going to vague a while about pathologic 3 fandom's dismissive attitude toward daniil's mental illness and this should really be a more formal post but i need this out there before it eats me alive
for a game with mechanics built around managing your position along an apathy-mania axis there's an astonishing amount of pathologic 3 discourse that does not actually name bipolar disorder. daniil definitely has symptoms of autism (especially in p3) but i can't help but notice how people pick out him kicking trash cans or spinning playground rides as ways of managing his autism/adhd instead of being how he vents his position on the apathy-mania axis. which is ridiculous. because that's why it's there.
mania specifically is unique to bipolar 1 disorder and schizoaffective disorder, though the dsm has always been fucked and medical definitions of these things are never really definitive—his mania is not coming from his audhd or borderline personality or whatever, he's bipolar. p3 is incredibly heavy handed with this; peter and andrey are subtitled "architect in apathy" and "architect in mania" respectively, he's constantly bouncing between the two states, he has psychosis associated with bp1 mania through the shabnak hallucinations—it's bipolar disorder. it's blue and red. it's two-toned. he self-medicates. it's bipolar.
and for all of pathologic 3's flaws its portrayal of bipolar 1 is pretty damn good! andrey's mania is accurate to the way manic episodes make you feel. they're impulsive and bitey and blissful in a way that makes you feel too empowered to want to calm down, and lead you to make extremely reckless and painful decisions, and they keep you very goal-oriented and insistent. andrey's in a state of mania for the latter half of the game after day 7 and his plot to kill karminsky in defense of his brother shows off a lot of these symptoms
daniil is similar: mechanically when he's manic, he moves faster, time moves slower, and he takes more damage (fast-paced thoughts and impulsivity, grandiose future-oriented thinking, painful risktaking symptoms manifested as game mechanics). stimulant drugs can also kickstart mania and wrack the heart; if your mania meter maxes out, you die from heart complications immediately, and likewise a lot of medication meant to manage depression/apathy has a risk of causing mania and damaging your heart
daniil is also explicitly stated to be taking lithium with him to the town before it's stolen on day 1. lithium is a mood stabilizer. i am typing this post having forgotten to take my dose tonight
the really important thing i want to get at here is that it gets annoying to see all of the conversation be about daniil's audhd and symptoms/management thereof because it's a constant reminder that people don't give a fuck about other forms of neurodiversity. when i talk about daniil's mental illness or neurodivergence or whatever in p3 the first thing i'm talking about is his bipolar because it's The Game's Main Mechanic. he can be your audhd blorbo little guy or whatever that's fine but good fucking god he's not kicking a dumpster or spinning a wheel because he's "stimming" he's doing it because he's mad as fuck and needs to vent. because that's what mania does to you. physical actions (ie. kicking things, feeling pain) get you agitated and pumped up from adrenaline. that's not unique to people with audhd. that's just a normal ass thing that also happens to be a mania trigger
in general there's a lot of fandom conversation re: daniil that dilutes his personality to "sad smol autism scientist who wants to infodump to you about death" and that does so much of a disservice to his. fucking everything lmfao especially when you consider the actual in-game manifestations of his mental illness we're given. hell, the shabnak in p3 is a hallucination. hallucinations of that scale are forms of psychosis. you're not getting that just from being autistic, but psychosis IS more common with bipolar
there are other forms of neurodiversity beyond audhd and people trying to just project the ones they have onto him because they don't know any others are really fucking annoying given the stigma around psychosis and mania already. honestly i do not care if the audhd headcanons are more common/talked about because it's more of a common diagnosis, people can talk about things they've never experienced. it's okay to not be digging into research around bp1 or whatever but if you're going to speculate his illness or discuss daniil's character in p3 you literally cannot do that without accepting he's written to have bipolar disorder it is useless to ignore the way he is written around those game mechanics
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