#psychosis spectrum representation

[cripplecharacters]

Writing a Schizophrenic Character: Everything But Hallucinations

Plain text: Writing a Schizophrenic character: Everything But Hallucinations

Hey! Mod Bert here. 

So: you’ve decided to write a character with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (there are other disorders on the schizophrenia spectrum but I will be focusing on these for today)

You’ve done it, you have their hallucinations and maybe even delusions picked out. Maybe they are one of many who experience auditory hallucinations or maybe they also have visual hallucinations or a combination. Maybe they have olfactory hallucinations as well. They may have persecutory delusions or delusions of reference or something like Cotard’s delusion or clinical lycanthropy. Awesome, you’ve done it!

What, I hear you say? What do you mean that’s only 2 of the 5 components needed to be diagnosed with schizophrenia? What do you mean, you don’t need to hallucinate at all to be schizophrenic?

What Goes Into a Diagnosis of Schizophrenia

Plain Text: What goes into a diagnosis of schizophrenia

Not a lot of people realize there’s more to schizophrenia and schizoaffective than just hallucinations or delusions. There are 5 diagnostic criterias that are needed for schizophrenia, and only 2 of the 5 are needed for a month, with larger symptoms happening for six months or more. Let’s get into it.

Delusions

Hallucinations

Disorganized speech or thinking*

Disorganized or unusual motor behavior (catatonia)*

Negative symptoms (avolition, anhedonia, flat affect)*

I’m going to focus on disorganized speech/thinking, catatonia, and negative symptoms.

Disorganized Speech/Thinking

Plain Text: Disorganized Speech/Thinking

Schizophrenia and related disorders are often called “thought disorders” for a reason. Speech and thinking can be extremely affected, and for people like me this can be one of the first and most striking examples of an episode coming. Some people will always have disorganized symptoms that will flare during episodes. A myth is that schizophrenia can be indistinguishable with medicine: most people will have some level of symptoms even during moments of peace or “remission”. More on remission later. 

So, disorganized speech. Some examples are: word salad (schizoaphasia), thought blocking, poverty of speech (alogia), pressurized speech, clanging, and echolalia.

Word salad: a combination of words that do not make sense together. Often called schizoaphasia for its similarity to jargon in Wernicke’s aphasia, this is instead a disconnection with the brain and not due to damage to the language part of the brain.

(Example: the salad would be yellow in the fat cow).

Thought blocking: A severe loss of thought, often paired with connecting two trains of thought that are not connected

(Example: I went to the………Do you like grapes?)

Poverty of speech: A lack of organic responses to speech or organically speaking, it can be severe enough that a person only responds to questions or in one word responses. Can also happen in severe depression.

(Example: Person A: Did you do anything fun today?

Person B: Yes.

Person A: Oh, what did you do?

Person B: Store

Person A: How was it?

Person B: Fun)

Pressurized speech: A sort of frenzied way of speaking associated with psychosis or mania.

Clanging: Connecting phrases together because of what they sound like instead of meaning

(Example: I went bent tent rent).

Echolalia: Repeating word’s and phrases. Commonly also associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder. 

(Example: Person A: I went to the store.

Person B: To the store.)

These are not the only examples but they are some ones I thought I'd highlight, either because they’re well known or I have experience with them, or because they’re famously thought of with other disorders as well and I wanted to point out how things overlap.

Personal experience: I had severe alogia for the duration of my last and worst episode. People thought I was mad at them because of the clipped way I spoke and the lack of really speaking. It got me in a lot of trouble. I didn’t realize what I was saying was different or weird (I have the least insight when it comes to my speaking patterns affected by my schizoaffective, meaning I can’t hear any difference and all of this is from repeated conversations with my mom, who was my caretaker for a bit and knows the most about my speech and what it means). The best solution was talking with people and being honest and educating myself and others. I don’t know about others, but I couldn’t have used AAC at that time.

Catatonia

Plain text: Catatonia

Fun fact: catatonia means unusual motor behaviors! Any unusual motor behaviors mean catatonia. This includes what we think of when we think of catatonia in schizophrenia (inability to move) as well as the opposite (being unable to stop moving) as well as strange movements and ways of holding and moving the body! Catatonia in the DSM-5 includes 3 or more of these 12 behaviors:

-Agitation unrelated to external stimuli

-Catalepsy

-Echolalia

-Echopraxia

-Grimacing

-Mannerism

-Mutism

-Negativism

-Posturing

-Stereotypy

-Stupor

-waxy flexibility

I have some experiences with catatonia-like symptoms but since they were never identified as such I’ll skip those for now. I will say that catatonia is a symptom that can happen in many disorders besides schizophrenia as well.

Negative Symptoms! Yay!

Plain text: negative symptoms! Yay!

So a positive symptom (Hallucinations or delusions) are symptoms that add something to reality or a person. Negative symptoms are symptoms that take away. There are 5 A’s:

-Alogia (Again, poverty of speech, our favorite)

-Avolition (Lack of energy and motivation)

-Affect (Blunted affect, or a flat way of speaking)

-Anhedonia (Lack of pleasure in things that used to bring you pleasure, often thought of with depression)

-Asociality (Lack of interest in social events and relationships)

There are also often cognitive changes including thinking and memory, information recall, understanding, and acquisition, and so forth. 

Schizophrenia and schizoaffective often (but not always) happen with what’s called a prodromal period. This period can be months to years (mine was a little less than a year) and mainly consists of negative symptoms. Slowly, positive symptoms are added. There are thought to be stages to schizophrenia including prodrome, active phases, and remission.

I’ll talk about that a little for a second because I’m currently in remission and no one knows what that means. I was diagnosed with schizoaffective depressive type in January 2021. As of February 2024, I no longer qualified to be rediagnosed because my symptoms were strongly under control and no longer severe enough to qualify for a diagnosis. They also didn’t distress me or impact my daily life severely. Day to day now I still have mild symptoms and take my antipsychotics (trying to go off them have made it clear that I still have some symptoms I choose to keep medicating) but I haven’t had a delusion in 2 years and been hospitalized in 3. There’s always a possibility of another episode but I work with my team to keep myself one step ahead if that happens.

What I want from a character with schizophrenia

Plain Text: What I want from a character with schizophrenia

Alright the writing advice part. What do I want from a character with schizophrenia or schizoaffective (which is schizophrenia plus either depression or bipolar). 

-Characters with caregivers.

-Characters using coping strategies (recording hallucinations to tell if theyre hallucinations, taking medication, having service animals that greet people so they know if they’re a hallucination, using aids for the cognitive symptoms like sticky notes and organizational tools)

-Characters who know other characters with their disorder, either online or in support group or through running in similar circles

-Characters having autonomy

-Characters who aren’t the killer or horror victim. I know it’s cool to have the schizophrenic protagonist in horror, and I love horror, but I don’t want to read about the horror being symptoms the whole time

-Characters who are in magical scenarios, who are in fantasy and sci-fi. The schizophrenic princess and the schizoaffective robot technician aboard the spaceship.

-Medication and hospitalization treated casually. Sometimes we need higher care. That’s morally neutral

-Characters with negative symptoms and speech symptoms.

-Characters with catatonia! 

-Characters with other disorders as well

-characters with side effects from medicine treated casually

-Characters with cognitive symptoms

Thank you for reading this incredibly long thing! Happy writing!

[spiderblanket]

Anyway

I will always be amused by this representational shit. Like. Maybe...you would like to show the society some other minorities? You know, less "pleasant". Oh, but then the story about love will not work :( So, go fuck yourself you little psycho lol 💙

As someone on the schizophrenic spectrum, I'd like to see us accepted. Because, for example the trans community has never been associated with monsters. But what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word "schizophrenia"? The man who killed 16 children because of the voices in his head? Great. Try to make a cartoon/movie about accepting such things lmao.

oh yes, I'm in the closet, but I'm still non-binary. So it's not transphobia, relax. I just understand that people will never accept me in society, not because of my gender or orientation.

[wings-of-fire-confessions]

I personally think the wof mental health rep is a lot better than it seems at first glance.

I should say upfront that I'm not a professional, though one of my biggest interests is psychology and majority of the conditions I talk in this post I either have or have traits of (and I'll clarify which I don't).

Whiteout is the only canonical neurodivergent character as far as I know, having associative synesthesia, but many headcanoning her to be autistic. I haven't read the books in a long while, but from what I remember I can agree, though I'm not autistic (despite meeting criteria... long story) so I won't for sure say if I think her traits are enough for a diagnosis or not (again, haven't read the books recently), but everyone seems to think they are so I'll agree.

Hawthorn has psychotic symptoms, which I think is important to represent since people with psychosis (whether that be from being on the schizophrenia spectrum or some other reason) are very often put in a bad light. Hawthorn is too, to an extent, but that's more so due to the Breath of Evil and not due to his psychotic symptoms, or from what I can remember, at least. I don't think Hawthorn has a mental disorder like schizophrenia since symptoms of psychosis can be caused by isolation (I'm not actually 100% sure if this is true, this is just something my psychologist told me), but I think the representation is still important either way. I relate to him a lot due to his symptoms.

Darkstalker very clearly shows symptoms of NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), I don't think you can even argue that (sorry, narcissism anon from a month or so ago). I myself fit the criteria for NPD, and I definitely see myself in him. I doubt he can be diagnosed since he is still a child, but his symptoms might be extreme enough to warrant one, I'm not sure (coming from a minor who's doctors referred them for a personality disorder screening themself). Of the nine (9) criteria for NPD, just off memory he fit basically all of them. I won't go into all of it but I will definitely mention his splitting, seeing how he goes from loving Clearsight to thinking he can kill her if she doesn't meet his expectations. He also has the aspect of how it develops too, that being trauma (I recall Arctic being abusive to him which is definitely enough to warrant trauma), and being spoiled as a child (this could be my brain making things up but I swear this happened, or at least he was overly praised or something). So yeah, fairly sure he would have been diagnosed with NPD if he didn't eat the strawberry.

Moonwatcher seems to have social and separation anxiety. I like this, since I am diagnosed with both and they are both very difficult to live with, and I like seeing another character having it that I can relate to in that way. She also has symptoms of AVPD (just from what I remember), but she's only like... twelve (12) so there's no way she could be diagnosed.

Anemone, while not having any mental disorders specifically, still had a rough mental health journey so I think it's important to bring up. She grew up with her mother, Queen Coral, who was a complete helicopter parent, and likely never met her Father, King Gill. She was praised and adorned all her life, so it makes sense that when she was eventually separated from Coral, she acted out what she thought she deserved. While I think Darkstalker has NPD, I can't say the same for Anemone, since she was so young and it's normal for young children to have narcissistic traits. When she met Darkstalker, they clicked well due to both being animi and having... less than positive thoughts on the dragons around them. Darkstalker ended up lovebombing her, and telling her to leave when she got mad at Moon. She lashed out at Turtle afterwards, before they reconciled later. I thought this would be important to mention.

Peril likely has a few personality disorders as well, the most likely ones in my opinion being BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) and DPD (Dependent Personality Disorder), which isn't surprising given her situation. She likely has tons of trauma so it's only natural for her to develop a traumagenic disorder. I say those in particular because of her rapidly changing thoughts and emotions and her over attachment to Clay, which I can definitely relate to given how I act with my DP (Dependent Person). I don't have BPD though I show traits (not sure if enough for a diagnosis or not) and I remember Peril showing traits too.

There's also a lot of dragons that probably have PTSD in some way, Fathom, Peril, and Jerboa III being the first ones that come to mind specifically.

I seriously think this is an important topic and I might make a video on it at some point. Like I said, I love psychology and I think it's interesting how it impacts characters from my favourite book series.

.

[schizosupport]

hi there! im mentally ill but not on the schizophrenic spectrum, and want to hear from people who are on this idea.

i’m currently developing a mahou shoujo/magical girl inspired narrative with monsters only the chosen few can see; the general premise is that people who have near death experiences are sometimes given a choice, to die or to live on but be bound by an omen—for the latter, they become a ‘magical girl’, a human granted an omen of unique powers and the ability to see  and fight the monsters, called infections, that plague everyday people and lead them to misery and death. 

 i wrote my main character, lucia, with schizoaffective disorder (MDD)— her near death experience is becoming perilously suicidal, but subconciously choosing to live. she was not aware of this, and as such, never chose to take an omen, but she’s able to see the monsters still. typical protag stuff. she’s dealt with delusions and hallucinations all her life, but after this, she sees the infections everywhere, nothing like her past hallucinations, and as she learns abt other magical girls and the world she navigates this new stressor and what it really means to survive, as opposed to truly living.

is it harmful to have my protag struggle with unreality and paranoia in a real-world setting where ‘monsters that are everywhere that nobody else can see’ are an Actual issue? ty for taking the time out of your day to respond (if you do, i totally understand if not)

Short answer is no, I don't think that's problematic, sounds pretty cool to me! Generally I don't think there's anything wrong with schizospec characters who also have special skills etc, as long as it's not either "everything they thought was psychosis was just magic" or "everything they thought was magic was just psychosis". Even within those two of course there's nuance and I'm sure people can tell fun stories with those tropes, but as far as representation of schizospec experiences go, those are both overused and problematic in a bunch of ways.

But what you describe is neither of that, and sounds like cool representation depending on other factors.

Best of luck with your story!

[schizodiaries]

Question for those on the schizophrenia spectrum (or anyone who has experienced psychosis):

What’s a fictional or dramatized depiction of psychosis that you find most relatable? It could be a character or scene from a movie, show, book, or game. It could even be a song, poem, or visual art.

It doesn’t have to be a perfect, accurate or even “good” representation of psychosis. It doesn’t even have to be representation at all. I’m more curious about what you feel speaks to you the most and what you personally relate to.

[cannibal-nightmares]

I miss May as mental health month almost every year because often the rainy weather of May puts me deeply out of commission (as per the context of this post: rain is a ptsd trigger for me)

if you're new to my blog: I credit/headcanon Professor Stein from anime and manga series "Soul Eater" as accurate and respectful representation of schizophrenia, from the perspective of someone who is on the schizophrenia spectrum. While I have a collection of worthwhile depictions of psychosis in fiction, there is something uniquely special about Stein in how his loved ones don't give up on him and how he wears his heart on his sleeve that I cherish with utmost sincerity. His character has brought me a feeling of belonging I didn't realize I was missing. Representation matters so much.

'Might as well take power in what i cant change: I am proud to be your neighborhood schizo.

Happy pride, dear friends.

[ "A Flag to Wave" by Currents ]

[nanistar]

Just wanted to write in to say I've enjoyed your portrayal of Bonestar so far, especially showing her as a victim of her condition!

I'm not schizophrenic myself/don't experience any form of psychosis/delusions but have several close relatives with the condition. It can be really difficult when they lose trust in others, or lash out, but at the end of the day it's really just an involuntary illness. The comics perspective as she develops symptoms felt true to life for me (as a third person at least)

I'm glad there's a sympathetic response from her clan mates so far, I'll be interested in seeing how the comic develops.

Please don't feel obligated to respond to this ask, just wanted to show appreciation as there's a lot of harmful/misleading representation of schizophrenia/related illness out there.

i appreciate the ask (: i also have a few friends on the schizophrenia spectrum so i want to do right by them. i want bonesight’s spiral downwards to be realistic and tragic, but not in a trauma-porn way (if you will excuse the term) that a lot of other stories with these sort of disorders tend to be (when written by someone who doesn’t have said disorder)

[dhddmods]

I don't know that this applies to your request for queer questions exactly, but feels worth inquiring anyway just in case. It does play into our queerness for us in a sense though.

We have a neurotype we've not found a name for in english- we presume, in part off the recommendation of someone we met, that other cultures may have something to call us. but we've had difficulty knowing where to look. (limited energy to devote to research subject so broadly).

We've also met others with it- including a collective here- and some whom may be in a similar spectrum of identity. Though not yet to the 'intensity' we have. Also this doesn't require plurality, tbc.

'Symptoms';

Experience of psychosis-states from an early age, usually related to the speed, creativity, and fluid-ness of thought. Someone we met didnt have those as much, but did have multiple 'thought paths'- they could think multiple trains of thought at the same time. Exact symptoms are often unique to individual, but seem to be consistent

At a young age, this likely results in what appears from the outside to be panic attacks- periods of uncontrolled psychosis. If of the type to visualize very easily, it may also result in frustration when that visualization doesn't 'work'.

Unlike with schizophrenia however, this psychosis- often in part via the will of the individual- develops "rules". One may see things as math, or ryhme. in our case, we're able to create and control 'forms' not only of ourselves but of our environment- sort of projected onto things- that are also heavily tied to our emotions. (this is how it ties into queerness for us)

If the "rules" are not robust enough, or they can't be created, the individual may choose to- through sheer willpower- "block off" their access to this ability, afaik always at immense cost, to prevet the psychosis 'panic attacks'. The first we met with this neurotype did this- they lost perfect daily memory recall, among other things. We did this too- losing memory and access to plurality- but we 'unlocked' it again a few years ago.

Lastly, we theorize one cause of this could be internal boundaries- such as the boundary between the concept of "your arm" and "the sleeve over it", or "fear" and "sadness"- are much thinner 'by default', allowing for more fluid thoughts. But also allowing control over those internal boundaries- hence 'rules' helping.

'Empaths', in a spiritual sense, are the closest name we've found, but the category seems too broad to be directly applicable and doesn't seem to be very well defined. They have reported having similar mental states, but don't seem to understand this to the degree we or those like us that we've met do.

To add onto the queerness of this since you asked for that specifically;

Being able to control how we percieve ourselves and our environment effects our gender and representation immensly, and we tend to only want relationships with those who would enjoy interacting with it in effectively a 'spiritual' or at least 'mental manipulation' sense- touching or molding our form and/or mind, allowing us to do same to them, and most ideally (tho we've yet to be able to rly try this) doing so to the environment around us and treating it as legitimate in some way, if temporarily.

This results in a very, 'expansive' methodology of our sense of self, that feels less like a gender and more like gender being one aspect of a way of viewing the world.

thank you

Going to be very frank with you, we are extremely confused over what your question is. You gave a lot of background but didn't ask anything.

Are you looking for answers about what label to use? Or are you looking for our input on what condition you may have? Or both?

/genq

[cherrybombfangirlwrites]

hello and how are you, fellow Wanderer?

Happy Pride Month! We came and wanted to send an ask for the Pride Themed Oc Ask Game!

Fourteen | Eighteen | Twenty-One

Hope this month is filled with fun and joy for you! :D

☕ Natsume Rune, @365runesoftheamalgamations

OMG Hi I think I recognize you, did you change up your blog? I wasn't active for a hot minute so I don't know, but I think I have met you before. Let me know <3

Pride OC Asks~

14. Do you have ocs on the aro or ace spectrum?

I absolutely do! and they're all over the spectrum too. Most of my characters end up aro or ace coded because I'm AroAce myself, but I'm gonna focus on the several I have that I intentionally wrote as aro, ace, or both!

Princess Snow is the main character in my Snow White retelling, she's AroAce and in a QPR with her best friend Lan

Lan is Snow's best friend, they're also Arospec and Acespec, and they're also Nonbinary/Genderqueer

Princess Sapphire is one of the two main characters in my Sleeping Beauty retelling, she's Demisexual. She also has ADHD and is in love with her bodyguard (his name is Raven and he's bisexual and autistic)

Triveya is the magic expert in my dark fairytale retellings series, she's AroAce and Genderqueer. She's also AuDHD, and going through a burntout gifted kid arc right now.

Nickelle is the heroes team leader in my teenage superhero wip, she's AroAce, and she's also Japanese American. She has ice powers and gets a villain arc followed by a redemption arc

Kylee is the youngest teammate in my teenage superhero wip, and she's PanAce! She's also non-speaking autistic and has superspeed and invisibility powers

Chase is the team Tech Genius and inventor in my teenage superhero wip, and he's PanAro! He's also Jewish Romani, and struggles with a lot of mental health issues and his cluster B disorders (he has OCD, Bipolar Disorder, and a psychosis Disorder). He also struggles with anxiety, depression, and insomnia. (he's my favorite of this wip)

Corie is one of the main characters in my space cowboy wip, she's AroAce. She's also a cyborg bounty hunter and thinks she doesn't need people but she'll learn

18. Do you prefer to give your ocs specific labels, or keep it unspecified? Why? If applicable, do you change their labels depending on circumstance?

Not really, unless it feels applicable, or the setting would have specific labels (my fantasy wip for instance, I mostly leave things pretty vague)

21. Free ramble card wee

The reason I wrote Kylee as PanAce and Chase as PanAro is because while we are starting to get a bit more aspect representation in media recently- which is great- there's more asexual characters than anything else, and if there are aro characters (which there are almost none), aromantisicm gets conflated or immediately lumped with asexuality.

While it is true that a person can be both aro and ace at the same time- there are a lot of alloace or alloaro people, and there's almost no representation for those people in media, or the internet in general. Aromantic is rarely even said outside of a couple of social media posts.

So I created two character that were kind of opposites on the aro and ace spectrums. One that's alloace and one that's alloaro- and they have a pretty close sibling like relationship as well (though neither will ever admit it).

We need more characters that are just aro! Aro people need more care and representation (and if they want it, love).

[fenmere]

An Afterword for our WIP

Putting this here both as sort of an ND advocacy post, AND as an accountability gesture and the opportunity for crowd-sourcing some editing.

If you're a follower and you read this and have something to add or suggest, we'd love to hear it. Feel free to DM us about it if you don't want to comment publicly.

(We do have a sensitivity reader for our Black representation, who we are compensating for it. We have very limited funds outside of that, so contribute only if you feel moved to. There is no expectation.)

This is long, and it is up for respectful discussion.

Thank you.

under the cut for those who just don't want to see discourse:

A word about psychosis, schizoaffective disorder, DID, and plurality

First of all, we, the Inmara Fenumera, the actual authors of these stories, have not experienced psychosis ourselves, as far as we know. Not as a psychiatrically significant symptom.

We are plural (meeting the criteria for DID except for the personal distress part), autistic, and have C-PTSD. We do experience brief, mild hallucinations occasionally, related to our plurality and just having a brain (most people do occasionally when they are falling asleep).

But we are part of the broader community of neurodivergent and mentally ill people, and we have a responsibility to our peers to represent them as best we can in our writing.

So, a very elementary first point to make.

Being psychotic does not mean having multiple personalities. Schizophrenia, Schizoaffective Disorder, and Schizotypal Personality Disorder are not Dissociative Identity Disorder, Multiple Personality Disorder, or Dissociative Disorder Otherwise Specified. These are different classes of neurotypes and experiences.

To dramatically simplify things, psychosis involves having hallucinations and delusions among a few other symptoms, while having multiple personalities is a separate thing. Plurality is the current community umbrella term for a wide swath of experiences of not being a single person in a single brain, such as having DID.

These things are separate, and if you experience one of them, you do not necessarily experience the others.

But, it is possible to be plural and to be psychotic. And they do not invalidate each other, and that’s important to accept. If you have a psychotic disorder, that does not mean your plurality isn’t real. If you are plural and are experiencing chronic psychosis, your plurality is not necessarily to blame for that psychosis.

Now.

If you spend any time searching for and reading about psychosis, and the conditions under which it occurs, you will learn a lot of really important and useful things, such as that it is a symptom and not a disorder in and of itself, and that it has sets of sub-symptoms that are common but not universal to every episode someone might experience.

You will also be able to read a plethora of personal accounts of what it is like to experience psychosis, and what it is like to live with one of the disorders that can lead to it, or that feature it. 

We recommend doing this.

It helps everyone around you quite a bit, if you have a better understanding of neurodiversity and mental illness, and if you spend some time contemplating how to work with someone who is experiencing a mental health crisis.

That said, you may also notice that most of the disorders and circumstances that lead to psychosis, and the symptom of psychosis itself, are described as happening on a spectrum.

Not “on the spectrum” as a euphemism for autism, but that they occur in any number of degrees of severity.

But almost all the accounts and descriptions you will find for such things as schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, C-PTSD, and the like will describe worst case scenarios, or at least, cases that are severe enough that psychiatric medicine and therapy have been necessary.

However, if you spend any amount of time actually participating in the neurodivergent and mad communities, you will meet countless people who have much less severe versions of these things. They are typically in a lot less distress, and therefore may have trouble getting a clinician to take them seriously, or they don’t even feel the need for help. 

And this is OK. The experiences of these people do not reflect on the people who need more assistance and treatment. Humanity (and its adjacent peoples) is neurodiverse and has room for all experiences.

That said, there are a number of stigmas and misconceptions that do need to be addressed and dismantled here.

We felt the need to include Erik in our stories to help do this.

Erik’s specific psychotic disorder is undiagnosed. He knows he’s occasionally psychotic because he experiences vivid hallucinations and mild delusions on occasion, and they are usually triggered by stress. This happens frequently enough that he’s learned how to manage it, but infrequently enough that he can hold down a job and maintain relationships. It’s hard work for him, but he does it. 

And, he doesn’t trust the mental health industry because of some bad personal experiences in his youth, plus the fact that he’s Black, queer, trans, autistic, plural, and experiences psychosis. This collection of identities and neurotypes often leads to bad experiences with people who might have any power over him. He’s being cautious. He was taught to be cautious and to manage himself by his family and most of his actual peers.

Erik probably has a relatively mild case of Schizoaffective Disorder and C-PTSD. His experiences with plurality do not cause him enough distress alone to get that diagnosed as a dissociative disorder of any sort. If his plurality is a result of his trauma and struggles, it is a useful adaptation that usually gets him through the week with little fuss, making code switching or masking from situation to situation a little easier than it might be. But if he did pursue a diagnosis along those lines, he’d probably be awarded with OSDD for his troubles.

His specific set of neurological traits and experiences are based on those of a very close friend that we have, with some accounts from blogs of other psychotic plural people we know online. He is someone who could very well exist.

He is not, by any means, capable of being a representative of all the experiences of anyone who is Black, queer, trans, autistic, plural, and/or psychotic. No one with any single one or combination of these identities or traits can be.

He is, however, an example of someone who just happens to match a cross section of stereotypes that are commonly flagged by the neurodivergent community as misconceptions. And that’s something we wanted to point out.

You really can’t point at any given representation of human experiences and say, “that doesn’t exist.”

Being plural does not mean being able to see your alters and talking to them face to face, as depicted in movies. Though, the medium of cinema makes it difficult to depict how inner system communication can often work.

Being psychotic does not mean having another version of yourself, representing a part of your psyche, appearing full bodied in front of you and having a conversation with you. But it’s really fun for a lot of people to see that on screen.

And, it’s really common in disability and mental health advocacy to call these things out when they appear on the screen as misleading the public into thinking this is what these symptoms and disorders are all about. And it’s good to call that out.

But when you are plural and have a psychotic neurotype, you can actually experience the stereotype personally.

This has happened to real people.

And we know from our plurality alone that when your experiences match a particular stereotype that is often called out as fake that that can do a real number on your senses of self and reality, and the validity of your experiences. You tend to question yourself during times when you really don’t need that extra doubt.

A certain amount of grace and nuance should be extended to the people like Erik who do exist and live in the outworld. 

When you see what strikes you as problematic representation of a neurotype or mental illness in a piece of media, instead of saying, “that’s not how it works,” try on, “somebody probably experiences it that way, but not most, and we see that stereotype far too often in stories,” instead. Or something like that.

It means using more words, but sometimes you have to do that in order to not create new stereotypes and stigmas, such as “that’s fake”, that other people really shouldn’t have to face.

How is it that every major character in this story is autistic, trans, plural, and has other major things going on on top of that?

It’s a reflection of our actual lived experiences.

When you are autistic, for instance, you tend to have a lot of other neurotypes and conditions. A unique set for yourself from a huge grab bag of possibilities. It’s sort of the current definition of the diagnosis itself, and just super common amongst those who self identify as autistic, too.

Being queer and/or trans is not a mental illness or condition, but it's also really common amongst autistics.

And when you are not straight, cisgender, or neurotypical, you do tend to collect friends and acquaintances who share your experiences. And we are not as rare as a lot of people will lead you to believe.

There are absolutely autistic, trans, queer, and/or other marginalized people who are isolated, friendless, and struggling to find others. But if you live in a big enough city and are social enough, you’ll end up surrounded by people like yourself, and spend as little time as possible amongst those who are not. Those who aren’t like you will tend to shun you, after all.

And this can happen subconsciously and organically.

Fully ten years before we recognized our own identities as an autistic, plural, transgender therian, we started a comics making club called the B.S. of Comics that met in a coffee shop called the Black Drop (that Aunti Zero’s is inspired by). Within one month of putting up the signs inviting the general public to join that group, it had 30 members and was full of other autistic, plural, transgender therians and furries. And for ten years we were so delighted and bewildered. 

And then we couldn’t deal with our dysphoria and with masking anymore and had to come out to ourselves, and it suddenly all made sense.

And we now live with another autistic, plural, transgender therian who is our partner, and have another partner across town with the same sets of identities (though she identifies as ADHD, not autistic, but close enough), and the vast majority of our friends share those traits, too. And, we each have our own unique sets of co-occuring neurological and physiological weirdnesses on top of that as well.

It’s one of the most delightful things about being who and what we are.

[cripplecharacters]

I'm not sure how to write this, but alas.

How would you write a character with Schizophrenia(or any other disorder similar) in a fantasy setting. Say like, Skyrim.

There's quite literally a bunch of supernatural things that happen in that universe that are canon, like ghosts legit exist and what not and you can quite literally talk to gods in there as well. And I know could be seen as a Delusion and what not.

So I'm not sure how to god about respectfully writing one. 😅😅

Hiya! This is one of my absolute favorite topics, and I do this fairly often in my own writing. The best answer is that you blend the two - there is real magic happening and around the character, and they may at times mistake their positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, etc) for parts of their world.

An example for skyrim is that maybe they believe their hallucination is a god they have talked to before and when they message the god again they realize the god doesn't understand a reference to the last time "they" talked. Maybe they have a delusion there are demons terrorizing them but it's actually a very sorry ghost. Have fun with the setting and playing with what's reality there and what isn't!

You could also focus on, in terms of delusions, less of talking to gods and demons and ghosts and more on interpersonal delusions. That someone is plotting to kill them, that the world is fake, that someone they've never met is in love with them, that the radio is giving them messages, etc. The big thing to keep in mind is respect for writing characters with schizophrenia and schizophrenia spectrum disorders as well as psychosis in general - they are experiencing a reality that is strong and very real and intense for them. Even if it doesn't overlap with what others experience as reality, the biggest thing is not forcing reality or encouraging the other reality but helping them cope with their reality and stay safe in the episode.

I also encourage you to look at negative symptoms and symptoms of disorganized speech and add that to the character as well, as schizophrenia is more than just hallucinations and delusions. This will help ground your character in the disorder as well even when reality is more fantastical than ours.

I hope this helps, and happy writing! Mod Bert

[gpscomputerworld]

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1. Exposure Therapy for Anxiety and Phobias VR facilitates gradual exposure to feared stimuli, aiding in the treatment of various phobias, such as fear of heights, flying, or public speaking. This method allows patients to build coping mechanisms within a controlled virtual environment.

2. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) VR Exposure Therapy (VRET) has shown promise in treating PTSD by immersing patients in virtual scenarios that mirror traumatic experiences, helping them process and reduce avoidance behaviors.

3. Depression and Mood Disorders While still under research, VR therapy is being explored as a complementary treatment for depression, offering engaging environments that may enhance mood and motivation.

4. Psychosis and Hallucinations Innovative approaches like avatar therapy enable individuals with psychosis to interact with virtual representations of their hallucinations, potentially reducing their impact.

5. Social Skills and Autism Spectrum Disorders VR provides a platform for individuals to practice social interactions and develop communication skills in a controlled setting, benefiting those with social anxiety or autism spectrum disorders.

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Adjunctive Use: VR therapy is typically used alongside traditional treatments, not as a standalone solution.

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As VR technology continues to evolve, its integration into mental health care holds significant potential for enhancing therapeutic outcomes. Ongoing research and development aim to address current limitations, making VR therapy an increasingly viable option for diverse mental health conditions.

Sources

[aardvaark]

fictional representation of people with psychosis, especially psychotic disorders, is fucking terrible and offensive and it’s like. you do know we exist irl right. pw psychosis are everywhere… and yeah my brains weird but i can still read and watch tv. just so you know, people DO see this media and we ARE upset by it, and it IS a problem, but it seems like few people actually care about mental health rep when it comes to certain stigmatised disorders.

[mollypaup]

Futaba seeing another obviously evil version of herself and going “ah, my psychosis is acting up again” instead of freaking out is a huge Mood.

[glitter-stained]

So a not fun fact about this, because I realise I said "this is particularly bad if you know how schizophrenia works" but I didn't expand on why that is.

So!

Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders (yup, it's not just one; let's call them SzSD) share this particularity with Bipolar Disorders that they seemingly appear out of thin air in early adulthood. Nowadays, we have a more precise understanding of the disorders and can retrace and check for precursor signs (called prodromes) but historically, and most importantly when speaking of the person's experience, SzSDs are a total upheaval of your life, especially since most first episodes lead to a hospitalisation in a psych ward. It's brutal, it's alienating, and it happens all at once.* Put a pin on that onset mode.📍

But what are SzSDs? According to the american conceptualisation of these disorders, they're basically chronic psychotic symptoms (positive symptoms) that manifest in early adulthood and are associated with cognitive and affective symptoms (negative symptoms). Note that psychosis is absolutely not specific to schizophrenia, it can happen in so many situations and disorders* but (according to American psychiatry) the chronic psychosis is what defines schizophrenia the most. Importantly: Schizophrenia is NOT Dissociative Identity Disorder. SzSDs have nothing to do with having different personalities, I've grown up with people calling Gollum from LOTR schizophrenic and that's just a completely incorrect representation.

What psychosis is, very basically, is either of those two (or both):

-delusions (aka the belief in something that has no ground in reality, like the sudden, unexplainable but unshakeable conviction that one's organs are rotting inside of oneself for example)

-hallucinations (aka a sensorial perception without object, like if I'm alone in my room and hearing voices. Note that if I were aware that those voices weren't real, they wouldn't be called hallucinations, those require to believe in their reality (making them de facto one of the mechanisms through which one can develop delusions). Note also that visual hallucinations are actually atypical in SzSDs; the most common type of hallucination in those disorders is auditory-verbal (basically hearing voices).

Now we know that Arkham Asylum has diagnosed Joker as "psychotic" (at least TKJ doesn't give us any more precise diagnosis. I'm pretty sure that we've seen Joker having psychotic symptoms in other comics that I can't be arsed to pull out now, feel free to fact-check me. But if we don't have a SzSDs diagnosis for the Joker, why does the narrative of TKJ harm people with SzSDs specifically?

Let's talk about the causes of schizophrenia (because it's the SzSD I know best, but I know it works the same for schizoaffective disorder and probably schizophreniform disorder at least). Now, schizophrenia has a very largely genetic origin. The predominant explanation to my knowledge is that genetics lead to in-utero changes in the architecture of the brain that don't manifest until the brain reorganizes itself in teenagehood, a reorganisation that would be atypical in schizophrenia, leading to the apparition of symptoms in early adulthood.

But schizophrenia onset is also called "traumatic" in origin. Now, traumatic here is meant in a larger sense than in PTSD: it can be any stressor from a traumatic event, to something like a breakup or, on one memorable occasion, a pair of planes crashing into the twin towers on TV. Also drugs (including alcohol). I'm very serious, if you have people in your family with schizophrenia, stay away from weed!

Now let's take that pin out from the SzSDs onset mode📍. If you've followed so far, this means that a person with schizophrenia, usually a young adult, will be confronted with a stressful event (or drug consumption) and have a first, brutal psychotic episode (with delusions and/or hallucinations). And because schizophrenia is a chronic disorder, once the first psychotic episode has happened, it's a lifetime of psychotic episodes (that can luckily be managed/prevented with neuroleptics) and neuropsychology to manage the cognitive symptoms at best...

That's right: when your genetics (a personal factor inherent to you) predispose you to it, all it takes is one to develop chronic psychosis is one bad day.

So what did Batman have to say about that again?

"So maybe ordinary people don't always crack. Maybe there isn't any need to crawl under a rock with all the other slimy things when trouble hits... Maybe it was just you, all this time."

Yeah.

Sometimes, when you're vulnerable, when you draw your lot at the genetic lottery, it takes one bad day. And that doesn't make you any weaker than anyone with any kind of genetic illness, it's not a moral of personal failure, it's just a disorder. It doesn't make you evil, or a slimy cowardly thing, It doesn't make you the Joker and it doesn't make you any less of of a person. It's just genes.

Fuck you, Alan Moore's Batman.

*for the purpose of keeping it short and because this isn't my speciality i'm simplifying a lot; there are actually two modes of entry in schizophrenia, i'm talking of the most classically known one here.

**starvation exhaustion fever depressive episodes manic episodes (bipolar) heatstroke brief psychotic episodes (often triggered by stress, substance abuse or birth-giving) substance abuse delirium substance withdrawal medicine personality disorders etc, etc. Oh and also normal non-pathological psychotic symptoms are a thing, some people just hear voices in their head without being mentally ill. To clarify.

The thing about the Killing Joke as a comic, Barbara's disgusting fridging aside, isn't just that it's nasty because it's a comic centered around the Joker's character (which is always gonna be psychophobic since the moment they decided to make "madness" his defining trait) or that it establishes his backstory following a psychophobic trope (especially since that trope is questioned in the story). It's not even entirely about how it blatantly does the amalgam between madness, specifically psychosis, and being evil/doing villainous things.

No, The Killing Joke is vile because the whole fucking point of the book is blaming mentally ill people's weak/evil character for "succumbing" to mental illness.

Like seriously, what happens in TKJ? We learn about how the Joker was "made", and Joker decides to turn Gordon to the evil side by traumatizing him "that's what the One Bad Day" thing is about. So he does a bunch of bullshit, shoots Barbara, strips her naked, might or might not have raped her, and shoots a bunch of pictures of her in that situation, and then kidnaps Gordon, also strips him, and forces him to see huge projections of those pictures. Then Batman comes, and later there's a fight, where Batman tells the Joker that Gordon is fine actually and the Joker is wrong, it doesn't take one bad day to succumb to psychosis as a way to escape reality, there was just something inherently wrong with the Joker specifically that caused him to develop psychosis.

Behold:

"crawl under a rock with all the other slimy things when trouble hits..." (To be clear, this is in 100% response to Joker's statement that psychosis is the valid response to the random brutality of reality, an escape to it. It's not me over interpreting something about villainy, god I wish, the entire comic is about Joker arguing that psychosis is the correct adaptation to a fucked up reality.) Batman is directly calling anyone with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder or any other form of psychosis "a slimy thing crawling under a rock when trouble hits." And that's the lesson we're supposed to learn from that! The Joker is wrong! We good people of strong hearts and good minds are normal and good and can pat ourselves on the back for being so much better and more resilient than those nasty little crazy freaks (and the circus freaks, oh my god the circus freaks) who are so cowardly and weak-minded; but look how magnanimous we are! We're still gonna extend a hand to help them crazy freaks once we've established our moral superiority! Because we're good, upstanding cops, and our habit of arresting criminals and putting them in the nastiest fucking asylum which doubles as a horrible prison works! Because we're so good!

Seriously, what is up with that? In what world is the wrongness of this comic not fucking obvious to everyone? Is this really your Batman? Your childhood hero? This is the guy the narrative (and dc in general) tells us we're supposed to be rooting for? How have we normalized psychophobia to the point I regularly see people praising this comic or saying it would have been good had Barbara's fridging not ruined it? No, what happened to Barbara didn't ruin shit! What happened to Barbara is nothing but one more indicator of the worth and respect Alan Moore holds for women in his writing, and I genuinely don't find him any better than Jim Starlin with the way he likes to write sexual assault on women, but the comic was already ruined because its message was already fundamentally disgusting.

And the worst part is it fucking gets worse if you know anything about how schizophrenia (or other schizophreniform disorders) develops. I can't imagine what it's like, picking up this comic as a person with schizophrenia. The suicide risk associated with schizophrenia is high as fuck, and with the way our society stigmatises that disorder, it's no fucking wonder. Reading that kind of book, it feels like some people are actively working to get those figures higher actually. I wonder if Moore is aware of the damage his comic does, if he even fucking cares. I wonder how many people have talked themselves out of getting help because they were afraid of acknowledging their mental health issues and "being like the Joker", or knew they weren't like the joker and concluded they weren't mentally ill. I wonder if people with schizophrenia have read this comic, thought back to the one bad day that lead to them developing psychosis, and wondered what was so wrong with them that they couldn't handle reality the way normal people can. People with schizophrenia are so much more at risk of being verbally or physically assaulted by someone else than of attacking someone else and so much more likely to be verbally or physically assaulted than your average joe. I wonder how many people feel justified in that kind of violence because they see a person struggling with delusions, visibly interacting with a hallucination or saying incoherent, absurd stuff and thought they were heroically intervening to stop a "dangerous psychotic individual" from doing harm. I wonder how much of this perception is influenced by the most famous mentally ill character of all times. Worst fucking comic I've ever read. That story is rotten to the core.

Seriously, fuck the Killing Joke.

[horsesource]

hi! I just came across your post about autism and found it so interesting... where can I learn more about “autism emerging out of psychosis”, as you put it? x

Thank you, it is something interesting to me that I care about

"Autism emerging out of psychosis" can be meant in two different ways. The article Autism: Schizo of Postmodern Capital by Hans Skott-Myhre and Christina Taylor addresses both of these. if you don't have familiarity with some of the psychoanalytic and philosophical arguments about mental symptom production, I still think it's very much worth reading.

Autism, as word, quite literally came into existence as a symptom of schizophrenia. By that I mean, when Eugen Bleuler coined the terms "schizophrenia" and "autism", he used "autism" not as a separate diagnosis but to demarcate a symptom of schizophrenia (a turning "inward", a withdrawal of symbolic exchange, catatonia). Schizophrenia characterized by autism was considered as particularly "extreme", more hopeless than the symptomatic relentless verbosity typically associated with schizophrenia. It's common to attribute this initial "misunderstanding" of autism connected to schizophrenia as an unfortunate lack of diagnostic clarity, later resolved when autism had its own diagnostic territory staked out. I disagree; autism has always been incredibly slippery (it went from construal as an excess of fantasy, an extreme retreat into an incredibly imaginative inner world, to being written as the polar opposite, as flat literality, as a deficiency or aberrance of imaginative capacity, as a paucity of inner world; Asperger's was subsumed by Autism Spectrum Disorder in 2012 which made things even fuzzier (exactly what sort of person are we supposed to imagine when we hear "autistic"?); the influx of speaking, "late diagnosed" autistic individuals is resulting in a drastic rewriting of the popular understanding of autism, etc) and it is much more fruitful imo to track historical fluctuations rather than assume autism is on its way to being nailed down conceptually once and for all

But of course, autism and schizophrenia are more than diagnostic categories. They are subjective processes, they are ways of being in the world through body and language.

As I mentioned in the post you referred to, post-Fordism, the development of communicative technologies and financial capitalism radically changed the nature of labor/the relations of production and consumption. With this change came both deliberate and unintentional production of radically different subjectivities. Communicative prowess, imaginative capacity, personality appeal, ability to cope with intense instability and competition...all of these became economic resources in a way that they were not in an era dominated by factory production. Which brings me to the 2nd article I'm linking, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution written by the CEO of Buzzfeed.

Although Buzzfeed CEO never once mentions autism, he does describe an unintended consequence of minds saturated by a psychotic, ever-accelerating barrage of information and representation:

“These media-savvy youth consume the accelerated visual culture of late capitalism, yet do not develop ego formations that result in consumer shopping. It is as if the light and sound from the television is sufficient to satiate their desire. Actual products become superfluous ­­as the media itself is the final object of consumption."

If endless identity/self consumption and production is compelled by a structurally psychotic market economy, perhaps what cannot be captured economically is a subjectivity that is not consuming representations for its formation, improvement, or dissolution, but sheerly for "light and sound". A subjectivity unconcerned with legitimizing its subjectivity. Tell a speaking autistic "you don't look autistic" and we will predictably give you 1000 reasons why we have autism coursing through our veins, we will assert "I Am autistic" until blue in the face, we will provide paperwork and professionals to vouch for our autism, we will produce tiktoks about the dangers of the invalidation of autism. Tell a nonspeaking autistic "you don't look autistic" and chances are they're listening to the sound of a voice or the sound of a bird