#I've been casually hallucinating for a couple weeks and told my psychiatrist that it's really not a big deal lmao

[karamazovposting]

I've briefly talked about it before (it's somewhere in my bipolar Ivan Karamazov agenda tag) but I genuinely love how Ivan's situation is treated through the story and I really relate to it because it's so realistic and well done.

I mean, Ivan himself openly and casually admits that yeah I might kill myself in less than ten years but it's not a big deal or anything mid conversation with his brother who he hasn't seen in almost a decade like it's a completely normal thing to say and think about (because to him it is) and the narrator is like oh Ivan sees dead people sometimes but it's alright and everyone else is just cool with it.

Yes, Ivan is struggling with his mental health, but it's not treated as an epic descent into madness for the drama or for shock value or a Jekyll and Hyde or extreme situation out of ignorance or, worse, mockery. He's just a mentally ill young man being treated like a person who needs help (I wish the people around me had been as concerned and caring as Alyosha and Katya were, to be honest) and even if it's a story written and set in the 19th century, no one's ever disrespectful towards him: no demeaning language (for the time period), no mockery, everyone takes him seriously and it's even highlighted that he's still capable of rationality (his defining character trait; he has not lost himself!); even after the whole trial fiasco, no one's angry at him, they just acknowledge that he's unwell. There is something particularly delicate about how his character is handled, a particular kind of sensitivity and softness paired with a lack of exaggeration and spectacularization that really positively surprised me when I first read the book because I wasn't expecting Ivan's condition to be an accurate portrayal of what I have been through and live with every day.

Even when Ivan is distressed by it, the story never gets too dramatic with that and it never drags it on for too long and that's what I love about his talk with the devil and the trial: it's all very neutral in the most respectful way possible given the context. I don't really know how to explain this, but (at this point everyone and their mother knows) I have bipolar disorder and that's exactly what living with it (or any mental health condition I guess) is like: it's casual, it's normal, it's not a big deal; that's just your life and you gotta live it. There is a lot of nuance that I didn't think I would find so accurately portrayed in a novel from almost two-hundred years ago.

Ivan is more or less neutral towards and comfortable in his own chaos because what else can he do, really?