How am I supposed to react to a friend of mine writing a story about schizophrenia? She’s using the “character doesn’t actually have schizophrenia, they can just see magic/the voices are just a ghost or demon” trope and I tried to explain to her that it’s really damaging and she got really mad.
Ive been too busy to answer this, but my wonderful pal Nick said i could use it's answer: "as a psychotic person, we are often told by others that our experiences are spiritual, magical, or mystical in some fashion. this may feed into our delusions and stop us from getting the help we need. additionally, it drives people away from accepting psychosis as it really is -- a mental illness. some of it may be spiritual in nature, but to paint someone's experiences that way, especially if you have not experienced them yourself, ties back into negative perceptions about psychosis. it's easy to want to reduce psychosis to mysticism. it's easier to think about that way. but it is scary, and weird, and most importantly, painful for the people who experience it. writing a character like this does not liberate those affected by these mental disorders. in fact, it actively regresses it into making psychosis digestible and, again, driving psychotic people away from the help they need. rather than writing a character who's spirituality was misinterpreted as and mirrors psychosis, it'd be much more effective to write a character who is purely a spiritual person. in fact, doing so that way may result in more psychotic people feeling seen by your writing, which may be unhealthy but is also a highly relatable experience for many of us. including that your character is perceived as psychotic is a really tricky scenario to write when you haven't been in those shoes, and my suggestion is that if they choose to proceed in that fashion, to at least reach out to psychotic people about our experiences to get that right. im okay with tropes where it's like "person is experiencing things and others don't believe them", but to specifically name it as schizophrenia and then deviate from that for shock value is painful and shouldn't be done by anyone who is not psychotic"
