Raines created a successful YouTube channel dedicated to her advocacy efforts rescuing foxes from fur farms.
Animal rescue activist and YouTube star Mikayla Raines has died by suicide, according to her husband. She was 29.
Ethan Raines announced her death in an emotional video he posted to her YouTube channel on Monday.
He said that for years his wife suffered from various mental health issues and struggled to cope with online criticism.
“She couldn’t bear what she was feeling any longer, and she ended her life,” he said. “And it breaks my heart that someone who is selfless and devoted her life to animals could have so much negativity pointed at her.”
How hollow that must feel. Not getting any justice or retribution.
And the disgusting people to blame are probably praising themselves, now.
RIP
From my cursory glance, yes, they are
It’s times like these that I hope there is in fact a god and they are watching folks like that.
If there’s a god, he’s a cunt. Find your own justice.
I agree, but at heart I’m a pollyanna.
“Inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist.”
- George Carlin
On 4chan?
The real hollowness is found in the people who have nothing in their lives so they embrace hate and hound those trying to make the world a better place.
Sad, I watched her shorts sometimes. Apparently there was a hate ‘snark’ subreddit that just made up shit about her all day, with some members connected to the factory farming fur industry, and pedophilic artist KazeoLion, leading the harassment
So…wait. I’ve never heard of her, but you’re saying there was an entire subreddit deddicated to making up lies about her, saying she did horrible shit, KNOWING what they said was a lie? Because if I’m reading this right, that’s pretty fucked up.
I follow her and she was a beautiful human. This news is so painful for me.
Apparently there are ‘snark’ (what the hell kinda name for a genre is that?) pages on Reddit for all sorts of niche stuff
So telling lies about people is a ok, but mentioning a green plumber is not. I’m fucking grateful that I’m banned from that cesshole of a website now.
There’s snark pages on lemmy too, some of them moved here after getting kicked off Reddit.
Lol at Snarky Puppy getting caught up in that search result.
TIL there’s a snarky puppy community here
Man, my life is kinda sad, but at least it’s not “join a community specifically to hate on stuff” sad. What hosers.
quietly unsubscribes from all reddit sublemmies
It’s a pretty fucked up name if you ask me, specifically.
I think most people know about her through her fox, Finnegan the Fox
If there was an organized harassment campaign against her I wonder if there is any legal culpability for those involved.
Weird how someone who became a minor celebrity opposing the lucrative live fur industry would be targeted and harassed to death.
I hope this isn’t some kind of pattern, wherein public figures who speak out in defense of environmental and social welfare causes are defamed and driven into obscurity or death.
This has been an established pattern for decades…
I think it was around 2002, when i read about that girl that died from a car accident. She had taken her dad’s car, without permission.
Iirc, one of the police officers that was at the accident site took lots of photos of her corpse or rather, from the pieces scattered along the road.
Somehow those photos were leaked online and trolls had nothing better to do, than keep sending emails to the girl’s parents. The subject was something along the lines of , paraphrasing, “Hi Dad, I’m back” or “Guess who’s back in town?”
The emails always contained some of the photos.
The parents moved and even changed their names.
Who the fuck does something like that? The same kind of troll, that now harassed Mikayla to death.
“Thralls of the Archons”
I knew kids in high school who tortured gophers, and who knows what else, for the stimulus. Kind of dead inside; in retrospect, badly sociopathic, but without coping techniques or charisma.
Oh yeah, Porche Girl. Got really popular on early /b/.
She apparently had an OF as well, which really draws out the judgmental weirdos.
Could have just stopped the YouTube channel and done something else. I know this is a stupid comment but it makes you wonder whether a bit of therapy or support in that direction would have been a bit more accessible her life could have been saved.
I get what you’re trying to say, but by saying it, you’ve demonstrated a significant misunderstanding of what it’s like to live with depression and suicidal ideation.
As simply as I can: I wouldn’t assume that she wasn’t seeking mental health help when she ended her own life. Just because she was successful in removing her own life, does not mean she wasn’t trying to save herself from that outcome.
Intellectually, the above statement is contradictory, if she didn’t want to die, then why did she end her own life? That, is the very nature of suicidal ideation and depression. You can’t intellectually ponder it out of existence, and you can want to live while still having suicidal urges that are hard to control.
This isn’t a logic problem. Intellectual reasoning doesn’t have a place in the discussion. The cognitive therapy you get from a mental health professional often needs to be paired with anti-depressants to mitigate the negative thoughts while you sort of work on rewiring how you think about the things that are causing you to feel depressed. Whether those things are internal thoughts, or comments from external sources…
Depression is a demon that isn’t easy to overcome.
By saying she should have just gotten therapy trivializes the struggle that some people go through every day, so I would expect some down votes for your comment. I understand that your comment is meant to be helpful and coming from a place of caring, but it does not come across that way.
I’ll add a disclaimer: all of the thoughts and ideas expressed here have no scientific, nor medical basis, I am not a doctor. These are from my own personal experiences and research, and have no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I may be wrong and if I am, I hope any readers will comment to let me know that I have erred.
A final note: to anyone struggling with mental health: I hope you get the help and support you need to overcome any struggles you may be experiencing. I sincerely hope you can find a path towards mental health that works for you.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
Piss off you victim blaming ass
Work on your reading comprehension my dude
Work on not being a shitty person
hey uhh this isn’t exactly a happy conversation, but, uh happy cake day 😅
Maybe if you could read you wouldn’t need to call other people shitty but have a day I guess bye
Maybe if you wouldnt be a vile pile of pure garbage people would not call you shitty.
Maybe you wouldn’t be a bad poo poo brain your dad wouldn’t have left for cigarettes
See? You keep confirming what a shitty human being you are. Complete waste of cell. Blaming the victim for being bullied to death.
Fully propagandized idiot who will follow you around commenting on all your posts if you say a single nice thing about China btw ^
If you know it’s a stupid comment, maybe don’t make it
You’re blaming the victim.
Tragic.
But listen, no one needs YouTube that bad. If you’re having issues because of it get off of it. It’s not real anyway. (YouTube, that is. People and foxes are, of course)
That advice is basically, don’t work in your chosen vocation. Running animal rehabilitation is not free, you need some sort of source of funding.
If your job is causing you enough mental anguish to go through with suicide, it’s reasonable to suggest you find another. That goes for any job.
it’s reasonable to suggest you find another
If it’s “just a job” like working retail at Target, sure, that’s a respectable take. It’s still blaming the victim, but it’s also advocating for the victim to address the issue themselves.
But if it’s not “just a job”? If it’s your life’s work, your calling, something you love more than anything else?
That idea is very likely what drove her to the brink. You really have no fucking clue what you’re talking about.
I’ve been there and I almost didn’t survive. Choosing to live isn’t always so easy.
If you are just working for money, yeah.
People work for things that benefit everyone at a personal cost all the time, and advances are made because of people like that. It’s a good thing, which had tragic consequences in this instance.
We need to protect people who put the world before themselves. This isn’t her failing, it’s ours.
I’m in agreement with you, though I still think it’s a fair suggestion for people putting the world before themselves to find another line of work too. I’m not saying that’s the only reasonable suggestion. I’m all for trying to mitigate the risk of abuse and trauma in the first place. I took Optional’s comment as an intended show of support to folks that might be struggling with similar abuse in their life.
Alright, but in general just leaving the work to other people doesn’t mitigate, it just shifts the abuse to other people.
Social workers, emergency aid, etc have high suicide rates.
And yet animal rehabilitation exists all over the world and has for decades without it. Somehow.
🤔
You think you’re doing the right thing
You think you’re doing the right thing
You think you’re doing the right thing
You think you’re doing the right thing
You think you’re doing the right thing
You think you’re doing the right thing
But they just won’t listen.How can you blame someone for doing what should be universally understood as a positive and still having nonstop trolling? Quitting YouTube wasn’t going to stop the harassment. Quitting YouTube wasn’t going to make her unsee the harassment. Quitting YouTube wasn’t going to promote advocacy for the animals. But you think it’s her fault for putting herself in a place that is both a primary media location and collection point for a bunch of toxic people?
Quitting YouTube wasn’t going to stop the harassment.
Disagree.
Quitting YouTube wasn’t going to promote advocacy for the animals.
Also disagree
But you think it’s her fault for putting herself in a place that is both a primary media location and collection point for a bunch of toxic people?
You can change your circumstances. None of it is her fault. But if anyone is in that position they should understand that getting out is absolutely an option.
She got harassed and bullied by people she knew IRL. They would’ve slandered her even if she wasn’t on youtube.
Blaming the victim eh?
No, just saying people younger than me never had a time when none of these horrible things existed. (Other things did, but not YouTube fame.)
Uh OK… Suicide due to bullying isn’t an internet only thing. We’ve been killing ourselves since the beginning of ourselves.
It’s different with the internet, but I don’t need to tell you that.
Fuck off, no one here is blaming her. But reality is holding no punches. I too would love for there to be no world hunger or violence in the world… Wait till you find out about this thing called “crime”!
Fuck off yourself. They clearly put the fact she killed herself in the frame of “it’s so simple to not do a thing”. Extra fuck you because you deserve it.
My condolences to Mikayla. Remember, the internet and social media platforms are battlefields. Battlefields of ideas, feelings, images and our passions. I get “online criticism” from people every day for stance against genocide and for the incarceration of the “puppet master” that is responsible. I don’t drink their Kool-Aid and their cult leader can go eat dirt.
There’s no sense in this but we all would be wise to be supportive of friends and help them step back from social media.
The people who bombarded her account with negativity are empty shells of human beings themselves. Why give any of your precious energy to these people? Stay focus and block out the scum.
deleted by creator
It was reddit. Reddit is dead center of this.
Edit: its amazing how being correctly identifying reddit as the culprit is downvoted on lemmy when its clear most of us are here because reddit sucks a skunks ass.
Tumblr users were also heavily involved
I forget tumblr still exists.
The internet mirrors humanity.
It mirrors humanity when we’re anonymous, which is why it’s so awful. There are people who are publicly shitheads without being anonymous, sure, but they’re far fewer in number.
Not really. Nowadays, it’s a funhouse mirror that is distorted in ways that rich sociopaths think are better.
yeah, but can you imagine caring about others? No thanks.
In all seriousness, I’ve never heard of Mikayla before, but this is a big loss for the animals. She saved 150 foxes that would have been killled if she didn’t rescue them. Why can’t we all just get along??
F
“Press F to pay respects” if you don’t know the meme.
Thank you for providing context. I guess I’m officially old on the internet.
No, this was the SaveAFox person… This is like hearing if The Girl With The Dogs were to suddenly die tomorrow. I’m not sure I could handle so much good leaving the world so quickly.
They had been posting fundraising updates on their YouTube for the last couple weeks. I hope they can keep it going.
This one hits me hard. So sad. So goddamn sad. Seeing her and those foxes really cheered me up. Her death just stabs me right through the heart.
I believe she had BPD as well, which in itself often gets you targeted harassment online while also making you extremely sensitive to said harassment.
Wait what? People harass people online because they’ve got BPD? Like they specifically target people who are suffering from BPD? Why??
Fucking gross.
Because hurt people hurt people.
People with BPD can be very manipulative and controlling, they can leave you with your own psychological trauma if they’re not self aware enough to realise what they’re doing. And some people are just evil and don’t try be better. So there are a lot of people who have been hurt by people with BPD and they then become a target for harassment.
Sad part is that most people with BPD just want to be loved. Unfortunately they can’t trust love or anyone around them. It’s fucked and really hard to manage, but possible with a lot of hard work.
No, people don’t specifically look for people with BPD. I believe you misunderstood.
I would assume that the trolls are attracted to those people because they get more of a reaction to their vitriol. It’s sad, honestly.
Yeah, I agree. If a sadistic person wants to see reactions naturally they’ll continue to harass the people that give it to them.
Then what does this mean?
I believe she had BPD as well, which in itself often gets you targeted harassment online
I believe some people react to bullying in a specific way that excites bullies. It’s not like they say “hey, who’s got BPD,” it’s just that people with BPD tend to get the reactions they seek. Don’t mistake this as saying the bullies aren’t doing wrong or ableist. It’s still awful.
Is BPD bi-polar disorder? Or borderline personality disorder?
Latter
BPD is borderline. BD is Bipolar Disorder. But most commonly referred to as simply bipolar.
BPD is borderline personality disorder.
Well, it is unfortunately symptomatic. Lived with one for 10 years. Gave everything. It is not easy to admit that most of the even self aware sufferers will automatically manipulate and stir up drama due to the impossible weight of their own guilt and anger which if you want to help you have to realise is never going away and more often than not continually hurt anyone around them. It’s sad that giving energy and help to sufferers is so draining and destructive and if you want support many people react like you. Except in support groups. So if anyone is reading : take care of yourself first, giving more than you have is bad for everyone and it will be hard not to. Support groups are your friend as many that are in the same situation sharing and understanding is deeply important to survive
I don’t know her at all - is that BPD diagnosis something confirmed, thet she shared and all?
I have terribly mixed feelings about people with BPD.
On one side, lots of empathy: they often feel miserable and (not always, but) very often their BPD is the result of trauma or abuse.
On the other, and having lived it for a decade and a half: they can make the lives of people in their surroundings an absolute abominable horror-movie type of nightmare.
It’s actually treatable but not all people with BPD seek treatment, it’s a tough one.
There just aren’t enough therapists learning how to administer dialectical behavior therapy. Very helpful for people with BPD, addiction problems, or PTSD.
I have an uncle who has been cut-off from the family because he refuses to treat his
BPDbipolar (whoops) and his sisters got tired of taking care of/cleaning up after him. “Doesn’t like how the medicine makes him feel”. Pretty sure he started self-medicating with other stuff and found a woman who enables him, don’t know exactly (it’s been two decades since I last heard from him)If he was taking medicine for it, it likely wasn’t BPD; BPD doesn’t have any chemical treatments. Treatment is usually Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to try and regulate the person’s emotions and establish a more normalized baseline emotional state. But that requires a lot of personal effort, and many people with BPD refuse to follow through with it. And CBT only really helps with the emotional outbursts; It doesn’t do a lot for the abandonment issues, desires to self-harm, dissociation, etc…
Maybe he was bipolar? Bipolar is in the same category as schizophrenia, because the mania produces delusions and hallucinations. And it is treated with meds similar to schizophrenia.
BPD relies on DBT and not CBT
Bipolar is indeed what I meant, I forgot that Borderline Personality Disorder took the initialism. It’s also probable that he has more than just that going on.
I personally cannot confirm it, I just saw it being mentioned on one of the BPD subs on reddit.
I think it’s important to differentiate people with mental health issues and bad people with mental health issues.
I have BPD, it sucks so much and I suffer a lot of emotional pain. I have hurt some people, but the first person I really hurt, I loved like no other, and when she told me what I was doing to her when she left me, I decided not to be that person anymore.
I’ve fucked up a lot of my life during my worse episodes, but I choose not to be a horrible person to the people around me. I don’t always get it right, but I try.
A diagnosis doesn’t make you evil or bad, that’s a personal choice.
Bless you, take care of yourself and loved ones. If you do anything at all, please have safeguards against the most harrowing statistics with suicide on this diagnosis. Even worse if you are male but that’s beside the point <3
BPD is brutal on the people close to the person with the disorder. Absolutely brutal.
My sister has BPD. My parents cut her off after some particularly spectacular episodes. I stuck up for her even after she wasn’t allowed around anymore. She tried to off herself in my room when I let her hide out from her boyfriend (not the first time she did that). She ended up moving in with that scumbag who on multiple occasions beat her senseless and threw her out of a moving vehicle. I had to come over (strapped mind you) and escort her from his place to the station onto a greyhound to go live with her cousin. I have so much fuckin trauma on account of her. She’s better now, for now. If it comes to it again tho I’ll always fight tooth and nail to keep her safe, regardless of how outrageously she behaves. That’s my fuckin sister.
Thank you, you’re an amazing sibling. Just don’t let her abuse you. I hope she is getting help, it can get better.
You’re a good sibling. I had an ex that really fucked me up. I found out later that she was diagnosed with BPD a few years after our relationship.
After reading up on it, it explained so much… Didn’t really help anything, but explained it. Made the mistake of reconnecting with her around the time of the pandemic. What a terrible idea that was lol.
Yeah, her husband shared it when he announced the news on Tuesday (or Monday?).
As a long time supporter of SaveAFox, it’s hard to really even process this. I am sure being an online personality to try and fundraise isn’t easy, but never did I dream that there was such a degree of hate lobbed at Mikayla that she’d decide to end her own life. Someone so kind and devoted to the lives of creatures who are constantly exploited and cannot save themselves. It’s just despicable, and all I can really hope for is that Mikayla’s mission continues on in spite of such significant loss.
That’s incredibly sad to hear. I watched this channel alot to see the various fox personalities, like Finnegan. I’m gonna be worried about the foxes for a while, now.
People need to start staying off social media, especially when they’re not doing well mentally
I couldn’t bear to watch her husbands video, but I saw several comments on reddit that her “friends” were spewing this shit too.
While they have admirable goals and do important work, a lot of animal rights people are fucking nuts.
Correction * a lot of PEOPLE are fucking nuts.
The human race makes me really sick on a daily basis these days
