I was once dragged to a hospital by police because they were looking for a drug smuggler that was not me. They told hospital staff I was a druggie criminal with drugs up my ass, as I sat there in cuffs.

It is incredibly hard to overcome such accusation by someone in authority. Nurses cursed me, touched me without consent, and several doctors examined me. They ultimately found nothing, and noted no intoxication, but noted in my medical record that they think i am a smuggler anyway, with no explanation as to why.

I am now in medical debt for a non-existent 'overdose' bill that notes no intoxication...

I imagine as soon as some official person insists the identity isn't yours, just as multiple doctors wouldn't believe despite all evidence to contrary, they won't believe you.

I have a cousin who is paranoid schizophrenic. He makes all kinds of wild claims about all sorts of things: family abuse, screwed over by employers/landlords, beaten up by the police for no reason, the people living in the crawl space are poisoning him, etc, etc... Many of them are provably false e.g. those family members didn't live there at the time of the allegation, the body cam clearly shows him charging the police and then trying to grab their guns while they try to wrestle him into handcuffs, nobody in the crawl space, etc. The problem is that it'd take a full time detective to track down all his various claims. It's very sad that as a vulnerable person he probably is sometimes taken advantage of by people, but at the same time he's never been compliant with medicine and therapy for more than a couple months at a time, despite extensive support. It's kind of a no win situation.

>I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.

(Un)fortunately, there is a quite famous experiment

>The Rosenhan experiment or Thud experiment was an experiment regarding the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions and feigned hallucinations in order to be accepted, but acted normally from then onward. Each was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and given antipsychotic medication.

This is how divorce goes now based on my experience. The legal system is not setup to handle these sorts of problems well and leaves the innocent to deal with the fall out of bad actors and lawyers who empower them.

This won’t be corrected until there are penalties for political, legal, and administrative professionals who don’t do their due diligence.

> or assert that he had tried to warn the F.B.I. in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks

That’s a very long shot but I now want someone to verify this claim too, in case he was also telling the truth.

"I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else."

Isn't that everybody now? Credibility is a strange thing in the age of social media.

Just because you're crazy doesn't mean you're wrong.

This is just the system getting rid of (in their eyes) an undesirable. The truth doesn't really matter in these cases unless you have tens of thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer to plead your case.

Having grown up in the Deep South, I feel like every single person in the justice system from police to judge make decisions about you based on how you look and subconsciously decide to not believe facts or allow weak facts to have more weight. Nothing about this question seems outrageous to me whatsoever. And I think that’s the shocking part here.

> I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.

Likely a metric fuck ton. The perceived quality of one's character plays an outsized role in getting people to believe you. Serial killers figured that out a long time ago.

“problematic” being a rather charitable term here, I think

I wonder the same but I also firmly believe it's a useless and unproductive thing to worry about.

I mean, I wonder how many gold coins are laying in the forest? Surely there are many, and you can find ample news stories of people locating them out there, but I can confidently tell you that if you assembled a team an combed the forest for a year, maybe you would find one object worthy of a news story. And definitely you would wasted thousands of man hours that could have produced far far far more than what the object is worth.

I'm not sure that being "problematic" was the issue here; it sounds more like they might have thought he wasn't fully sane. I could imagine thinking that someone fully believed what they said about their identity in the same way they believed that they could have stopped 9/11 if people had listened to them beforehand. The issue isn't thinking they have bad takes or unsavory opinions, but that they have trouble distinguishing reality from delusions.

This is how these institutions work. If someone behaves erratically, holds unconventional beliefs or just doesn't present themselves in the "right" way, they can be dismissed entirely

The literal moral of "The boy who cries Wolf"? Liars are not believed even when they tell the truth.

... probably all of them.