About every other day, we get a question from a schizophrenic person. By "schizophrenic", I don't mean crackpots or people making elementary mistakes, I mean people with an actual mental disorder. For example, in their posts, they may mention being formally diagnosed with the disease, hearing voices, hallucinating, and so on. Others seem to be in the first stages of developing the disease and report milder symptoms. My impression is that we get more of these people than other SE sites, because a common symptom of schizophrenia is becoming convinced you have a theory of everything.
To preserve some semblance of privacy, I won't be linking any examples.
We always close and downvote their questions, because don't make any sense, and then the Community bot deletes them a while later. Sometimes they receive rather mean comments.
This is in accordance with our established results, but do we have some moral obligation to do better? I fear that downvotes and nasty comments might just make their situation worse. Perhaps it's possible to make a standard "get psychiatric help" comment with some useful links? Have any other SE sites or forums dealt with this?
Edit in response to comments:
No, I'm not diagnosing people as schizophrenic just because they spell badly. I'm referring to posts where people explicitly refer to such a diagnosis. In one particularly memorable post a few months ago, a guy mentioned that his father was diagnosed with schizophrenia and that he had been warned he might be developing it too. The post essentially asked if his hallucinations were real. Some users here left mean comments, and the question got downvoted to hell, closed, and automatically deleted.
I have personally noticed one such question about every month, but upped the estimated rate because these questions are usually downvoted off the main page within 15 minutes. After they pass -5 votes, they become invisible, so you essentially won't see it unless you were one of the first 5 people to.
As further evidence that this actually happens -- we had one of these questions literally two hours ago, and yet some commentators claim that they've never seen such a post. That's how fast they get downvoted to invisibility.