Tidbits and Rabbitholes

Things To Ask Yourself When Writing That Black Queer/Trans Character

When you’re writing that Black trans character, are you making sure to consider how they would be perceived in the moment, both in story and outside?

Do you feel like your Black queer/trans character has to sacrifice their culture to be who they are? Why?

Is this an intentional plot point, or did you just think that was The Answer?

When you say this Black trans character “passes”- by whose standard? That of whiteness?

When you say this Black nonbinary character is “androgynous”- by whose standard? That of whiteness?

Do you associate certain things to gender presentation, that their culture may not? E.g. long hair. Long locs are not considered a feminine look on Black men, but the sister locs style might be considered feminine. Are you aware of patterns like this?

Do you feel like these Black characters have to pass in order to be “validly” trans? Do you hold your white characters to this standard?

When you’re writing this story, if you want to say “oh everyone in my world is unaffected by these things”, very well! It’s nice to have stories like that! But are you having White Queer Main Character go through the real-world scourge of discovering sexuality/gender, and then act like Black Queer Main Character just lives life willy nilly?

Why? Is that explained in-story?

Are you doing the opposite? Is this on purpose?

Are you avoiding giving that Black queer/trans character that depth in their background because you are scared of/don’t want to do the research?

If you feel this way, do you think you should continue? Are you willing to take the risk of it being rejected, upon someone potentially seeing the lack of effort?

What made you want to write a character with this identity, if you did not want to know them? What purpose does them having this identity serve, other than ‘being cool’, if you weren’t interested in it depicting it well?

Have you consumed any media written by Black people that compose of the group you’re trying to write? Why not?

When you come up with your “ship pairings”, do you reject Black people as queer? Why?

Why does this Black woman not strike you as bi? Why does this Black man not strike you as gay? Is it because you don’t see Blackness as in line with what you see queerness as?

How do your views of Blackness and sexuality affect how you treat Black characters that are canonically queer?

Do you feel like you have to have “more proof” in order to accept that a Black character is queer? Why?

Do you feel like your Black characters have to be bolder about their sexuality in order for it to be valid? Why? Why do you not hold your nonblack characters to this standard?

Do you feel like your Black male characters have to be feminine in order to be acceptably gay? Did you even notice you did that?

Do you feel that being masculine would make them threatening, or less gay? Why? Did you even notice you did that?

Do you feel like your feminine Black male characters are somehow “less Black” if they’re not stereotypical? Did you even notice that you did that?

Do you feel like your Black female characters have to be masculine? Why? Did you even notice that you did that?

Do you feel like your Black character has to be the top, and does that come with an automatically “dominating” personality? Why? Is it like this for all your Black characters? No, there’s nothing wrong with writing a Black character that is also a dom and a top. It happens. However, what matters is the why, and also, this next part:

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Spent way too long researching this before posting lol. but please, if something's wrong, tell me. i'd rather be corrected than spread misinformation.

⋆˙⟡ Doctors don't run. Almost ever. Running in a hospital is a safety hazard, knocks into patients and equipment, and signals panic to everyone who sees it, which is the opposite of what hospital staff want to project. In a true code blue situation, there is urgency, but it looks more like extremely fast, purposeful walking and a kind of controlled chaos where everyone knows their role. The sprinting attending dramatically sliding to a bedside is a TV invention.

⋆˙⟡ "She flatlined" does not mean what you think it means. A flatline (a straight line on a heart monitor) means asystole: the heart has stopped producing electrical activity. You don't shock a flatline. CPR, yes. Epinephrine, yes. But the dramatic defibrillator moment everyone loves? That's for ventricular fibrillation, which looks like chaotic scribble on the monitor, not a flat line. Shocking a flatline in real life does nothing. Your doctor character would know this. Your nurse would know this. Your paramedic absolutely knows this.

⋆˙⟡ Medical professionals have a dark, dry humor and it's a coping mechanism, not a character flaw. People who work in high-stress, high-death environments often develop humor that sounds brutal to outsiders. BUT It's not callousness, it's a pressure valve.

⋆˙⟡ Hospitals are obscenely loud and smell very specific. Writers default to clinical silence and "the sharp smell of antiseptic." Real hospitals smell like a combination of cleaning fluid, stale air, cafeteria food leaking through vents, and occasionally something you don't want to identify. They're also constantly noisy. Intercoms, rolling carts, the beep of a dozen different monitors all slightly out of sync with each other, people talking too loudly, visitors crying in hallways. The silence only comes in very specific moments, and it's jarring precisely because it's unusual.

⋆˙⟡ Waking up from a coma is not waking up from a nap. Someone who has been unconscious for more than a day or two will have profound muscle weakness, and they often can't hold their own head up. They'll be confused, possibly for days. They won't be able to speak normally if they had a breathing tube, because their throat will be raw and damaged. They won't recognize people immediately and then have a tearful reunion five minutes later. The brain coming back online is slow, strange, and disorienting in ways that aren't photogenic. Patients frequently don't remember the first several days of recovery at all.

⋆˙⟡ There's a specific hierarchy and it matters to the people inside it. Attending physician, fellow, resident, intern, these are not interchangeable words for "doctor." An intern on their third week is legally a doctor and can barely order a sandwich without second-guessing themselves. An attending has full clinical responsibility and has seen everything. A fellow is post-residency, specializing, somewhere in between. Nurses operate in their own parallel hierarchy that intersects with but is absolutely not subordinate to doctors in the way TV suggests. Experienced nurses regularly catch errors that residents make, and both parties know it.

⋆˙⟡ Patients are almost never alone in their room doing emotional things. Nurses check vitals. Phlebotomists come for blood draws at ungodly hours. Housekeeping rolls in. A different doctor than the one managing the case comes to consult. Meals appear. An orderly needs to take them to imaging. The room itself is rarely private for long. The idea of a character lying in a hospital bed having a long, uninterrupted emotional conversation is something that mostly happens in fiction. In reality, someone knocks and enters approximately every 40 minutes, sometimes more.

⋆˙⟡ Paperwork and insurance are a constant, grinding presence. Discharge doesn't happen because the patient is better. It happens when it's approved, when a bed is needed, when insurance says so. Patients are sometimes sent home earlier than feels safe because the system demands it. Doctors spend an enormous, demoralizing amount of time on documentation, estimates suggest 2 hours of paperwork for every hour of patient care. The administrative weight of hospital medicine is a slow-burn horror that almost no fiction touches, which means the moment you do, it feels startlingly real.

For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.

Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.

They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.

Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.

If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.

If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).

it doesn’t have to be a “punch line” as in the end of a joke. It could be the part that punches you in the gut. The most exciting, juicy, shocking info goes at the end of the sentence. Two different examples that show the difference it makes:

doing it wrong:

She saw her brother’s dead body when she caught the smell of something rotting, thought it was coming from the fridge, and followed it into the kitchen.

doing it right:

Catching the smell of something rotten wafting from the kitchen—probably from the fridge, she thought—she followed the smell into the kitchen, and saw her brother’s dead body.

Periods are where you stop to process the sentence. Put the dead body at the start of the sentence and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you’ve piled a whole kitchen and a weird fridge smell on top of it, and THEN you have to process the body, and it’s buried so much it barely has an impact. Put the dead body at the end, and it’s like an emotional exclamation point. Everything’s normal and then BAM, her brother’s dead.

This rule doesn’t just apply to sentences: structuring lists or paragraphs like this, by putting the important info at the end, increases their punch too. It’s why in tropes like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking or Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick, the odd item out comes at the end of the list.

Subverting this rule can also be used to manipulate reader’s emotional reactions or tell them how shocking they SHOULD find a piece of information in the context of a story. For example, a more conventional sentence that follows this rule:

She opened the pantry door, looking for a jar of grape jelly, but the view of the shelves was blocked by a ghost.

Oh! There’s a ghost! That’s shocking! Probably the character in our sentence doesn’t even care about the jelly anymore because the spirit of a dead person has suddenly appeared inside her pantry, and that’s obviously a much higher priority. But, subvert the rule:

She opened the pantry door, found a ghost blocking her view of the shelves, and couldn’t see past it to where the grape jelly was supposed to be.

back in the dark ages, i was taught (by a guy putting out his 22nd best seller that year) that, back in his day, he was told that a writer needed to write 1,000,000 words of crap before they'd start to get good -- and the catch was that one never knew where those 1,000,000 words were going to fall. the positive side of that was that most of them were going to come at the beginning so it was best to just get them out of the way by soldiering on and learning on the job.

if you're at this stage, just accept that you're going to be uncomfortable and it's going to be horrible word vomit. that will not be true about it all but you're going to feel that way and you have no idea what a good thing that is for becoming a better writer.

i've been a slush editor. that means first reader of anything sent to a publisher for consideration. i have had in my hands some of the most batshit confident dogshit prose known to humanity and i have sent it back with some polite notes (usually because one of our regular writers knew the perpetrator writer in question) only to have the person either tell me it's perfect and i'm insane or to have them enthusiastically submit...exactly the same kind of dogshit prose while telling me they took my notes to heart. no ability to know that it's bad or why.

find what you did right, stick what you think you did wrong in a time-out folder, and keep going. for fun you can do things like write the end first, write a whole story as a chat log, write it from the point of view of the cat in the room, write it as though it was a news release, whatever you want. the point is to write it, to get good at feeling bad at it, and to learn the difference between what works and what doesn't.

[Plain text: Writing Schizophrenia and Psychosis: Hallucinations and Delusions]

So you've read our lovely guide on parts of schizophrenia and psychosis unrelated to hallucinations and delusions, you've skimmed our tag, but it's finally time to tackle the most commonly known part of schizophrenia: hallucinations and delusions.

So, hearing voices or seeing shadow people and thinking everyone is after you, right? I'm done?

Nope!

This is a guide to the many many kinds of hallucinations and delusions that exist, written with experience by people with psychosis.

A note obviously that psychosis is highly personal and your mileage may vary. This is not meant to be an all-encompassing post.

Conditions that can cause psychosis (not exhaustive):

Schizophrenia,

Schizoaffective Disorder,

Schizophreniform Disorder,

Delusional Disorder,

Brief Psychotic Disorder,

Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features,

Bipolar Disorder,

Psychotic Disorder Due to Another Medical Condition (yes that's the real name and the Another Medical Condition usually refers to things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, brain tumors, etc.),

Substance/Medication-Induced Psychotic Disorder.

The first three are also known as the "schizo-spec" (schizophrenia spectrum) disorders, with delusional disorder and brief psychotic disorder sometimes also being included in that definition.

Hallucinations

[Plain text: Hallucinations]

There are many kinds of hallucinations, the most commonly discussed being auditory and visual. However, they are not the only ones! There are also tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and somatic ones (the latter are often categorized under tactile or vice-versa).

The most frequent kind of hallucination experienced changes depending on the exact disorder. Overall, the most common ones are either auditory or visual (e.g. auditory are the most common in schizophrenia, and visual in neurological disorders), then the other one of the aforementioned two, then tactile/somatic, then olfactory, and then gustatory.

A person can experience any number of those, and multimodality (involving multiple senses) is more common than unimodality (involving just one sense) in people who have a primarily-psychiatric condition. In other words, having hallucinations that involve multiple senses is common for those on the schizo-spec, but very rare for those with ocular conditions, for example.

Types of hallucinations:

[Plain text: Types of hallucinations:]

Auditory hallucinations: There are many things a person can hear, the most common and most discussed being voices. However, other common auditory hallucinations are whispering, hearing your name being called, music, and hearing people walking around.

Command hallucinations: a subset of auditory hallucinations. My absolute enemy. A hallucination, usually external voice but sometimes an "implanted voice" that commands the listener to do things, from something simple like standing up to hurting themselves or others. The listener can resist, but I personally find the longer I have command hallucinations the harder they become to resist or ignore. Often the thing that gets me sent to inpatient. The most important distinction for command hallucinations are that they are not intrusive thoughts - the person is insistent they are external from them.

Visual hallucinations: Less common than auditory hallucinations but still incredibly common. Not always shadow people or recognizable people - I see strangers and have never had the same visual hallucination twice, although some people do see returning "characters". I do see shadow people occasionally, but they aren't the only thing people see and can be a somewhat exaggerated depiction. I know a lot of people who see cats, for some reason. If you can think it, someone can see it!

Obviously hallucinations can but don't have to be scary, it simply depends on the person and experience.

A person can see almost anything as a hallucination. Some people experience what are known as "simple" visual hallucinations (as opposed to "complex" ones) - basic patterns, spots, geometric shapes, lights, lines. They are not lifelike or clear, and are visibly out of place. Simple hallucinations are less common on the schizo-spec, but anyone can have them.

Tactile hallucinations: my absolute enemy (hey, different mod here). Tactile hallucinations are less common than visual or auditory ones, and often come with other kinds of hallucinations as a bonus - especially somatic ones, since there's no clear distinction between those two a lot of the time. They encompass touch, feeling, and spatial sense in the broadest sense you can possibly imagine. They can be annoying in their own manner as there is often no way to check their validity - you usually can't just record or take a picture of them to verify them.

Tactile hallucinations can be, as most hallucinations, basically anything. One of the most common types is the feeling of parasites, bugs, or other animals, like snakes, moving across or under the person's skin.

Parasitic/fornication hallucination is the main example of tactile hallucinations to the point that there are sometimes used as synonyms. It's also very often associated with delusional parasitosis, where the person actually believes that they are in fact infested, which will be mentioned in the "delusions" section.

For many people tactile and somatic hallucinations will be one and the same, or otherwise inseparable, like the feeling of blood or urine dripping down their body, being burned, feeling their organs or bones "move around", or having their skin stretched.

In my personal experience - YMMV - tactile hallucinations are the most difficult to acknowledge as fake (for me, this is in comparison to visual and olfactory ones). Even if you are aware of the possibility of being in psychosis, since they can't be reliably verified for the most part, are often at least theoretically possible, and frequently co-appear with delusions of the same theme.

Olfactory hallucinations: smelling things that aren't there. Those can be pleasant, gross, or completely neutral, as most hallucinations in general. Smell hallucinations can be (unofficially; this is just a distinction I've used myself) categorized into external (smells "outside" the person having the hallucination, like a fire) and internal ("in/on" the person having the hallucination, like the smell coming from their own body). In my anecdotal experience, people tend to have more of only one of these types rather than both.

One of the most common ones is the perception of having extremely offensive body odor or bad breath, but it can also do with urine, blood, even decomposition, etc. The hallucinations generally revolve around mundane things (there's nothing "OMG I must be in psychosis!" about thinking you smell bad), which might make them difficult to spot as fake, even if someone is aware that they are overall psychotic.

Many kinds of olfactory hallucinations might make the person feel insecure (body related smells), paranoid (chemical related smells; e.g. I had a recurrent hallucination of smelling spilled gasoline), or cause problems with things like eating (smelling non-edible things in food; rot, mold...).

Gustatory hallucinations [warning: none of the mods have first-hand experience with this one; this is entirely based on external sources]: tasting things that aren't there. The rarest kind of hallucinations statistically, though it shows up in some non-shizo-spec conditions more often (e.g. epilepsy).

Gustatory hallucinations are mostly realistically plausible (for example, feeling a bitter or sour taste) or realistic but unusual (e.g. metallic taste). They often coexist with other kinds of hallucinations and delusions, often exacerbating the problem (e.g. a person with delusions of being poisoned might experience a hallucination of dangerous chemicals in their food, solidifying the delusion).

Hallucinations FAQ

[Plain text: Hallucinations FAQ]

Q: How to describe hallucinations in a sensitive manner?

A: Sensitivity and hallucinations is less about being sensitive about the hallucinations and more about the person having them. Hallucinations can be anything, and I mean it. For every "stereotypical" hallucination, there's a thousand real people who will have it. Unless you're considering doing something extremely out there, I wouldn't worry about the content of hallucinations being sensitive or not; anything that's common enough to be listed as an example of a hallucination is more than safe. Some hallucinations are scary, a lot are deeply unpleasant. That's okay to show.

So, how do you describe the person having the hallucinations? First of all, don't make them violent towards others. This is a very harmful stereotype that writers love to use. Psychotic people can be violent since they are people, but they're much more likely to be victims of violence as well as committing violence towards themselves (both in the self-harm context, as well as in attempts of dealing with psychosis that ultimately result in unintentional self-injuries). Don't make someone into a murderer because they are hearing voices or smelling blood in their food.

Second, show them as a full person and that psychosis is part of them as that person. Why* are they psychotic? How do they experience it? When did it start, and how often do they have episodes? Do they go to therapy? Do they take medication? How do they feel about it? Make them seem human while integrating psychosis into their character, not just a "normal" person with a "scary gimmick" slapped on top without considering what it actually means for them.

*- not as in "there needs to be a reason for a character to be disabled", but as in "what condition is causing them to hallucinate".

Third: don't push people with low insight under the bus. Someone who can't tell their hallucinations apart from reality isn't stupid or "worse" than someone who has higher awareness. It also doesn't translate to morals; someone who fully can't tell what's real isn't more likely to be evil. It also doesn't make them blissfully unaware angels that should be treated like children - don't moralize a mental illness in either direction.

To go back to the actual hallucinations - treat them as what they are: hallucinations. They aren't future-telling, prophecies, visions from an alternate dimension, sources of magic, whatever else, they aren't those things. A delusional person (or character) might believe that what they're experiencing is something "greater", but that'd be a part of a delusion; it's not something you should put as part of your objective worldbuilding. Even just implying that psychosis has some "deeper meaning" can mess some people up.

This is my least favorite form of psychosis representation in media. Honestly, personally, I'd rather be portrayed as violent than like I have some secret gift, but don't do either.

Q: How to integrate hallucinations into a story without the story becoming about them?

A: Depends greatly on whose POV you're writing from, how much insight the character has, and what emotions do they experience while hallucinating.

If it's a non-POV character who is aware they are in psychosis and are relatively unbothered by it, you can just describe them glancing around, or otherwise checking where the hallucination is. In most cases someone with high insight won't be interacting with a hallucination (an exception could be a pleasurable hallucination that the person enjoys).

They might ask another character if they also see/hear/feel the hallucination - even if someone is fully aware they are currently in psychosis, it might be difficult to verify which things are fake and which aren't. Maybe the character is sure that the person they're "seeing" is fake, but aren't sure about the dog that's with them.

You can describe the character being clearly distracted by something; looking into a specific place, moving weirdly, or not being able to stay on topic.

If you're trying to write about the character experiencing hallucinations and having low insight, it might be much more difficult to not make the story (or the scene) about it - if you don't go out of your way to acknowledge them as hallucinations then it will look like there is no hallucinations present, since the character will just consider them to be real. It'd just be another part of the setting - you can obviously throw in something that would be clearly out of place for the reader, but it will raise questions that you should probably address, thus making the scene about the hallucinations.

A similar thing can happen if your character is experiencing an unpleasant hallucination - you kinda have to make the scene about it. if the character is scared, it'd be weird to ignore that. You can of course go "they saw a peculiar creature in the yard, one so weird that they knew right away it wasn't really there, so they decided to ignore it," since you can be aware of a hallucination being fake while still being disturbed. In that situation you can have the character purposefully trying to distract themself, show them being under stress, or having another kind of reaction (e.g., using some sort of grounding technique, having a panic attack, etc).

Q: What are some common ways to tell what is and isn't a hallucination?

A: Visual: taking pictures/videos, taking off your glasses (hallucinations will sometimes stay in-focus when the real world blurs accordingly), asking another person if they also see it.

Auditory: recording the sound, asking another person.

Blind people having visual hallucinations and deaf people having auditory ones usually just assume that the hallucination is fake, especially if it's the only thing they are able to see/hear.

Olfactory: asking another person.

Tactile/somatic: no consistent way as far as I'm aware. In some circumstances you can tell by just looking (e.g. you feel like you're having a nosebleed, you can just look in the mirror to check) or asking another person (e.g. you feel like you're levitating), but for most hallucinations there is no way of telling (e.g. how would you check if there's something happening to your internal organs? Get a body scan of some sort maybe?).

Gustatory: if it's about a real food you can ask another person if they also feel the same taste, otherwise no way of telling as far as I'm aware.

Q: Does being able to logically differentiate between reality/hallucinations stop emotional responses?

A: It can, but it's not a guarantee by any means. Imagine you're on a rollercoaster or watching a horror movie: logically speaking, you know that you are safe - but still, you get scared, it's a natural response. If the insight helps someone emotionally, it's usually partial.

That said, being able to recognize something as a hallucination might (key word here) help someone stop having a psychotic episode, which could end the emotional response. But just because you know that something is fake doesn't mean you'll stop believing it. In fact knowing that you're believing something that is fake can be even more distressing than not knowing it's fake.

For some people, a hallucination could be traumatic or plain upsetting and continue to disturb them even after it's gone and they are no longer having an episode.

Not everyone will be particularly emotional though. Some people hallucinate 24/7 and just treat their hallucinations as another part of their day, even if they're fully conscious of them being fake.

Q: Can blind people have visual hallucinations/deaf people have auditory hallucinations?

A: Yes. For those where the two are connected, the former is called Charles Bonnet syndrome, the latter Musical Ear syndrome. The major distinction is that in both of those, the person experiencing the hallucinations usually has high insight (i.e., is aware that they are hallucinations) and they don't generally co-occur with delusions.

Blind and deaf people with residual vision/hearing can also experience "regular" visual/auditory hallucinations as well (and obviously other kinds too - nothing is stopping a deaf person from having olfactory hallucinations).

The one important caveat is that people with congenital cortical blindness do not, for unknown reasons, ever develop schizophrenia.

Delusions

[Plain text: Delusions]

Delusion is a fixed belief in something that is considered false, even after seeing evidence for the thing being untrue. The delusional belief isn't a part of the person's culture or religion, and isn't accepted as true among other members of their community. The belief is generally disturbing to the person and causes them distress.

The delusions that one can have are basically endless in terms of options, but they can be broadly put into two categories:

Bizarre: delusions that are impossible to occur in real life.

Examples:

being abducted by aliens,

having your thoughts broadcast over the radio,

being a supernatural entity.

Non-bizarre: delusions that are possible to occur, even if highly unlikely.

Examples:

being poisoned,

having a partner cheat on you,

being watched by the government.

Of course, in terms of fiction, what's considered "possible to occur in real life" might differ from these examples.

Delusions can also be categorized in "themes", such as:

Persecutory: the theme surrounds believing that one is being harassed, attacked, stalked, or conspired against, often by powerful entities. Frequently reported as the most common type of delusion, especially in schizo-spec disorders.

Grandiose: surrounds believing that one has special powers, status, knowledge, skills, has relationships with famous, powerful, and otherwise important people, or is such a person themself.

Jealousy: surrounds believing that one's partner is unfaithful.

Erotomanic: surrounds believing that another person, often of higher status, such as a celebrity, is in love with them.

Somatic: surrounds believing that there is something wrong with one's physical body, such as being infested with parasites, having blood replaced with a different liquid, or missing internal organs.

Religious: surrounds believing that one is a god or another religious figure, like a prophet or a saint, or is receiving directions/commands from those. A person doesn't have to actually be religious to experience religious delusions, nor has to be of the same religion that the delusion is about.

Thought manipulation: surrounds believing that one's thoughts are being manipulated in some way. Common examples include believing that one's thoughts are being broadcast, or that foreign thoughts are being purposefully inserted into their brain.

Mixed: delusions that match multiple of the aforementioned types. E.g. a character who thinks the government wants to kidnap them for their magical powers (persecutory+grandiose); a character who thinks that they are married to a famous pop star, and that she's cheating on them (erotomanic+jealousy), etc.

Unspecified: literally everything else.

There are also specific delusions which are often referred to as their own syndromes/disorders. They are generally considered very rare but they are frequently referenced in media. Some of them are:

Clinical lycanthropy: a delusion that one is turning into a werewolf. Often clinical lycanthropy is a catch all term now for clinical zooanthropy, which is the belief you are transforming into any sort of animal. It's very rare and can be part of a disorder such as schizophrenia or exist as a delusion on its own. Often people with it will start to behave alongside the disorder, such as eating raw meat or feeling somatic transformation, or hiding so as not to hurt others in their beastly state.

Delusional parasitosis/Ekbom's syndrome: a somatic delusion where you believe there are bugs/bacteria/parasites inside your body, generally under the skin. Commonly co-occurs with tactile/somatic hallucinations, adding realism to the delusion.

It very frequently results in self-harming behaviors in an attempt to "get them [parasites] out". That can be anything from skin scratching to auto-amputation or disembowelment. The less extreme ways can result in infections and painful skin conditions, sometimes solidifying the person in the delusion that their body is in fact infested. The more extreme ways can and probably will result in death for obvious reasons.

A common phenomenon associated with it is the "matchbox sign" where the person finds "evidence" of the "parasites" (usually dead skin, fabric, small pieces of food, etc.) and shows it to someone, often a doctor, as proof of the infestation (matchbox coming from it being the go-to container for the "specimen", but honestly it can be anything. Who even has matchboxes anymore). A person with this disorder can also obsess over parasites/other animals that can in fact infest humans, potentially forcing them to avoid certain activities as much as possible (not eating meat, not going into forests, obsessively washing themself, etc).

To my knowledge this is the most common syndromic delusion, though it could be related to the fact that people with delusional parasitosis are also the most likely to see a doctor about it (though the doctor of choice would practically always be a dermatologist, not a psychiatrist) and thus get counted in statistics.

[Warning: the next three are entirely based on external sources since no mods have first-hand experience with them.]

Capgras syndrome: a delusional misidentification syndrome where the person believes that someone else has been replaced by a clone/double/impostor. Most commonly the person who was "replaced" is a close family member or a spouse. Rarely, a person can also think that multiple people or a group were "replaced". Very rarely, the person with the delusion might think that they themself have been "replaced".

The delusion might be persecutory in nature, where the person believes the "clone" is there to spy on them or hurt them. This can sometimes lead to attempts of "unmasking" or confronting the "impostor" in an attempt to get their loved one "back".

Fregoli syndrome: a delusional misidentification syndrome where the person believes that strangers or acquaintances are someone they know in disguise. While generally it centers around people, it can also happen with animals or objects. It usually has a persecutory aspect to it, where the person thinks the "disguised" person is trying to follow or harm them in some way.

Cotard syndrome: also sometimes known as "walking corpse syndrome". It's a wide-spectrum delusion where the person believes that they already are dead, are currently dying, are immortal (and thus unable to die), have died but were reborn in some way, or just don't exist. People who have it might also believe that their organs are gone, rotting, or dying. Some can also abandon their basic human needs (such as eating) since they think it's no longer necessary. Cotard syndrome is very rare in real life, especially in young people.

This is not an exhaustive list, just some examples.

Delusions FAQ

[Plain text: Delusions FAQ]

Q: What do delusions feel like?

A: So, it primarily depends on "insight" - whether the person has no, low, or high insight into their own delusion. The vast majority of people who experience delusions will have very little to no insight during their psychotic episodes.

Delusions feel like every other thing that's real, except they aren't, well, real. During a psychotic episode, delusions are facts as much as everything else around you - you don't question them since they feel obvious.

In delusions, there's lack of proof - which can be filled in by hallucinations (person believes they have a lethal disease, and starts hallucinating symptoms), explained by the delusion itself (person believes that someone else is in love with them, and interprets regular behaviors as "signs"), or simply ignored (the average person also doesn't know how [random everyday technology] actually works, but knows that it's a real thing that exists - people don't tend to question things they simply consider to be true, even if they don't really understand them).

Q: How to describe delusions in a sensitive manner?

A: To quote myself from earlier: Sensitivity and delusions is less about being sensitive about the delusions, and more about the person having them. Delusions can be of anything, about anything, they can sound stupid and seem absurd to outsiders. I'm not saying "write the most ridiculous delusion you can think of for fun", more so "yes, some people do have unusual beliefs due to having the Unusual Belief Disorder".

Delusions are frustrating for everyone involved almost by definition. They aren't true and they directly affect what you believe, so they make you believe nonsense. And you can't "just explain lol" to the person that what they're saying/thinking is untrue because, well, it's a delusion. By definition, the belief being verifiably false really doesn't matter.

What's important to remember is that the delusional person isn't doing it on purpose. It's not a case of someone Purposefully Spreading Misinformation or rejecting factual data to further their agenda, it's a mental illness. Portraying it as a choice or some moral failure is simply incorrect. You can't just "opt-out" and magically stop being delusional.

So, what to actually do?

Recognize that delusions generally aren't fun. Obviously, everyone's experience is different, but delusions tend to be distressing. Persecutory ones will almost always be very negative, while a religious or grandiose one could even feel positive for someone if they think they are an angel or have some amazing talent.

Try to show the character's feelings in a sympathetic way, not a mocking one. What they believe isn't true, but their feelings are as real as anyone else's.

It's also important to remember that a delusion is something you genuinely believe. Try to put yourself in that position: you simply know some things. What your name is, how your pet looks like, where you live, whatever. If someone tried to convince you that you are wrong about these things you'd think they're crazy. Imagine your coworker talking to you like they know your home life better than you do. Depending on the exact circumstances, you would probably have some sort of reaction - whether that be anger, being baffled, or just kinda weirded out.

It's the same when someone is delusional, and the "things you simply know" just happen to not actually be true.

This kinda leads to considering the ways in which a delusional character interacts with others. Some delusions are ignorable - the other character can kinda just nod and change the topic and move on. Others are a bit more in your face (e.g. the character thinks they are some higher being, or they think the character they're directly talking to wants to hurt them). Again, just telling someone "that's not true lol" doesn't really do much, if anything it can make the delusion worse (again: imagine you confront someone who you think is poisoning you, and they just say "um but I'm not?? what are you talking about lol you sound crazyy"). Try to consider what the relationship between the characters is, and what their personalities are - are they considerate, are they impatient, do they understand how the delusions affect the other character? Does the other character realize/know that the psychotic character is in psychosis at all?

Q: How do I incorporate delusions into a character's voice realistically?

A: TLDR: It's can be hard to make dialogue that sounds realistic for a character who has the disconnect-with-reality disorder.

First, try to consider how your character experiences their delusions in general. Are they extremely disturbed and can't stop thinking about their delusion when they're having an episode, or is it more of a background noise?

If it's disturbing them, then it probably won't sound realistic. When the delusion is all-consuming, the person having it might talk about it in circles and relate everything to it. Depending on how the psychotic character actually behaves, other characters might feel like they're being pranked because it just seems like "too much". It might be "like in the movies". The character can be going in circles trying to figure out how to stop NASA from broadcasting their thoughts around the globe; this happens.

At the same time, sometimes the delusion is much more covert. Sometimes on purpose (e.g. character with persecutory delusions believes that they are being observed, and doesn't want the observer to realize that they are aware of the observing, so they actively choose not mention anything about it), sometimes as a by-product of the way the delusion affects them (e.g. character with an erotomanic delusion isn't distressed by it, and they just vaguely mention their 'partner' in a way that doesn't really even tip anyone off).

If it's the first, you might be dealing with a character who is simply nervous/hiding something (because, well, they are). They might avoid certain topics or visibly get more stressed if the conversation goes into uncomfortable territory.

If it's the second, it will probably be more subtle. Perhaps you-wouldn't-be-able-to-tell-it's-a-delusion subtle. It depends on the character's exact delusion though. Some would just be considered non-events (they say they have a partner who's famous, or that they are accomplished in some way), relatively normal/common events (partner is cheating on them, they have some serious illness), and some would be clearly bizarre (they say that their parents have been replaced by robotic clones, or that they are some mythical creature). If it's the first or the second, there might be no "tell", or maybe there will be some logical errors that other characters can catch on to, maybe there will be some inconsistencies when the character asks about it further, or maybe there will be nonsensical changes that happen between different retellings of the story that let others know something is off.

If it's the third clearly-bizarre option, then the "delusion reveal" might feel like it's coming out of nowhere, or create a sudden tone shift. It will be explained further in the post more, but psychosis isn't always obvious. Sometimes you learn that someone is psychotic because they say one thing that makes absolutely no sense. Again: it might feel abrupt, unexpected, other characters might think that they are being pranked at first. Just don't make the narrative make fun or mock the delusional character.

As to what you shouldn't do: no matter how delusional someone is, people still have other traits. Delusions aren't a replacement for backstory, relationships, preferences, or personality. They can and do affect them (and vice-versa), but if all the character talks about is their delusions, it will come off as either boring and flat, or a parody.

Psychosis FAQ

[Plain text: Psychosis FAQ]

Q: Can psychosis go undetected by the people around the person experiencing it, or is it very obvious?

A: Depends (sorry). But yes, sometimes it can absolutely go undetected, especially in case of a person experiencing mundane non-bizarre delusions and/or hallucinations.

It can also depend on the actual cause of the psychosis - for example, schizophrenia often comes with disorganized speech (among other things) which is definitely noticeable.

On the other hand, Delusional Disorder is often referred to as a "high functioning" disorder where it can be very hard for others to notice anything is wrong. It's generally characterized by non-bizarre delusions, unremarkable behavior ("not odd"), relatively non-impaired functioning, and any hallucinations that come with it are relatively minor and most importantly, fit the theme of the (probable) delusion.

My own absolutely worst psychotic episode went undetected by everyone I was living with at the time (in a tiny apartment at that). For someone else, a stranger could notice that they are experiencing psychosis from the other side of the road. It's a very wide spectrum, and a person can be on different ends of it at different times of their life.

It's basically: could you tell that your coworker who is ranting about their wife cheating on them is having a psychotic episode? Because they could be, and you probably wouldn't even consider it as an option since it's a very mundane delusion. On the other hand, if the coworker told you that their wife has been replaced by an identical evil clone overnight, you will know there's something going on because that's not a thing that happens.

Q: What impacts what hallucinations and delusions come up? Are they random?

A: As far as I'm aware, there's no actual research on this. We know that certain types of hallucinations and delusions are more common in specific disorders (e.g. in schizophrenia, auditory hallucinations and persecutory delusions are more common than other types), but that's about it. We don't know why certain people hallucinate cats meowing, and other ones hear demonic screaming.

Anecdotally speaking, people tend to stick to their delusions rather than have a completely new kind every time they have a new psychotic episode. It could be literally the same delusion following them ("the government is watching me"), it could branch out over time ("the government is spying on me and stealing my thoughts"), or incorporate other delusions that still somewhat connect, either in theme (in this case persecutory) or in subject (in this case government-related). In my experience, it would be very unusual for a person to have a psychotic episode where their delusions center around one thing with a specific theme, go into remission, and then have their next episode center something completely different with a fully unrelated theme (excluding "major event happening between the two episodes" type stuff). Having unrelated hallucinations is more frequent since multimodality is very common.

The content of delusions or hallucinations is essentially "anything". It can be related to trauma, but doesn't have to. It can be related to the person's daily life, but doesn't have to. It can make sense from the outside, but doesn't have to.

Q: What do antipsychotics do from a more first-person perspective? How do they affect the symptoms of psychosis?

A: Make you sleepy... no, the biggest thing my antipsychotics have done when dosed correctly and on the right mix is they have helped give me a tool to more easily establish what is real or true and not. Even "in remission", a person with psychosis may experience hallucinations or mild delusions. It's less the symptoms that stop and more that they stop being as disturbing and disruptive, in my (mod bert again!) experience. They do not affect speech or negative symptoms for me, however.

Other mod here! When on the wrong antipsychotic, my delusions and hallucinations got meaner. They were more persecutory and I also experienced "old" hallucinations that I had not seen in a while returning. However, on my best dosage, my antipsychotics made my hallucinations nicer and quieter. Not as in like literally less loud, but they became easier to ignore. Like above, I have never seen an improvement in my speech or cognitive symptoms from medication.

Q: What kind of things can trigger a psychotic episode?

A: Technically speaking, anything can. It depends a lot on the actual disorder causing the psychosis (no points for guessing what triggers an episode in someone who has Medication-Induced Psychotic Disorder), but the most common triggers would be:

high stress,

recent traumatic event,

substance use,

sleep deprivation,

and social isolation.

My symptoms can be triggered by talking about them or seeing content similar to my hallucinations and delusions. For example, hearing a bible story triggered a religious hallucination, etc.

Sometimes the trigger is also "nothing" as far as the person experiencing the episode knows.

Things to Avoid

[Plain text: Things to Avoid]

Violent psychotic characters, especially ones that kill others because of "the voices"/"the visions". Psychotic people are much more likely to be violent towards themselves than anyone else.

Magical psychotic characters where the psychiatric disorder is some sort of magic system mechanic. A mentally ill character can have powers or whatever, but don't make symptoms into something they aren't.

Delusions/hallucinations that predict the future or have some other kind of omniscient quality to them. Again, this is a real medical condition, not a writing prompt.

Rule of thumb: would you still make the character psychotic even if their symptoms served no purpose in terms of worldbuilding and/or establishing something supernatural? Because if the answer is no, you have to rethink some things.

Psychotic characters who always have to be one of the like, four possible character archetypes (evil cannibalistic serial killer/mad scientist/Victorian era child in a horror movie/side character whose delusions are played for a joke and/or to show how 'dumb' they are).

Things We Want to See

[Plain text: Things We Want to See]

Regular people who just happen to be psychotic because of a mental health condition.

Psychotic characters who also experience other symptoms of their condition. Schizophrenia, the most commonly portrayed psychotic disorder, has many more symptoms than just that.

Psychotic characters who aren't young. Elderly people are actually the most likely to develop psychosis, childhood onset is extremely rare in comparison.

Psychotic characters who aren't white, physically abled men. Your character can be of literally any background, anyone can develop psychosis. In media it's almost exclusively either white men with poorly "researched" schizophrenia to portray them as crazy and dangerous, or sometimes women with delusions (usually erotomanic/jealousy type for obvious reasons) to portray them as crazy and unbearable to be around.

Characters who experience other kinds of hallucinations than just auditory and visual ones.

Characters who experience cognitive and speech symptoms.

Characters with other disabilities.

Characters who need a lot of support as a direct result from their psychosis. This should be portrayed as a neutral thing.

Psychotic characters who still have a social life! And hobbies!

Characters with MDD [major depressive disorder] that experience hallucinations/psychosis as a result. This was something I experienced during one of my worse periods and I have quite literally never seen anyone talk about MDD with psychosis outside of a medical context.

Happy writing!

I read this, and I can tell from the “review” that the package was NOT shipped by a professional.

One: two inch tape. Professional establishments use three inch. It’s MUCH easier to seal boxes with, especially around the edges. Two inch is what you can buy from office depot or lowe’s. It’s fine for moving house, but it’s definitely not professional grade.

Two: no edge tape. Just seal your edges, people. UPS basically plays soccer with your packages. Even the light ones, just on principal, give them the structural support you can offer.

Three: centered label. Looks pretty on a package, sure, but it makes it very likely that the label will be covered up when the box is sitting in a stack or a pile, and that increases the chance that it will be manhandled to get to that label or even potentially mis-scanned or missed altogether in a stack. Label the SIDE of the box if at all possible! And put it to the side if you can’t! Visibility!

One: two inch tape. Professional establishments use three inch.

Nope. For packages I see, two inch packing tape is the norm. Today I had one package with three-inch water-activated reinforced paper tape and one (from Uline) with 2.75" packing tape. Everything else used 2" packing tape. Yes, it's exactly the same kind of stuff that you can get at Office Depot or Lowe's, and people use it because it gets the job done.

Two: no edge tape.

Not uncommon for small, light packages. I just don't see box failures on packages under a pound where more tape would have helped. Where I do see failures is overloaded boxes, thirty pounds and up, where the corrugate simply ripped, and no amount of tape would have saved the package.

PSA: please don't fill an 8x8x6 single-wall box with machine screws and expect it to arrive intact. Fastenal, I'm looking at you.

Three: centered label.

Label on top is standard. I had only one box today with the label on the side, and all the rest on top.

Looks pretty on a package, sure, but it makes it very likely that the label will be covered up when the box is sitting in a stack or a pile, and that increases the chance that it will be manhandled

Your package will get manhandled, regardless of where you put the label. Plan on it.

to get to that label or even potentially mis-scanned or missed altogether in a stack. Label the SIDE of the box if at all possible!

Heck no! I expect labels to be on top and that's the first place I look for them. If it's on the side, that's potentially four other places I have to look, which is a pain in the ass when I'm busy. And I'm always busy.

UPS, incidentally, says you should put the label on the largest surface. For the packages I get, that's usually the top.

Someone who has shipped too many boxes would comment on whether the box was new or reused,

Okay, that's legit. I do see a fair number of reused boxes.

whether there was any special hazmat (mostly lithium-ion battery) labeling

Hazmats aren't common enough to mention it every time when there isn't one present. (My hazmats are usually solvents or paint, and that's not something I get every day.)

the condition of the package post shipping

Not usually noteworthy. My internal monolog (which is what the above fanciful review is based on) doesn't bother to mention it unless something unusual happened to the box.

whether or not the weight of the package matched the stated weight on the label

Although I ship just as many packages as I receive, if not more, it never would have occurred to me to check. And I don't have a scale in the receiving department, so it would be guesswork anyway.

AND they’d have commented on the two-inch packing tape.

Which everyone uses. There's not much need to comment when it's far and away the most common type of tape.

Common Faux-Archaic Word Swaps

Pronouns & Address

you → thou / thee (singular, informal)

your → thy / thine

yours → thine

yourself → thyself

my → mine (before vowels: mine eyes)

sir / ma’am → my lord / my lady

friend → good sir / good woman

Tip: Overusing thou can feel forced. Many modern fantasy stories skip it entirely.

Verbs & Actions

are → art

is → be

have → hast / hath

do → dost

did → didst

will → shall

can → may

must → must needs

go → depart

come → approach

leave → take one’s leave

stay → remain

die → perish

kill → slay

help → aid

stop → cease

begin → commence

Common Descriptors

before → ere

after → henceforth

now → presently

soon → anon

always → ever

never → ne’er

maybe → mayhap

nothing → naught

anything → aught

angry → wroth

afraid → afeard

tired → weary

quiet → hushed

dark → gloomed / shadowed

Faux-Archaic Phrases (Very Usable)

“I would have words with you.”

“So it shall be.”

“You speak boldly.”

“This matter is settled.”

“I will hear no more of this.”

“Mark my words.”

“Gods be good.”

“By my honor.”

“It is not my place.”

“Let it be known.”

“You overstep.”

“Enough of this.”

“On my life.”

“Say it plain.”

Dialogue Tone Shifts (Modern → Faux-Archaic)

“What do you want?” → “Speak your purpose.”

“I don’t trust you.” → “I place no faith in you.”

“You lied to me.” → “You spoke false.”

“We’re out of time.” → “Time runs thin.”

“This is dangerous.” → “This path is perilous.”

“I’ll handle it.” → “I shall see to it.”

Syntax Tricks (This Is the Secret Sauce)

Instead of archaic words, shift sentence structure:

Put emphasis first → “Never have I seen such folly.”

Drop contractions → “I will not” instead of I won’t

Slightly formal word order → “Gone are the days of mercy.”

Replace casual filler → “Well…” → “So…” / “Then…”

Writing Tip:

Good faux-archaic prose is about restraint, not accuracy.

☽ Memory becomes absolute garbage. Like “why am I in the kitchen?” garbage. “What was I saying?” garbage. Their brain is running on buffering screens and regret.

☽ Fine motor skills? Ha. They’re dropping everything. Pens. Phones. Entire moral compass. They’re basically a malfunctioning claw machine.

☽ Hallucinations creep in. That jacket on the chair? Suddenly a person. That noise? Definitely doom. Everything becomes mildly haunted.

☽ Time gets weird. Five minutes feel like a year. A full hour disappears and they swear they blinked wrong.

☽ Irritation skyrockets. They get mad at chairs. At air. At gravity. At the audacity of other humans continuing to exist.

☽ Their voice sounds weird. Slow, scratchy, like they swallowed sand.

☽ They walk like a drunk baby giraffe. Walls suddenly jump closer. Floors rise unexpectedly. Coordination said: “I’m out.”

☽ Zoning out becomes a hobby. They stare at random objects like they’re trying to understand quantum mechanics.

☽ Vision blurs in and out. Like someone smeared Vaseline over their eyeballs out of spite.

☽ Their body just hurts. Not a dramatic pain, just the “why does my skeleton feel like it’s buzzing?” pain.

☽ Food cravings go feral. They’d fight someone for a stale cookie.

☽ Terrible choices. They will absolutely say “I’m fine” while making decisions that end in disaster.

☽ Random emotional implosions. Crying because their sock feels wrong? Yes.