Well, It's Official. My Hunch Was Correct:

Dialogue Thing #14

"Alright, we have your name...uh...are you a boy or a girl?"

"I'm a servant of the Most High."

"... Okay. And you?"

"I'm...the personification of death?"

"..."

"..."

"..."

"Okay, go on in."

I have a character with paranoid schizophrenia who starts the story not being medicated and doesn't really want to be so far.

She has frequent auditory hallucinations since childhood, but she likes them and has friendly bond with them.

I've done a lot of research on how different people lead with their auditory hallucinations, and chose to take this approach because they're usually always portrayed negatively in media when that is not the case for everyone who experiences psychosis.

What I'm wondering is if it would be alright for her to want to seek treatment later on. In the world she's currently in (fantasy setting), there's no way she can consult with a health care professional nor get actual medication, but she can seek healing magic which would have a similar effect to antipsychotics.

I wanted to know if it is alright for me, as someone who is not on the schizospectrum, to portray her symptoms getting worse and more overwhelming over time and have her make the decision to seek help.

Being neurodivergent, I know how wrong people can get the relationships we have with our conditions, and I also know not everyone would like to see certain struggles be shown in media. However, I would like to show both the good parts of her condition (how important the voices are to her) as well as the less good parts, always as carefully and respectfully as possible, of course.

Thank you already for your time and for this amazing blog! It has been very useful to me.

Hello there, friend!

There are obviously a lot of ways to experience relationships with auditory hallucinations or any symptom of psychosis and schizophrenia specifically. I have friends with psychosis and with schizophrenia or schizoaffective specifically who have decided against taking medication - there are also people with these disorders who have decided against medication but been given medication anyways.

It is also possible for someone to have symptoms for a while that get worse - for schizophrenia and schizoaffective specifically there is usually a period called prodrome or the prodromal phase where certain negative symptoms (symptoms that take away such as lack of affect or lack of energy, difficulty with hygeine, and so forth) become more pronounced and light psychotic symptoms develop until they become more severe in the "active" phase of the disorder.

as for having symptoms as a child that get severe in late teenage years or young adulthood...it is possible. There are multiple people I know, including myself, who had psychotic experiences as a younger child that later turned from magical thinking and odd experiences to active psychosis later. But I do want to stress that childhood schizophrenia is much more rare than it is often represented in media, and often more severe than how it shows up as an adult. Your character would likely have psychotic experiences but not full-blown active psychosis or schizophrenia until later. I also want to add that sometimes children have experiences that may seem odd and that is not always disordered, even in a character with a thought disorder!

However, with that in mind - having symptoms get from comforting to disturbing enough to seek help is absolutely a narrative that happens, and I think it's a great one to include in the character.

One last small thing - paranoid schizophrenia may or may not be used depending on where in the world the story takes place or when the story takes place. The DSM-5 no longer puts schizophrenia into subtypes but the ICD still does! Something to think about.

-Mod Bert

Loved Everything about This Episode...

For starters, I love how Sven (the nice creator) is making EVERYONE want to be adopted by him, Solar included. Do NOT tell me you didn't see it.

Speaking. Speaking of Solar. He...is way too cute to hold that much sass. "I'm good at robotics, I can't perform miracles!"

I'm glad Molton trusted Moon enough to let him reprogram him. It was sweet.

And finally, it was fun watching Moon and Solar gang up on Sun (in a non-toxic way). Beautiful sibling bonding.

Top notch episode, really. ❤️

@baa-whatever Can either you or me redraw this? I absolutely love this image so much that I’ve kept a screenshot as to not loose it to the tumblr sea. I’d love to either see a redraw from you or redraw it myself with Dazzle’s new design but I wanted to ask first.

WE INTERRUPT THE FLOW OF TIME FOR THIS BULLETIN:

Dazzle and Jack are the best friend duo.

I love them so much.

And Sun is so sweet to Dazzle, which is great, because of...things.

That is All. Gotta go before the Time Police find me.

Dialogue Thing #12 (It's been a minute...)

(CW for meds, I guess. If that's not right, lmk)

"You know what's great about living where I live!? There's just...free cats. Cats everywhere."

"Uh-huh. Those meds are really workin', aren't they bud?"

"I can feel them."

"That is a rug. You are lying on the floor."

"Why do... these cats taste salty?"

"And it's time to get you to bed."

Saw the animation and immediately knew where the audio was from <3

JD and Broppy kids interacting :3 I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and I’m happy with how it turned out💪

International Awareness Day & Mothers at the Wall Day

Person A is from a city where everyone born with supernatural abilities is sent outside the city walls to protect the city from the monsters that roam. When a child is found to have an ability, they are removed from their families and kept at and trained at a government facility. They are usually given a different name, and rarely get to return to the city, but parents go to the wall to wish for the safety of their taken children. Person A plans to not have children and contents themself working as a nanny, but when they accidentally meet Person B, a rogue super human, trying to care for a few super human children they stole from a government facility, Person A ends up dragged into the mess when they instinctly went to soothe the crying children before learning the whole situation and getting mistakenly labeled by the authorities as an accomplice to Person B.

Blitz's has dyslexia 🙂

Him singing it is just so cute.

He dose know the alphabet as Blitz gets it right right after this. So this is an ordering issue.

(I still have to use the alphabet song to get it right, and worked at a library for a while and used to tutor English).

Dyscalculia is a fairly normal side effect of dyslexia, and is under the same umbrella term.

This can make estimating groups on the fly very difficult.

Blitz struggles to switch language tracks, and doesn't pick up that Loona's making a joke out of he skinning the manly meat with the manly men.

Blitz is normally great at these sorts of dirty jokes, but because it was unintentional he doesn't spot it.

This is because being serious and puns/jokes are sorted in a different 'box'.

Stols - Blitz spell a lot thing as they sound, with a few transportion errors like night to nihgt, and some typos like missing the o in sorry, or missing words out.

As he says Sto-lus, that gets shortened to Stol's when said quickly. It's a cute nickname. 🙂

He also occasionally reverses letters.

(oh look a nice wee pile of evidence).

Transcription - the case files are written by Blitz dictating to Moxxie. This is normal adaptation for working around this disability.

Ok addressing the elephant in the room, cus someone always says it. "But Blitz is just uneducated".

He got in and went to collage. (Dropping out was probably to do with the fire. Blitz is met to have been around 19-20 when that happend).

And Fizz, who he grew up with and worked the same job; has perfect spelling. They would have had the same people teaching them.

Honestly this idea bugs me a lot, because it's equating being poor to a lack of education. And then spelling proficiency as a stand in for intelligence level.

We saw this when people were trying to claim Blitz was too thick to use the word supremacist. 🤦

This ties in to whole host of classist and ableist tropes.

Blitz can with alot of effort Sometimes spell correctly, when it's very important. (For Fizz and Loona).

It takes 4x as much energy for dyslexics to do these tasks. It's common to sometimes get it right, but not others.

Dyslexia is kind of short working memory issue.

Working memory is the time you can hold something like an image, or a string of numbers, in your head before it fades.(Human ram). If it's short it can be extremely difficult to get it into long term memory.

So rote tasks with nonsensical none phonetical rules don't stick well. (Eg Fonetic).

Blitz getting it right some of the time, when trying hard at the hospital tracks. Cus he doesn't want to stress Loona out more.

The 'wiring' of dyslexic brains also makes it difficult, because reading and writing are processed across both hemispheres. Nerotypicals all do that one side, which is quicker as less far for the impulses to travel.

We also don't get the visual overlay trick that alot of Nerotypicals get. The thing were you can see the spelling in your imagination and copy that pattern to spell it right every time. (Anyone able to do this is so cheesy 😛).

And lastly Blitz talks a mile a minute, but only write a few short replies to Stolas' wall of texts. (Which are probably tricky to read as of bad formatting).

Here's hoping Stolas gifts him a better phone with a good spell check, and speech to text at somepoint. Then he gets more than just memes.

Happy pride month yall