#this also ended up being a meta about how things went with diana whoops

[movedyoakkemae]

spencer & “crash”. // rewrite.

notice: i have done a lot of research, but i have never had any personal experience with schizophrenia or interacting with someone with schizophrenia at all (i think). if any of this is inaccurate, and you feel the need to reach out to me, i will donate five dollars to any charity of your choice. you will not have to educate me for free. 

mentions of canonical child abuse, mental illness ( schizophrenia, depression ).

in season twelve, we are told that diana gave spencer the nickname “crash” because of how he used to always bump into things, but it’s heavily implied through context of the scene that it’s because she used to hit spencer during her delusions and forgot about it later. i... find that truly abhorrent for a couple of reasons, and thus that will not be canon to my spencer. 

when diana had her delusions brought on by schizophrenia, spencer was often brought with her into the delusions as someone she must protect. occasionally, she would leave bruises, but it wouldn’t be because she’d hit him, it would be because she was grasping his arm/shoulder/wrist too hard and didn’t want to let go in fear of losing him. after the first few times this happened, if spencer could mitigate that by having her clutch onto his hand, he would and that stopped most of the bruising.

for the most part, diana’s schizophrenia made her depressed (anhedonia, asociality, and  avolition), and she had delusions against the government and its purpose. however, she very rarely lashed out, and there have only been a few times where her delusions drove her to either flee the house (with spencer in tow) or do something drastic like rip out the phone or black out her windows. she was never violent, not to herself or to spencer.  

when spencer went to college and thus wasn’t with his mother full-time, he took trips over the weekends to see her and made sure that she was alright during the week. diana’s brother did, whenever spencer pleaded him to, sometimes visit diana during the week, but that wasn’t very often and only if diana missed any calls to check in for a period of three days. 

however, as spencer got older, diana’s apathy towards her own well-being got worse, and it wasn’t until spencer was eighteen that he applied for the power of attorney/healthcare proxy over his mother and received it. it was then he put diana in the best sanatorium in las vegas he could find and went into several local casinos in california (where the legal age to gamble was 18) and won upwards a few hundred thousand dollars (which got him banned) that went into diana’s care in particular. 

tl;dr: diana never hit spencer, and it’s insulting that they wrote a schizophrenic parent doing that in season twelve when there was literally no hint of that ever at all in any of the previous seasons.