Mental disorders

- Schizoid personality disorder.
- Dissociative disorder NOS.
- Obsessive compulsive disorder.
- Schizophrenia.
- Insomnia.

Schizoid

Jax’s schizoid personality disorder could possibly stem from - and probably does stem from - his parent’s controlling ways over him from birth. They were more focused on him becoming studious and well versed in various fields of expertise that they didn’t really allow him to socialise, thus rendering him not too social until his teen years and with a late start he found it near impossible to adjust. Though social these days he doesn’t really know how to form close relations and doesn’t care either way.

Emotionally he is cold and detached, uncaring to those around him and what happens to them lest he has, somehow, made a very good relation with someone, which is a very rare and difficult thing for him.

Dissociative disorder not otherwise specified

Jax is permanently dissociated to some extent if little or severe. In the worst cases he will zone out completely and feel detached from his body, far away in another world as he watches his own hands move without feeling that they’re his. In the usual but best case he just feels fuzzy and unreal. It is DDNOS because he doesn’t fit the criteria to other dissociative disorders, merely being dissociated as a cause of something unknown to the therapist. In reality he saw a video game and, due to his father’s negative mental health history which he inherited, he started to think life was a simulation or game and started to dissociate to cope with this thought process. He is so used to it now though that he thinks it is normal and doesn’t even realise it is a bad or wrong thing. To him everybody else feels this way.

Obsessive compulsive disorder

Jax’s mental health is almost controlled by OCD. He is not the type who has to clean a lot, though it does play a small part the disorder - He does feel the need to be clean. His OCD manifests as intrusive thoughts. He will get intrusive thoughts all day every day and usually acts upon them. It is usually the thought that he has to do something a number of times or keep things equal on both sides that dominates him. For instance if he taps something with his left hand’s index finger he has to do the same with the right hand’s finger. If he doesn’t then he thinks something bad will happen aka that he dies. He also gets more intrusive thoughts of killing people or hurting them and isn’t far from giving into the ones telling him to hurt others. He will gladly obey, but again it is a case of “hurt them or die”.

Schizophrenia

This is something he seemingly inherited from his father. From a young age, specifically seven or eight, Jax heard voices. It started as one voice and soon became six, though the most horrible of the voices was rarely around.

Jax, without his meds, hears voices frequently and sees things, hallucinating horribly about monsters, shadows and creatures all being around him, though they don’t scare him. The worst are the shadows he sees which are where the voices come from. But usually he doesn’t see things and just hears the voices.

They tell him to do things but plead that they love him and only care for him, which he believes, or did until he started the medication, to which the voices almost stopped; it is rare that he hears them now. When he stopped the meds in recent the voices came back full on and the sixth voice was very angry having been locked away for so long, which spurred on the other voices, and in the end he attacked Blue at their command. The commands by the voices share with the OCD diagnosis of commanding him to do things.

The other thing from this diagnosis is that he is suffer delusions and as previously mentioned thinks life is just a game or a simulation, that he will one day wake up to ‘reality’; this life isn’t real and what happens after death is the real life. On very rare occasions he believes people can read his mind though with this he finds himself lacking slight care - He is used to the idea, thinks it a normal thing, and isn’t bothered that people know what he is thinking except when his thoughts delve to hurting others, to which then he will try to distract himself.

Insomnia

Ever since joining the Rocket gang at age twenty-seven Jax has suffered insomnia. His mind was never able to switch off after starting two jobs and now he cannot sleep for days on end, though can nap with ease if only for a couple hours every few days. His issue is that his head feels ‘full’ and loud, filled with ‘cotton wool’, and he just cannot stop thinking, leaving him lying awake and unable to drift off.