whole bunch of nice people down a garden path, without at least suggesting they take a closer look for themselves, before committing resources.

~Susan