#psychosis in media

[proudfreakmetarusonniku]

”c!tommy trying to kill himself day 2 of exile was bad writing” he was suicidal before exile guys…

#he was also psychotic before exile (as in he had psychosis not in an ableist dream apologist way) #c!tommy was both explicitly and implicitly mentally ill way before exile yall just have no media analysis #c!tommy #dream smp #exile arc

[ladyylavenderrr]

Garak and Psychosis

Very self indulgent little post about instances of Garak displaying behaviors that read to me (or at least can be read) as a symptom of psychosis. I will almost certainly miss some, but I want to compile this together for myself. I completely see Garak as having some kind of psychotic disorder. Most of these examples will come from A Stitch In Time, but we have some from the show as well. Also keep in mind that many of these could be interpreted in a myriad of ways, not just as a psychotic symptom. I’m not claiming any of this is definitive proof or anything of the sort, and Garak’s past as a spy (a profession that by nature demands a lot of paranoia) certainly complicates all of this. That’s not to say this an either-or situation. He can be both psychotic and a former spy and in fact the effect both would have on the other would be quite interesting, as laid out in this post

Again, all of what I say can be interpreted in many different ways, but I just want to have it all written down in one place. Psychosis can manifest in very different ways for different people. Some people might be debilitated by their symptoms, struggling to function without assistance. Others might function just fine most of the time and only experience relatively mild symptoms, though the associated distress isn’t any less important.

Season 6, episode 5 “Favors The Bold”. Garak insists Julian examine him for a some kind of mind reading device put in his head by Starfleet Intelligence. Despite Julian telling him there’s nothing out of the ordinary in his head, Garak doesn’t believe him and insists he keep looking. Came off as a delusion to me, especially since he remains convinced despite evidence proving his delusion false.

Season 4, episode 21 “For the Cause”. Upon meeting Ziyal, Garak becomes convinced that she wants to hurt and kill him. I wouldn’t say her being Dukat’s daughter is enough evidence for the average person to be this worried. In fact, Quark even calls him out on his paranoia and we get this exchange.

GARAK: I was going to cancel. I've had visions of Ziyal presenting my head to her father as a birthday gift. 
QUARK: That's a little paranoid, wouldn't you say? 
GARAK: Paranoid is what they call people who imagine threats against their life. I have threats against my life.

To be fair, Kira warning him to stay away from Ziyal gets him to calm down a bit, or maybe not because he still seems quite apprehensive when he actually meets Ziyal, still afraid she might want to hurt him.

Now to A Stitch In Time.

Part 1, Chapter 7. As Garak helps Parmak dig people out of the rubble of a bombed Cardassia (highly stressful and traumatic situation), he seems to hallucinate a figure. You could read this as metaphorical, but he reacts to and tries to interact with the figure in the real world, which doesn’t come off as a metaphorical way of describing his despair to me.

“I have never lived with despair, Doctor, the way I live with it now. It's almost like a phantom companion that shadows me and casts doubt on whatever I do.

"Why save him?" it asks, as we remove a young boy from the rubble of a school. "You're only keeping him alive for a future of privation and chaos. Wouldn't it be more satisfying to join the burial unit?"

I want to scream at this phantom, to shut it up. Once I turned around suddenly and raised my hand to strike it. When I realized it wasn't there, it was too late. Everyone in the unit was looking at me; I'm sure I must have looked like a madman.”

After this, Parmak gives Garak some pills. He only calls them “relaxants” so it might be a sedative of some kind, but I’m not sure. Either way, Garak hallucinates again after swallowing the pills, panicking as he sees those Cardassian orphans from the episode “Cardassians”. I doubt the pills are hallucinogens, both because Parmak specifically gave them to Garak after witnessing him hallucinating and is seemingly trying to stop that, and because they speak about the hallucinations like an unintended side effect ("I'm afraid they don't react well with me," I explained. “I understand," he said.)

Certain drugs making psychotic symptoms worse isn’t uncommon.

Part 1, Chapter 6. As Garak and the rest of his group in Bamarren are forced to stand still in the heat for what might be hours as part of a training exercise, he begins to hallucinate multiple figures, including his parents (it’s interesting that one of the figures seems to be Palandine, even though neither we nor Garak have been introduced to her yet). If this were the only instance of Garak hallucinating in the book, I wouldn’t assume he has a psychotic disorder since this example has obvious an explanation outside of a mental health issue. People are known to experience hallucinations when suffering from heat stroke. However I’m putting this example here simply because it’s part of a larger pattern of Garak hallucinating multiple times throughout the book. It’s also interesting to note that this scene happens right before the scene of an adult Garak hallucinating that figure with Parmak.

Part 2, Chapter 18. Garak seems to hallucinate as he looks at the frieze. He sees the frieze move and the people painted on it move as well. He thinks some of the figures are he and Palandine but isn’t sure.

“The frieze now began to move in the upward direction. I was too amazed to ask if this was truly happening. People would disappear at the top while more would enter from below.

Certain faces were recognizable, but I didn't know why. Something was also rising within me, an energy moving up my spine to my head, and I began to feel dizzy. Two of the figures could have been Palandine and me, but I couldn't be sure. I was almost nauseous with the energy surging within me. The figures completed the cycle and disappeared at the top. The frieze stopped moving.”

This one can be interpreted in a more metaphorical way than some of the others, but like I said, it could also be another symptom of this potential psychosis.

I’m sure I’ve missed some examples, but you get my point.

#star trek #ds9 #deep space nine #elim garak #garashir #psychosis #schizophrenia #a stitch in time #asit #andrew robinson #meta #media analysis #schizospec #deep space 9

[dathen]

While I'm not satisifed on the whole with the book's treatment of Renfield, I do love that it never takes the angle of him as some sort of cautionary tale of "This is what you get for following evil too closely! When you want to turn away later, you can't! It's your own fault for not being pure from the start!"

Like while it doesn't hold Seward to account as much as I need it to, the culpability still is fully on him for ignoring Renfield's pleading. Mina already showed there's a better way to talk to him the day before. Quincey comments that it was an awfully harsh response to him and that he can't help but feel there's something they should have listened to. Van Helsing reassures Jack's doubts while admitting he probably would have listened to Renfield if it had been just him. But hey, Seward's the expert here! ..And then it all blows up in their faces.

And then all of Jacks' reasons for dismissing Renfield are also proven wrong in the narrative: It's not about how sane he is! He's still capable of caring about people and wanting to do the right thing! After Seward's dismissal, Renfield gets the last word: Remember that I did my best to get you to listen, and you refused. The wish to do good and the choice to turn away from harming people is what mattered, even if his efforts were in vain. He just needed the CHANCE.

#renfield #dracula daily #dracula daily spoilers #jack seward #this is why my feelings on the book's ableism are mixed #bc obviously there is Mess #but at the same time the narrative portrays renfield more sympathetically than. EVERY example of psychosis in modern media i can think of #people still use 'psychotic' as a synonym for 'evil beyond the bounds of humanity' #ableism cw

[crown-ov-horns]

I like that Yellowjackets went the "actually, the supposed mental patient is, in fact, a prophet" route.

It's the true horror for Lottie, the Wilderness being real. It's something inside, yes, but it's also a mystical force. It's everywhere. It's the true God (well, Goddess). It's so poetic, I love it. I could write a litany about it. The show executes the "actually, insanity would have been a comfort" trope so well.

I think, the Wilderness is a Lovecraft-level eldritch primordial entity, but folktale instead of sci-fi.

#if the show had no supernatural elements i wouldn't be half as interested in it #yellowjackets #yellowjackets fandom #yellowjackets thoughts 💭 #lottie matthews #the wilderness #antler queen #diary pages #the wilderness is the goddess antler queen a shape she chooses to appear as #i will not accept arguments that no actually lottie is just mentally ill and everyone has mass psychosis #boring boring boring #i will not hear that it's a problematic trope either #i'm a completely insane and i LOVE it #yes I honestly prefer the term insane to mentally ill i could write a litany why #media without supernatural elements can only be lame #i'm not saying lottie isn't a prophet AND mentally ill by the way #that makes things even better because everything gets so complicated #i mean... a prophet must be a little bit mad #she has the holy person quality even when she's fully convinced she's just mentally ill #i mean... insanity would have been comforting because it's more innocent than a primordial bloodthirsty entity #that's also a part of you and that follows you once it touched you #it's comforting to think there are no such forces in the world #yellowjackets text posts

[creativesplat]

Have a Dimitri because juggling hyper fixations is almost all I do now.

#dimitri alexandre blaiddyd #lambert egitte blaiddyd #(a hallucination of him anyway) #also can we take a moment to appreciate that no-one called dimitri crazy or insane or evil for hallucinations or psychosis #also no-one dismissing his delusions and telling him he was stupid but no-one saying his delusions were right and people gently correcting #like I love it #and as a side note #I've got (fairly mild) psychosis induced by stress and seeing my little guy/ the skrungly having a (considerably worse) thing similar to me #that wasn't villain-y or shown to be a really creepy or wacko thing to have #like do you know how many people in games and media are evil because of '!!the voices inside their heads!!' oooh creepy #like dang it come on psychosis doesn't make you evil or creepy it's just a symptom of varying conditions #or sometimes just something some people get #like I love Veronica (fe heroes) but the being possessed after hearing voices come on IS there are better ways to do things you morons #anyway enough about that #fire emblem #fire emblem three houses #creativesplat draws

[ear-motif]

fuckin. i still wish will didnt actually have encephalitis and had a mental illness bc the way s1 frames the possibility of him having a mental illness as the Worst Possible Outcome is so infuriating. i have no idea how one would write diagnosed psychotic will graham to be not offensive and also keeping in line with the message of the show but god will being psychotic is actually not as bad as dying from brain inflammation believe it or not

#but also...i was psychotic and if my symtoms never went away idk how bad id wanna live considering that was the #hardest thing ive ever been through #like. i would rather die of encephalitis #granted i had ZERO effective treatment offered to me during my psychosis and i was a child so maybe now itd be different #but every other piece of media demonizes the hell out of psychoTICS so having a good character who was psychotic #wouldve been fucking great #psychosis is hell but psychotics are awesome and my friends #again. no idea how this would work in the context of the show. but itd be cool #hanniblogging

[writheworm]

something better kept to oneself (2024)

#art #artists on tumblr #mixed media #collage #acrylic painting #colored pencil #traditional art #dark art #horror art #pressurized speech #adhd #psychosis #schizospec #wormart

[azrielfiend]

me (has psychosis): i will consume a scary media!

me, later, experiencing psychosis: why is this happening

#post #psychosis #its entirely my fault but. i do it anyways. i do enjoy horror stuff even though it makes me hallucinate/irrationally fear something #esp. if said media is dimly lit/very dark. my mind makes up shit and it scares the shit out of me. idk why i keep doing this #on main bc this is funny to me. not a vent #im fine for most part :]

[skinnypaleangryperson]

I'm suffering a lot from wanting to do nothing with anyone and for realizing that I'm at a point in my life where I'm past the point of being able to have love or of relationships in my life. For the most part it feels good, except for when I compare myself to the famous Rich talented woman that will be infinitely more relevant and more valuable than I can ever imagine. It's like we're not living on the same planet, and I've always felt this way but it never feels any less disorienting or painful. I'm subhuman compared to those kinds of woman-the successful singers, the models, The actresses, and above all else, the community that those women found together. I torture myself on Instagram daily.

On the other hand, I genuinely despise most people and they're not worth the energy of putting up with and those are the only people that are of access to me, and that's at best. Hearing the average person talk and what they say reminds me that truly it is a gift and a blessing for me to be completely alone even if it would mean my death, which it seems to be with the way that my life is going is exactly what it is. It is very,very difficult to keep your head on in a society like this that only cares about the specific mold of the boring rich and the plastic famous, but slowly, I'm developing lifelong tools that I hope that won't the very least ease the torment and the profound suffering away a little bit, although like a disease, it's never going to go away entirely.

People couldn't even imagine the amount of loneliness in isolation the entirety of my life has been but especially the past five years, it's reached beyond comprehension for me. It's both a choice and not. I'm suffering, but there's nothing to do about it. Everyone is so immature and superficial and terrible. Either that, or there's no chance for me to even have a hope of being worthy of someone's love.

It's nothing but my own specific niche projects until the day I die.

#I was having a really good night because I finally figured out how to make my handwritten and hand drawn hard cover of my stories #but as soon as I log on to mainstream media and see the kinds of woman that are considered valuable #well #now I'm struggling with psychosis and severe crushing crippling loneliness

[rachymarie]

Petition to change all tv/movie villains from all being schizospec/psychotic to just being billionaires/CEOs of corporations, to better reflect actual reality

#I give you your daily vent post about unfair portrayals of schizospec/psychotics in media #Rachel Rambles: succinct edition #my most succinct post yet lol #schizospec #actually schizospec #actually schizophrenic #schizophrenia #actually schizoaffective #actually psychotic #pseriously psychosis #mental health awareness #actually neurodivergent #neurodivergent #mental illness #end stigma #ableism in media #ableist writing #saneism #saneism in media #Hollywood ableism #Hollywood saneism #discrimination #stop bullying schizospec #petition #PSA #autism #actually autistic #tagging autistic since schizospec and autism have an intertwined history #writers on Tumblr #pink shirt day

[a-schizoaffective-artist]

Is any Australian finding the way the media is talking about the Bondi attack fucking fucked?

Like the one day after the event they announced he had schizophrenia. Why? We don’t know if he attacked those people due to his schizophrenia. I had a bitch to my boyfriend’s sister about it, say for me, say I went to a garden and cut off all the flowers. No voice is telling me to do it, I don’t believe unusual things about the flowers I might just not like flowers. That is NOT a schizophrenia thing.

And by the media pointing this out the public will connect schizophrenia to bad thing (a-fucking-gain) like the media never has talked about people living with schizophrenia in a positive way.

#personal #schizoaffective #psychosis #schizophrenia #hallucinations #mental health #delusions #media #bad news #australia

[ladyylavenderrr]

Re: Garak and psychosis

Hi! I do a lot of thinking about Garak, and I also read a lot of psychotic traits on him! I think while they didn't write him thinking of textbook psychosis, a man who has lied so much he can't really tell truth from lie because, to him, "truth is in the eye of the beholder" has to have some level of separation from reality. This is a rather looooong analysis, mostly of events that happen in "The Wire",  but I promise I have a point lol. 

So. I've been thinking about his "lies" to Bashir about his past, and one thing that caught my attention was the hesitation at calling Elim "... my friend"; 

once we found out that he is Elim himself, some stuff from the infirmary monologue got very curious: "we grew up together", true; "we were closer than brothers", true, in a very literal way; "for some reason, Enabrin Tain took a liking to us" well, the reason is that he is his father, that's some reason; 

Now, I'll address his separation of Elim from Garak: I'd say that growing up keeping the secret about who his father was, living a double life from the beggining, then such a split of the ego is almost inevitable. 

Elim is the son, the one who knows the truth, the one who knows Cardassia's love of the family and the people is a lie told to keep powerful men powerful; Tain was the Order, the Order was Cardassia, thus Cardassia's symbol is a man who is a hypocrite, one who betrays his own family- And Garak is the spy. The citizen, the servant of the State. As Tain says himself, he never had to ask Garak to put the implant in his brain, or to do anything - he was so eager to please, and that's what made him special. 

He would keep the truth, one that would make his work unbearable, as something of Elim, while he would be plain and simple Garak, the muscle, the man who did the dirty work without asking any questions. The man to whom family and state, two things he was alienated from from birth, were everything, regardless of how much his work went against that.

Onto the next bit, now: in the end of his monologue, Garak tells a more complicated story to fit into this analogy- he says he faked records to incriminate Elim, only to find out in the end that Elim had beaten him to it; Elim had destroyed him, and before he knew what was going on, he was sentenced to exile; 

But once we know that he is Elim, and if we keep the same logic that Elim represents his inner sense of truth - of knowing he is being used in a very cruel way and that none of that makes any sense - then it's logical that he would sometimes be one step ahead, and sometimes be killed by Garak in the blindness of duty; sometimes watching in horror as he let himself be driven by hunger or fatigue instead of seeing his duty to the end, for he knew the consequences; 

Then, it would be Garak's inner sense of truth, of reality, what destroyed him as the soldier, the spy. Maybe he actually did let those bajorans go for any reason whatsoever, maybe he framed himself for it- I'd say he broke down, some way or another. And he says he deserves it for what he tried to do to Elim, his own screaming sense of reason; much like Marritza killed his past self to die as Darheel - it is the coward, who covered his ears because he couldn't stand to hear the screams for mercy of the Bajorans, who couldn't stand to look at the truth and do something about it, the one who deserves to be punished. 

He became a man who is distressed and anxious during an interrogation, willing to take any answer no matter how irrelevant, just so he doesn't have to keep torturing someone he's kind of friends with, like what happens with Odo later on. We didn't see him do any torturing before that, so maybe he wasnt capable of doing it like he used to before he was exiled, not as a consequence of it; Imo life on DS9 made it "worse" as he became, slowly, part of a community like never before. 

And then, there's Bashir. Again, Garak is a man who adores the state and the family, and has neither. A man who spent his life having no ties to anyone that he couldnt cut immediately, sometimes by killing the person if it was the most efficient way.

On his deathbed, after being really rude and hateful towards Bashir while Bashir lost sleep and thought of nothing but saving him for days, he comes up with this magnificent story, that ends with something that can be interpreted as "I deserve this. Not for betraying Cardassia, the State, but for betraying my best friend." And as he says "my best friend", he stares at Bashir. He then asks for forgiveness, as if he was also asking for Bashir to forgive him for his betrayal of their friendship, for the things he said. He needs to know that, if he can't forgive himself for the horrors, at least someone is capable of forgiving him.

Always full of layers to his half truths and truthful lies, even when he really thinks he's gonna die. He haf-believes it, as a half-truth, even the bits that are made-up; That's where I'd say his link to reality is broken. Idk if any of this makes sense, but this is how I read into it, as someone who has psychotic symptoms and traits, but also as a nerd who loves to nit-pick complex characters like him. 

Peace and long life 🖖

I think it’s always really interesting if Garak truly does believe some of the lies he tells, at least partially. I really like your analysis!!

#star trek #ds9 #deep space nine #elim garak #psychosis #media analysis #schizophrenia #schizospec

[professorbussywinkle]

I do believe in social progress for mental health and breaking the stigma surrounding it, but then I see hordes of tiktokers obsessively pathologizing strangers behaving in awkward ways, who have atypical or non-normative demeanors/affects, and then attribute things like narcissism and psychosis to them

and all the while believing that they genuinely understand the minutia, complexity, and gravity of these conditions, and how to accurately identify the observable traits that suggest the presence of these conditions with clinical precision, and then telling the people they arbitrarily ascribed these things to...

"yeah so...I know what psychosis and narcissism look like on a clinical level because I watch a lot of TikToks of people wearing lab coats sharing sound bytes and factoids about these things, so clearly you must just be some kind of crazy abusive bitch or something"

And I can't help but to wonder if this type of phenomenon is actively making people's perceptions of what mental illness really looks like unequivocally and categorically worse in every way imaginable

#tiktok #mental health discussion #tw mental health #social dynamics #trends #social media #mental health tiktok #neurodivergence #neurodivergent #narcissistic personality disorder #psychosis #psychotic disorders #txt #txt post

[commonsensecommentary]

“When you get to the point where ostensibly responsible adults are arguing that castrating confused little boys and lopping the breasts off barely pubescent girls is a good idea, it’s time for an uncompromising look in the mirror.”

#culture #culture war #extremism #family #gender #gender identity #gender dysphoria #happiness #loneliness #masculinity #mass media #mass psychosis #mental health #morality #sexuality #social contagion #social welfare #transgender

[catgirl-kaiju]

So I have this, uh, idea that I wanna share with y'all about a genre I've been thinking of naming and utilizing in some of my work.

This is kind of a springboard off of "magical realism," a genre wherein magical, surreal, or supernatural elements are used in a story that takes place in otherwise mundane settings and are utilized to highlight the emotional and visceral reality of the characters and the real world. Some examples are: Sorry to Bother You, Slaughterhouse Five, Swiss Army Man, Twin Peaks, and Perfect Blue.

The genre I'm proposing is very similar to this, but different in a very crucial way:

In magical realism, the surreal and unreal elements are unexplained. Here, there is an explicit explanation for this. The perspective character(s) canonically and explicitly experience psychosis and delusions and have a hard time discerning reality from their psychosis.

However, while many of the surreal elements of the story and world are explained by psychosis, there are simultaneously surreal and absurd elements that are not readily explained by their psychosis that blur the line between the manifestations of their mental illness and the reality they live in.

This, i feel, helps capture the experience of being someone who experiences delusions and hallucinations. You know some of what you experience isn't real, but you're not entirely sure what or how much.

There are pieces of existing media that I feel fit these criteria already. For example, The Babadook. However, I want to focus on using this idea not as a source of horror but as a way for the audience to more viscerally understand the character's perspective in their day-to-day life. There is no point at which the surreality is entirely resolved and objective reality fully revealed. The audience is invited to sit in the ambiguity of a psychotic person's life experience.

The name I propose for this is "psychotic realism," as a subgenre of magical realism. The purpose of the genre is to highlight the ways that psychosis affects the reality that psychotic people experience without stigmatizing our existence.

I hope to start working on some projects soon that utilize these conventions. Feel free to discuss the merits of this idea in this post or highlight media that you feel might be good examples of this!

#scout's brain #mental illness #neurodivergent #mental health #media criticism #psychosis #dissociation #hallucinations #delusions #dissociative disorder #bipolor #trauma #surrealism #magical realism #delusional disorder #schizophrenia #schizoaffective #ptsd #cptsd #media analysis #writing

[thethreedeadkings]

[Between psychosis and lies there is no time for a peaceful life by Anna Scarpetti]

#anna scarpetti #between psychosis and lies there is no time for a peaceful life #art #painting #mixed media on canvas