#hear me out: martian manhunter finds jason in his little murder tour and is like “how old are you even”

[glitter-stained]

That makes a lot of sense! I do acknowledge how silly it is to do in-depth psychological analysis about characters in the universe of the Joker, unfortunately that is the way through which I enjoy any work of fiction and I sometimes forget about the possibility the writers did not in fact care- or your theory, which sounds pretty plausible, that Winnick did not find the word "dissociation" impactful enough! It is pseudo-science with a level of suspension of disbelief, however I can't manage that when it comes to psychiatric/neuro disorders (and does he know that a single dissociative episode can last several years in extreme cases? Does Ra's know this? So many questions.)

I see why your brain went to dissociative amnesia/fugue, especially in the context of lived experience, but I personally like to stay far far away from that idea because of how widely contested it is and its ties with psychoanalysis. Yes, it is reversible, but we're also not sure if it exists- because cases of dissociative fugue are almost always found to be associated with events in which a hit to the head has occurred (aka further investigation reveals the possibility that a mild tbi went unnoticed in almost all reported cases that were analysed.) And if it does exist, the description I've been taught m listed wandering and amnesia but not necessarily the dissociative symptoms Jason shows in UTH.

The reason I'm talking about age is because I feel like, both from clinical description and lived experience, being in a years long deep dissociative state doesn't feel like lived experience at all. The way I would word it is like, catatonia is lived experience because it's a "the lights are off and the door is locked but somebody is home" situation: if someone is home, they're living in the house. However, with dissociation, it's closer to "the lights are on but nobody is home" (Ra's hypothesis) except Talia also has a point when she points out "hey he has some level or responsiveness to his environment" because altered states of consciousness exist on a spectrum, so I'd say it's closer to: "there is a house with three basements, one is close to the house and has a glass ceiling that shows the inside of the house and you can hear the doorbell, one is a little deeper, one is deeper even and almost completely shut-out from the rest of the house, no way to hear anyone ringing the doorbell. The lights are on. There's a person who's been holed up in a little room in the third basement for years. Is she living inside the house? What about if she were in the second level?" And the first?

So yeah I'd say to me the question of Jason's lived experience in Lost Days is less about the experience as in the memory of it and more as in the almost philosophical question of what does it mean to experience life. If you're shut down so deep inside your mind you barely interact with the world because you're trapped due to the effects of a tbi and vicious trauma, can that be called lived experience? Functionally, Jason doesn't learn any knowledge, his brain certainly doesn't mature, he doesn't "learn any life lesson" so to speak. As to whether he socialises, that's a good question. He's shown to be able to hear Talia speak to him about Bruce at one point, but it's unclear whether it's what Talia says or Bruce's name that causes Jason to shed a tear. He has a clear level of familiarity and attachment to Talia, but is he attached to the sound of her voice, her intonation, her gestures, etc.? How much of what he's hearing is getting through? The issue is Jason doesn't talk but we don't know why. Does he have aphasia (common in tbi in children, but often not complete mutism, more like evocative difficulties)? Is it anxious mutism due to the psychological trauma? Or is he too deep into his dissociative episode to be able to answer? There's a lot of uncertainty around that that stops us from drawing full conclusions. Also if there's the implication of Jason not remembering what happened like you pointed out, that would, to me, indicate how massively deep inside himself he was in terms of dissociation (and strengthen the dissociative episode > dissociative fugue hypothesis), simply because you can't remember what you weren't paying attention to. Personally I tend to disregard the whole period as "not really lived experience" and chop it off his age, but I think everyone puts the threshold wherever they want, and I acknowledge a reason I'm eager to jump on the "not lived experience" wagon is that it allows me to not count it in his age, and Jason already, in practice with the way the world handles him, loses years off his childhood. If I'm saying these years don't count, that means he at least spent the last years of his childhood learning so much stuff, going on adventures, killing child traffickers, exploding stuff, becoming a crime lord, traveling the world, living through so much stuff. Personally I find it way more bearable to handle when considering it that way. Tragedy enjoyers who like to put Jason through hell and feel sad about it might feel like him just losing the years is more compelling though! If I were Jason's therapist, I'd tell him what matters most is how HE interprets it, and that he can be 20 if he wants, he doesn't have to be 23 if he doesn't feel like it- fortunately for my life expectancy and potentially of turning to villainy (or marrying Bruce apparently) I am not Jason's therapist. But I would love to see a comics in which he decides "you know what? Fuck this shit I'm 20/21 years old. And I was the most successful teenage drug lord the world has ever seen, that's talent. Also I overpowered Black Mask at 16/17, how embarrassing for him lol."

Is it just me or does Jason not have catatonia in Red Hood: Lost Days?

It's been driving me crazy the more I think about it, his symptoms are way more consistent with dissociation than catatonia (not to mention the etiology fits much better. If you just gave me the list what happened to him and I had to pick what disorder he was most likely to suffer from (in RH: Lost Days) without describing anything, my bet would be on dissociation no question asked)

This is has enormous implications when it comes to the Lazarus Pit and what it can and cannot heal, how to calculate Jason's age, the diagnostic hypothesis we have for Jason and so much more. Am I missing something? Why does Winnick keep referencing to Jason's symptoms as catatonia?