#sebba's posts

OCD

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is not specifically about being clean or tidy. It centers on having a fear of a thing, and the belief that particular actions and/or rituals will prevent (or cause) that feared thing from coming true. The stereotypical idea of OCD would involve a fear of germs and bacteria, with the ritual being excessive cleaning. Other common types of OCD include moral OCD, or the fear that you might be a bad person, often involving rituals like seeking reassurance, excessive apologies, or partaking in reblog chains if they inlude "you are xyz if you don't reblog," for example.

A large part of OCD is the mental processes that go into the actions, so his thought processes are a lot more important to the diagnosis of it than his actions. We don't play the game from his point of view, so we can only go off of what he says to Eri about his 'dark thoughts.' From these instances, we can infer that he may have obsessions surrounding Eri's safety, with the fear that he will hurt her.

OCD obsessions differ from typical phobias because of how the person responds to the fear, as a lot of OCD rituals don't always naturally have any logical correlation to the fear itself. I can't actually think of a specific ritual that Tei does that's not anything to do with Eri's safety right now, but...uh...[insert counterpoint here].

Borderline Personality Disorder

BPD is a personality disorder that can be caused specifically by abandonment, and results in strong emotions, as well as sometimes a fixation on a specific person. People with BPD can often see the world in a black-and-white state, and can also experience delusions or psychosis.

The reason that I gave this diagnosis to Tei is because of all of the above, especially including psychosis and altered states of mind, but this label does not fit with all of his symptoms, as one of the aspects of BPD is impulsivity, which Tei rarely shows, as he is always composed and in control of himself, constantly maintaining a perfect image.

Bipolar Disorder

This is the one I've been most confident in recently for Tei. Bipolar does get confused with BPD (I myself got confused the first time I heard of BPD), but I'd summarise the differences like this - BPD is about all emotions being intense, whereas bipolar disorder swings between the extremes of two different emotions, that being either mania or depression, with little in-between. Either way, both mania and depression can involve psychosis, more so than with BPD.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is the mental disorder that centers only on the state of psychosis, delusions and hallucinations but without any other symptom like intense emotions or specific fears/rituals. For many people with schizophrenia, their hallucinations can be entirely harmless or even easily ignored. The reason I've never really given this label to Tei though is because there's definitely more to his mental health issues than just delusions, although delusions are definitely a big part of it.

One of the major reasons that I believe he specifically has delusions instead of just fears is that he acts on some of his psychotic beliefs. He has an obsession over Eri's safety, as well as the fear that he will be the one to hurt her as well. This, to me, sounds a bit like a moral OCD, but the difference here between OCD and psychosis is that he doesn't just fear the possibility that he will hurt her: he actually DOES hurt her. Many people with moral OCD fear that they might hurt someone despite the fact their whole fear revolves around the fact that they DON'T want that to happen. Tei isn't just afraid of it though, he is aware that it is actually possible because there is a part of him that does want to hurt Eri.

So that's why I think it's something involving psychosis. But every source I find about people who experience psychosis...is quite different to what Tei displays. Because in real life, a lot of people who experience psychosis will experience it for an extended period of time, possibly without any awareness that they are psychotic. Tei, however, seems to switch frequently in and out of psychosis, and is definitely aware that there are mutlitple conflicting ideologies inside his head.

Dissociative Identity Disorder

DID might actually make the most sense for Tei. And before you say "but he refers to all of these different states of mind as all himself", the defining characteristic of DID is that it is a discreet mental illness, which actively tries to prevent the person from realising that they are a system.

There is a lot of variety between systems. Some have total amnesia between identities, some have none or only share memories with specific alters. Some can switch very quickly, some find it difficult to switch. And most importantly, many people who are part of a system sometimes have difficulty knowing which alter they are because of this.

Mystic Messenger portrays DID as being quite stereotypical: Unknown has only two alters who front. One is good, the other is evil, and they are also distinctly different from each other, and it's incredibly easy to tell who is who. That's not an impossible portrayal of DID, but it's certainly not very common at all, and it's plenty more common to have WAY more than just two alters.

Dissociative identity disorder would explain a lot about Tei that the other labels didn't explain. For one, something that has always stuck out to me about Tei is how different his behaviour at the very beginning of his route is to his behaviour at the very end. At the start, he acts INCREDIBLY playful and teasing with Eri, throwing her over his shoulder, carrying her to the bathroom and joking about going in there with her. Yes, he starts to act more aloof towards the end because of how aware he is of how he inadvertently hurts her, but it still strikes me as interesting, because his actions at the start are so different that he's almost like a different person entirely.

Not only that, but he has always thought of himself as dirty and 'lesser' than Eri since before they met, so in his logic, he wouldn't deserve to be able to be so casual and playful with her, right? Or did he just lose control for a moment, which we see that he hardly ever does?

Conclusion

I'm not saying I'm right or that it's 100% certain that Tei is a system, you can disagree with me if you like, but I'm only going off of the evidence that's presented to us in the text and what I know about the real life mental illnesses that he displays the symptoms of. The reason why I was always hesitant to give him the label of psychotic despite all of the evidence that pointed to it is because his attitude towards his psychosis seems inaccurate to real life accounts of it, as he shows awareness surrounding it and seems to be able to 'switch' out of his psychotic state if Eri 'convinces' him well enough.

This behaviour makes the most sense if it is because of a difference of opinion in the alters. Some systems are able to switch between each other very quickly, and some have limited amnesia between each other's memories, so all of Tei's behaviour can be explained in this way.

Furthermore, these mental health issues are not exclusive to each other, and one person can have one, two, more or even all of these at the same time. In fact, having a disorder like DID makes it even more likely for one person to suffer from other mental health issues at the same time as well, so it's not even that rare either.