#but knowing there’s absolutely no escaping this pain because my conditions are not just incurable but also really difficult to treat

[stillgotscars]

does anyone have any tips for someone who is having one of those days where their chronic pain is so debilitating that the act of existing is starting to feel excruciatingly draining? asking for a friend.

[scripttorture]

In a fanfic I'm writing, a character goes through multiple types of torture as a form of punishment. (These are going to be mainly whipping, lack of food, and being chained to a wall, but due to my own personal squeamishness I'm going to be keeping these offscreen.) She is able to escape her torturer/abuser, and escapes to what is essentially a magical copy of her house. (Part 1)

In this copy, she is able to access anything that she would have been able to access in the real version of her house other than Wi-Fi, phone service, and any other way of contacting the outside world (mainly due to being in an alternate dimension; house is fueled by magic.) Because she has stimulus and is hiding from her torturer/abuser, would this help to mitigate the effects of being in solitary confinement? (Part 2 of 2)

-

Probably not. Sorry.

 I think you could argue that she has a reason to want to be isolated and that that could help her voluntarily stay isolated for longer but she’s basically being driven to this. So I don’t think that ‘cause’ would reduce her stress or lessen the effects of isolation.

 But even people who voluntarily isolate themselves for long periods (some of whom are presumably more resistant to the effects of isolation) develop symptoms and I don’t think this scenario is closest to truly voluntary isolation.

 I wouldn’t compare this scenario to hermits or long distance sailors. I’d compare it to prisoners who are targetted for abuse by other prisoners.

 One of the consistent reasons prisoners give for not reporting abuse is that policies to protect them which amount to solitary confinement. A decent number of prisoners will choose to deal with physical abuse rather then face solitary confinement. And those who do choose solitary confinement will often ask to be put back in the general population.

 This strongly suggests that solitary, even when chosen, is still an incredibly damaging and painful experience.

 We know that solitary confinement makes mental illnesses worse. It does this across the board for every condition that has been tested.

 Combining that with the number and severity of mental health problems torture causes solitary is- Well bluntly it kills.

 You haven’t given a time frame, which is fair enough you may not have decided on one yet, but the heavy implication is that we’re talking about prolonged solitary confinement. This character is going into hiding. She’s likely to be confined for well over a week. Probably months, possibly years.

 These are dangerous time frames for a character who started out healthy. For a character who enters this scenario with severe mental health problems it would be a lot lot worse. Partly because they just wouldn’t get the chance to heal.

 I think that leaves the question of what the right choice for this story is.

 Based on the summary I get the impression you want to minimise the effect of solitary confinement here and avoid adding even more symptoms for the character to deal with. The best way to do that is to minimise solitary confinement.

 That doesn’t mean you have to remove the idea of her running to this safe harbour. I feel like that’s an integral part of the story.

 But is there a reason that this magic must cut her off from everyone? Is there a reason that she can’t occasionally leave and socialise?

 If the abuser can use magic to track and chase her outside of this one safe place why can’t she do the reverse? And if she can do the reverse she can work out how long it would take for him to catch up. Which means she can work out how much time she has outside of her safe zone.

 This would not be a relaxed or nice situation to live in. But it would give her a way to satisfy her social needs.

 Similarly depending on how the magic works in this setting you could have other people occasionally stumbling upon this house. Deliberately or accidentally.

 If you’re picturing it as being at a sort of magical half-way point, a liminal space, then couldn’t others stumble across this threshold? Especially if it’s only designed to keep a specific group of people out.

 They wouldn’t need to stay. The visits could be irregular and somewhat random. They could be as much a source of stress as of comfort.

 But again, it would give her a way of fulfilling a basic need.

 You could also imagine this refuge as a series of shared spaces, rather then a singular one. She’s created her own house. Perhaps if she opens the backdoor she’d find herself stepping into someone else’s safe space. Perhaps there could be a community in this place.

 You could also use magic to change the way the character perceives time. Perhaps she realises her own limits and puts herself in to an enchanted sleep, waking at a set time years later when her abuser may well have given up looking for her.

 Magic also creates another option that’s worth considering: I’ve mentioned before that there isn’t any way to bypass our need for company, we’re social animals and this need is a fundamental part of the way our nervous system is constructed. I have said in the past that to have a character completely unaffected by solitary confinement they would need to stop being human.

 You have magic. That is an option.

 And if she’s desperate enough to run into this limited lonely world for relief then she might be desperate enough to try something that drastic.

 Of course you might want to stick with solitary confinement and everything that goes along with it.

 It would be an awful experience for the character but if you’re sensible about time frames it could still be survivable.

 I’d suggest six months as an absolute maximum if you really want to test the character to destruction. I think 1-3 months is a more reasonable period in terms of survival.

 It would put back the character’s recovery by a very long time. Probably years.

 Her existing symptoms would get a lot, lot worse. And she might find that particularly distressing if she expected escape to mean she’d feel better.

 She’d also develop new symptoms, some of which might be more frightening then the symptoms of torture. Because most people tend to associate psychosis, hallucinations and irrational impulses with… bad portrayals of incurable ‘insanity’. These are disturbing symptoms to experience anyway, that cultural baggage makes them even more so.

 Once again, I highly recommend Shalev’s Sourcebook on solitary confinement for accounts of these symptoms.

 Sticking with solitary confinement means that it’s likely a good portion of the narrative will end up being about symptoms and about recovery.

 There’s nothing wrong with deciding that’s the story you want to tell but it can be incredibly daunting if it wasn’t the story you were planning on.

 Beyond that you might want to take a look at my post about researching and writing difficult topics.

 Because it can be really really hard. Both in the sense of actually writing and emotionally. All of the stories I’ve finished that dealt primarily with things like torture have been difficult projects.

 Recognise your limits and be kind to yourself. Take breaks. Don’t force yourself to continue when you’re distressed.

 The work will still be there tomorrow.

 I hope that helps. :)

Availableon Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[zauns-eye]

This uh is my DND characters backstory. Prepare for a fucking ride

It had been a long time since (insert obscure town name) had a competent doctor who actually did their job.

Pierre easily filled that position in only two weeks of work.

In two weeks, he had cured the terminally ill, cured previously thought to be incurable ailments, and reorganized the entire office of practice to be more efficient, and easier to function in, adding a library of reference and a surgical block downstairs in the basement.

He was an absolute protege, to say the least. He'd definitely made the others in the practice a bit nervous for their jobs. Though, he easily ascended to the position of head physician. Which made then even more nervous.

Though considering he regularly held classes for the other doctors to get up to his level, clearly he had no intention of removing anyone from their place of work.

His free time was filled with study. He couldn't rest easy unless he was either working, or filling his mind further, with all he could possibly learn to better his work.

As plague doctor stories go, of course there has to be a plague.

It wiped out half the town in a week, and even Pierre had trouble keeping his patients alive through this one. His colleagues didn't even stand a chance.

Out of 12 doctors, 7 survived, including Pierre of course.

Out of the 500 or so who lived in the town, only 100 were left by the end of it.

And who might you guess brought the end of it?

Pierre of course. Though he did ask for help from some obscure leech dealer who got him some pretty interesting bigass leeches.

When things began looking up for the doctors and the town, thanks to Pierre's work and the Giant Leech™ dealer's leeches, his co-workers began to think something fishy. How the fuck is Pierre so fucking competent? Maybe he actually studied medicine and didn't just fuck around in a fucking corpse pretending to practice anatomy.

He did extra studies on leeches of course and helped breed an Extra Special Leech™. Though there was only one and the leech dealer didn't really want to part with it.

Of course some time after the end of the plague things went well. Pierre was a goddamn hero for fucks sake. You can't just. Make a fucking hero dissapear.

Though when things from that cooled down. Oh boy.

Pierre unfortunately, at that time was pretty naive when it came to the ill will of others. He in all honesty believed in and saw only the good in people.

He completely didn't see it coming when he ended up strapped to a chair in his own surgical procedure room.

After a few hours of contemplation however, he got pretty salty and came round. This is where his bitterness and hatred of humanity begins.

For the first few days, he thanks the fact that he has a high pain tolerance. The chimera blood was bad, but not too bad.

However it's when they start with his hands that it gets messy. Unfortunately that is pretty soon too.

First the fingernails go all ten- but that's fine. He can work without fingernails- but Oh God No it gets worse than that.

Each individual bone, save probably the carples in each hand was broken, the skin burned and blistered from boiling water, and both hands stabbed all the way through multiple times.

Apparently they'd run out of ideas on what to do with his hands eventually because they did move on to the rest of him.

Now strapped to a steel medical table, the rest of him didn't look much better than his hands. Multiple bone breaks, lots of burns, lots of bruises, lots of cuts.

The worst probably was the literal vivisection which hed somehow miraculously survived. Magic probably.

Definitely magic.

Pierre began to search for some way to escape reality. Somehow push all this aside and be someplace else. His office maybe? Curled up on the deep green sofa, making notes in a tome of bacteriological ailments, glancing up at the clock occasionally. The walls had jesters masks hung up as decor, well. The office actually had a sort of jestery theme to it. Nothing tasteless of course.

Candlelit, with an open window letting in the night air, reading---

---- c r u n c h

The sudden feeling of having his ribs actually broken was enough to snap him out of the daydream.

The next few months passed like this. Pierre had gotten better at 'escaping to his happy place'.

They'd gotten a new head physician.

Told him Pierre was a lunatic clown who thought he was a doctor.(Wonder where they got the idea. Probably the jester themed office decor)

The new head physician could probably be classified as an actual sadist.

He had absolutely no problem giving Pierre a completely unnecessary beating for 'even having such a deluded idea'. And continuing with the torture part by using him as a guinea pig for various experiments

Pierre's kind of... Lost his spark in that time. Lost the saltiness. Lost most of what made Pierre himself.

The new head physician found this... Intriguing.

The passive, disociating hollowness that Pierre then ebbed gave him plenty of ideas.

Well. For starters, he'd finish with the clown work first.

Having a source of entertainment completely devoted to him was an attractive concept.

And thats how through conditioning and manipulation, the new head physician created pretty much a case of Stockholm Syndrome and erased Pierre's past.

Eventually the torture stopped. He was let up, redressed as a jester and kept there, as a sort of emotional and physical punching bag for his replacement. Occasionally as a source of comfort and the sense of superiority and ego boosting. It actually fucking sucked.

But Pierre was now dependant on this person. Followed him everywhere, did everything he said.

Eventually, the 'new' physician died of... Unknown causes.

Unknown causes being that Pierre remembered a little, though for a short enough time to push it all back again and keep all that buried and in no way accessible.

The body was found disemboweled and in an alleyway with a syringe stuck through the eye.

Pierre left the town, seeing as he got a lot of weird looks there. Like.. the people recognized him? Weird. He'd never been here before.

He left for another town and made a living performing. Playing the violin was easy. He didn't have any feeling in his fingertips so the strings, despite leaving calluses, didn't hurt at all.

He seemed to be a natural, like he'd played before. Though he knew he'd only just started with music.

Pierre the jester quickly made a name for himself after he explained how he got there, and was named the town madman because nothing he said actually made much sense. And was usually pretty worrying

He was some doctor's adoptive son or maybe lover? Has an interest in medicine himself? Please this idiot couldn't treat a scrape.

It was when hed stolen a body from the cemetery to disect that he became a nuisance to society.

He was chased out of this town and he moved.

This was repeated several times. Though Pierre's jestery skills grew, so did his passion for medicine. He wanted to know more. He wanted to help people. He wanted- he forgot what he wanted.

His old town hospital had received a letter addressed to him.

The letter spent a while being mailed and remailed before it made it to Pierre.

Some invitation to be the medic on a job from Gundran Rockseeker?

Oh shit! He could finally prove himself as a Totally Great Doctor™ now!

[supergrandpocalypse]

Beached Carcass of a soul

Amid the many great leaps the Murcian Empire made towards modernization, it would be easy to forget the many mistakes made during this period. Whenever such a mistake was made, the people already stood marvelling at the newest service that was imported from overseas. One of these forgotten mistakes was the Penter Hospital for the Diseased of Mind. During the reign of Bertram Penter, this hospital was constructed in an attempt to follow through with modernity and the importance of a mentally healthy population. However, after it was constructed the government quit caring about it and promptly decreased funding to an absolute minimum. As a result - only ten years after it was founded - the hospital was understaffed and most patients were refused. Those who did reside there were usually members of the nobility who had been there for many years, due to the incurable nature of the disease they had. If one could afford it, one would prefer to hire a private psychiatrist from abroad over the risk of dealing with the Penter Hospital’s terrible reputation.

One of the members who remained stranded there was marquess Léon de Vingouane. Léon was born as the sole child of the duke of Vingouane, one of Murcia’s more powerful rulers. Born into great wealth, Léon’s childhood was fairly normal for a noble child and he had a bright future ahead of him. This all changed shortly after he reached the age of fourteen. Around that time, he reportedly started seeing people talking to him late at night. At the end of his fourteenth year, similar events began happening to him during the day as well. Finally, the family requested a doctor. However, in accordance with contemporary psychology, the doctor believed that the child was making it up and needed more attention.

With that advice in mind, his father spent less time ruling the country and more with his son. Despite this, Léon’s condition worsened. As time progressed, he became less visible in court and more reclusive from social life. After his complete refusal to appear in public, he became even more drawn into himself, up to the point where he stopped talking at all. In response to this, Léon was sent to the Penter Hospital, where they took him in. At first, they hoped to break it through several treatments; they tried solitary confinement for several days, contrast bathing, electroshock therapy, and many more attempts. All failed, however. By now it had been many years since the last treatment was tried and he had remained there, with the thought that it would be better if he remained close to a source of treatment. When he was recently institutionalized he’d get regular visits from family, but this had reduced to once a year. Now, all that remained for him was either the discovery of a cure, or death.

This all changed, however, when he became possessed by a lackey of the King, a scor’elgh. This happened in the afternoon of Tuesday the first of March, 2994. After Léon made a short, agonizing scream in the process, he remained silent for a moment while breathing heavily. He would walk out of the room but the door was locked, so he tried to say something instead. All that came out was a soft yelp, however. After a few tries, the word “help” came out. Too soft. He tried to say the word again – louder - but again nothing happened. He did a final attempt, at the loudest Léon could manage, but nobody came once more.

‘Léon could’ve forgotten the language,’ the creature thought, ‘he must’ve not spoken for years in this institution.’

After this, the creature contemplated the difficulties of having to learn their language. It would have to spend a lot of time in learning a new language from scraps, as it would have no teacher who could understand his alien language. It would set his mission back with years. After these thoughts, the creature observed how inconvenient the human body is to it. It found the beating of the heart annoying; the breathing it found so as well as it had to remind itself of doing it constantly, because otherwise would make its chest hurt. It also did not know what to do with Léon’s arms; they simply laid there without any clear position that felt comfortable. Finally, there was his tongue –

Its thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a noise. All its senses directed themselves to the sound of a key being inserted into a lock, which subsequently turned. A person stepped out of the door that corresponded with the lock.

This person was a nurse, who immediately asked if Léon needed anything. At first Léon couldn’t muster a response, but after a few attempts he managed, ‘I... need to talk to... someone.’

‘Do you want to talk with the doctor?’ she responded.

‘Yes... please.’ Léon responded.

‘Okay, I’ll get the doctor, he should be here in a few minutes.’

As promised, the doctor came after roughly twenty minutes. He was a middle-aged man; his career started at the foundation of the hospital and he had remained there ever since, wishing that he had chosen a more prospective location for practice. The Penter hospital had a tendency to strand people.

Despite the above, the doctor was visibly excited to see something unusual happening for a change, ‘I came here as fast as I could. How are you?’

‘I’m… fine.’

‘Excellent. Um… do you feel any chest pains?’

‘What is pain?’ was the first thing the creature wanted to say, but it bluffed its way through the question by denying the presence of pain.

‘Good, good. I believe we can move this conversation to my office, then. Follow me, please.’

Léon tried to stand up, but stumbled and fell. He tried again; this time, he managed to successfully stand, but fell while taking the first step.

‘Help,’ Léon whispered.

‘Oh.’ The doctor thought for a second after which he concluded, ‘did… did your legs atrophy from sitting for too long? I suppose it has been multiple years.’

The doctor called a nurse, who carried Léon to the office. The halls of the hospital were clean, despite the lack of funding for the hospital, with clinical, white tiling. Each patient’s room had a large, metal door, probably so they couldn’t escape. Most rooms seemed open, however, due to the fact that the corresponding doors were open.

The doctor’s office continued the clinical white tiling and was scarcely decorated, with only a desk, a filing cabinet and a certificate in the back to ensure people that he was, in fact, qualified for his job. The certificate said that it was rewarded by the Ynys University to Mikhail Størner. The nurse sat Léon down on a chair, after which he left the room.

“Okay, we can begin,” Dr. Størner announced. “Do you experience any stabbing pains in your hands, either constant or in a specific rhythm?”

“What? …No.”

“Good, good. Don’t worry, it’s just standard procedure.” The doctor scribbled ‘Exorcism unhelpful’ down.

The doctor continued to ask questions about pain in his joints for another half hour, after which he concluded that Léon was healthy; this despite the fact that no questions were asked about his actual mental state.

“I suppose that I have no more reason to keep you here,” the doctor concluded.

“So this means that I can leave?” Léon asked eagerly.

“Technically, yes. Though you might want to stay for the night, as we are quite isolated here. If you were to leave now, you won’t reach anything of importance before midnight.”

“I don’t care. I need to reach the capital as soon as possible.”

“Wouldn’t you rather see your family first? They’d be delighted to hear of your return.”

Léon’s voice suddenly turned unpleasant, with which he responded snidingly, “Why, I need to buy a present for them, of course! They’d never accept my homecoming, were I to arrive empty-handed.”

Mikhail appeared somewhat shocked, “Oh. Um, very well. I shall prepare transport to bring you there. It should arrive by the evening.” Finally the doctor made haste, so that Léon could perform his task.

“In that case, I shall make preparations for my departure. I need decent clothes.”

“Yes, we have some for departing patients,” Mikhail said meekly.

“Excellent. Then I’ll dress myself. When I’m done, I shall wait in the guests’ quarters.”

“You don’t have to do that; I’m not too busy, so we could talk for a while,” Mikhail looked hopeful.

“No, thank you,” Léon responded with a rude tone of voice.

Léon left the room, and so, Mikhail was alone once more.