When you are committed to a mental hospital in the USA, you generally have to consent verbally to surrendering your agency, or someone has to do it for you. You have to do this for the hospital to be able to treat you as "legally insane" so they can lock you up in a room and treat you like a prisoner or an enemy or some kind of other thing. Nurses then work hard to ignore you, doctors that see you for five minutes attempt to either belittle you or goad you into some kind of behavior that confirms their suspicions that you are an unstable and suicidal person that is a danger to yourself and to others. They keep you locked up for a week and make you take pills that make you puke and you aren't allowed to sleep when you want to and you have to pace a circular hall shaped like a fucking panopticon with a nurse's desk in the middle. You will never want to die more than right there.
Why do people want to kill themselves? Because they're depressed? Sure. Depression, usually, means that your brain is chemically deprived of serotonin or other hormones responsible for a healthy internal world. It makes things you like feel less meaningful, makes things you're afraid of more scary, makes things you don't want to do into the heaviest weights imaginable. It's easy to look at this and just say, yes, we need antidepressants, we need therapy, we need whatever other number of things to treat this fucked up serotonin vacuum.
So you get therapy and antidepressants and you give them an honest try and you end up in the psych ward anyway. You open your eyes again and it's a frustratingly familiar sterile white fiber board ceiling. A man one room over screams about how he wants to kill his bitch of a wife, how he wants to strangle himself. You will never want to die more than right there.
Why do we never ask what has led people to these states of serotonin drought? Is it because you are just designated "legally insane," that there is some integral piece of you that was made broken that must be rectified by the sparkling techno-brilliance of modern medicine? Is it because you are simply a lazy whiner that has had it too easy and the reason you are falling to pieces is the shattering weight of your own malaise?
Or is it maybe that there's not a solution so simple. Maybe the very fiber of what we've come to understand as living is fucked. Maybe it's the fact that the ambulance ride that took you to the hospital costs you several thousands of dollars. Maybe it's that you couldn't even afford to see the therapist they recommended you in the first place. Maybe it's that you can't hold down a steady job because they demand so much for so little and your hands shake when your manager raises their voice. Maybe it's because when you were young felt some kind of sting on your skin or in your mind and you couldn't even begin to imagine how long that sting would stay. Maybe it feels like you are shouldering the weight of something at all times, and it is invisible. You can't point to anything to say:
"Look now, doctor. Look at my burden. Look what I am coming apart under. Please, help me. Please, I want to be free of this. Lay poppies by my bedside if you must. Please."
What you actually say to the doctor isn't that. You say "sometimes I think about killing myself," and that's all it takes for the shape in the doctor's mind to be something broken, bruised and insane. You are wrong, no matter how much it feels to you like the world has been wrong. All you've wanted to do is explore it, to have some answers. You don't get that. You're stuck here. You can't even kill yourself. They tell you this hell is your own making. You believe them.
Small edit:
I recommend beating this game in a single sitting without stopping. The PC optimization is terrible though, fair warning.
Why do people want to kill themselves? Because they're depressed? Sure. Depression, usually, means that your brain is chemically deprived of serotonin or other hormones responsible for a healthy internal world. It makes things you like feel less meaningful, makes things you're afraid of more scary, makes things you don't want to do into the heaviest weights imaginable. It's easy to look at this and just say, yes, we need antidepressants, we need therapy, we need whatever other number of things to treat this fucked up serotonin vacuum.
So you get therapy and antidepressants and you give them an honest try and you end up in the psych ward anyway. You open your eyes again and it's a frustratingly familiar sterile white fiber board ceiling. A man one room over screams about how he wants to kill his bitch of a wife, how he wants to strangle himself. You will never want to die more than right there.
Why do we never ask what has led people to these states of serotonin drought? Is it because you are just designated "legally insane," that there is some integral piece of you that was made broken that must be rectified by the sparkling techno-brilliance of modern medicine? Is it because you are simply a lazy whiner that has had it too easy and the reason you are falling to pieces is the shattering weight of your own malaise?
Or is it maybe that there's not a solution so simple. Maybe the very fiber of what we've come to understand as living is fucked. Maybe it's the fact that the ambulance ride that took you to the hospital costs you several thousands of dollars. Maybe it's that you couldn't even afford to see the therapist they recommended you in the first place. Maybe it's that you can't hold down a steady job because they demand so much for so little and your hands shake when your manager raises their voice. Maybe it's because when you were young felt some kind of sting on your skin or in your mind and you couldn't even begin to imagine how long that sting would stay. Maybe it feels like you are shouldering the weight of something at all times, and it is invisible. You can't point to anything to say:
"Look now, doctor. Look at my burden. Look what I am coming apart under. Please, help me. Please, I want to be free of this. Lay poppies by my bedside if you must. Please."
What you actually say to the doctor isn't that. You say "sometimes I think about killing myself," and that's all it takes for the shape in the doctor's mind to be something broken, bruised and insane. You are wrong, no matter how much it feels to you like the world has been wrong. All you've wanted to do is explore it, to have some answers. You don't get that. You're stuck here. You can't even kill yourself. They tell you this hell is your own making. You believe them.
Small edit:
I recommend beating this game in a single sitting without stopping. The PC optimization is terrible though, fair warning.
11 Comments
so did you like the game?
check this out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNLNYdBzrF0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNLNYdBzrF0
@brockreiher It would be a weird rating if they didn't like it, don't ya think?
yeah but the review doesn't mention anything so idk
@brockreiher you shouldn't let your cousin post on your account while you are gone. its making you look bad!
hm?
@mrchristmass animals are very interesting to me thank you for your input
vital writing, responding to the work with deep thought and deep feeling and inviting both in the reader in return. this is how i would like people to engage with and talk about art/media more: human responses, not machinic reviews, the distinction being that the latter reads like it was written for industry, a style which informs the consumer of the pros and cons of the product so they can choose to purchase or not. so many people, whether professional or amateur (such as on this site), endeavour to replicate this certain conformist approach in style and format, often without providing much to dwell on. it’s simply the way things are done in the business, right? it’s what’s expected of us, if we are to engage with media: consume or guide the consumption of others. quantification of quality—star ratings, scores out of 10 etc.—reinforce this purpose. i believe we must speak outside of the machine, just as this response does, and not for it. i hope more people listen to this response and think and feel deeper, rather than simply dismissing it as irrelevant (a superficial, thoughtless, machinic reaction).
"I recommend beating this game in a single sitting without stopping." HowLongToBeat says it's 19 hours long... Thanks for the review regardless; this has been sitting in my library a long time and I've been waiting for the perfect time to get into it.
FemboyGenius
1 year ago