#Especially on the BPD portrayals for Cinderheart | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bonefall · 1 year

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Are mental illnesses and neurodivergency recognized and named by the clans? Or are they just seen as “oh yeah randompaw is just a little odd”? Are there stigmas? Treatments?

I create herb guides exactly for this purpose. The next herb guide will be for spinal correction and scoliosis, but the guide after that will be for depression and anxiety.

So far I have guides for Transgender HRT and Epilepsy

The way the cats treat neurodivergency depends a bit on the specific issue. Autism, ADHD, I imagine those are like you described. A very, "Oh that's just how they are" sort of thing. Littlecloud obsessed with herbs? Sounds like StarClan has given him a gift. Squilf can't focus on one thing? At first they try to discipline that out of her but when it doesn't work, "that's just how Squirrelpaw is. That's why we're calling her Squirrelflight now."

Dyspraxic? Don't put them on weaving duty. Don't like the texture of leaf litter? Don't send them hunting in the woods. Forgets stuff? Don't force them to remember things.

Stuff like epilepsy or BPD usually needs more management; Sorreltail medicates with valerian root. Cinderheart has a long journey with mindfulness and so does Squilf.

I avoid the cats being able to name and recognize a wide array of neurodivergencies though. If they can't even call Greencough "pneumonia", they certainly don't know the medical name of Epilepsy or Autism.

Sorreltail has absence seizures; which the Clans call "being attacked by daydreams". An autistic cat "lives in their own world". ADHD cats are "always thinking". Cinderheart acts "heart-first".

I come up with the phrases as I need them; plus, I personally find that describing how these things FEEL to the afflicted and APPEAR to the surrounding cast is waaaaaay more impactful than just dropping an in-universe list straight out of the DSM-5, you know? The portrayal is the important part. This isn't a mental illness poke-rap lmao

Off the page, I speak frankly about my intentions and the neurodivergence I'm seeking to portray. On the page, it's "show don't tell".

#That's how I've been approaching it and I've gotten great feedback so I think I'm scratching an itch #Neurodivergency #Bonefall Rewrite #Especially on the BPD portrayals for Cinderheart #It is so underrepresented and stigmatized it's sad. People with BPD deserve the world

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bonefall · 4 months

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are there any bb!cats with schizophrenia or that regularly experience psychosis? people absolutely suck about mental illness so like. seeing characters like me going thru life and being treated like people and not monsters for something out of their control never fails to put a smile on my face! thank you for all the research and effort you put into making sure your disabled cats are not only believable but human. pd: cinderheart with bpd is an extremely based headcanon

Not yet but it's on my radar, plus NPD. The reason why I feel so unflappably confident with BPD is because I know and love people who have it, and I hate that I don't see any characters who are like them! So I feel like I'm really good at handling it, and knowing what's wanted in portrayals of it. It feels very personally important to me.

Pair that with the fact I write BB!Clans as canonically struggling with ableism and all these being so heavily stigmatized irl, I've gotta be REALLY careful with NPD and psychosis. I'm less connected to them so personally and I don't want to accidentally strike a nerve, you get me?

That said... I got an ask a while back that I'd been thinking about a lot, basically asking me about how Clan Culture would see psychosis in the first place. I've actually always been fascinated by how deeply schizophrenia is affected by the culture of the afflicted, so I've been idly thinking about that for a while without sharing those thoughts.

OH WAIT hangon let me explain some stuff about Schizophrenia and psychosis for people in the audience!!

Schizophrenia used to be diagnosed in subtypes before 2013. This is no longer accurate! A lot like Autism, it's a spectrum of symptoms that affect people differently. It's a cognitive disorder that messes with rational and organized thinking, and that can express in all sorts of ways.

One of the symptoms is hallucinations. It's The Famous symptom of it, but it's not actually something you NEED to have to be Schizophrenic. Not all people who are having hallucinations or delusions are Schizophrenic, either! I want to include an OCD character of some kind who experiences some mild auditory hallucinations, actually. The type where it's just random mumbling.

Delusions and hallucinations aren't the same thing Delusions are false beliefs and hallucinations are false experiences. An example of a delusion is, "If I don't click my pen three times, my family will die." An example of a hallucination is hearing voices.

PEOPLE WITH PSYCHOSIS ARE FAR MORE LIKELY TO BE THE VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE THAN TO COMMIT IT Feel like this is common knowledge in this space, and especially within my own following since I make a lot of art about mental illness and awareness, but it's always worth repeating.

So anyway

If you compare psychosis between cultures, you actually end up seeing VERY different expressions of the hallucinations. For example, in some cultures, voice hallucinations tend to say things that are negative or abusive, while other cultures hear significantly more positive, playful voices.

This doesn't mean that they're always less distressing. For example, the study above points out that Nigerian students (reported to hear lots of playful hallucinations) experience as much distress as Dutch students (tend to experience negative, abusive voices) during their psychotic episodes.

Still, there does seem to be a correlation with "less distress" and cultures that encourage psychotic people to see their hallucinations as positive, personal things. Even more interestingly, distress seems to be correlated with income and individualism in a culture.

But it doesn't stop there, the findings are fascinating.

Delusions of grandeur are rare in societies that discourage that sort of social mobility, reflecting social values.

Cultures that believe religious experiences are specific experiences-- like certain smells, temperatures, or sounds, will see those reflected in psychotic episodes

Yet, "voices" seem to be something seen across ALL cultures studied. Though some have more prevalence of random sounds and mumbling than others, they all share some expression of "voices that say stuff."

SO all that to say-- if I include psychosis it's definitely going to be trying to take the culture of each Clan into account, and I need to do a lot more research into what sorts of things people with schizophrenia and various types of psychosis want to see more often.

#psychosis #neurodivergence #bone babble

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bonefall · 1 year

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Can we hear about Cinderheart and bpd?

So last night I spoke to my partner about BPD cats, and we chatted about the various things that should be more common in portrayals of it. I decided I want three characters to show a good "range" of cats with it; We banged out Squirrelflight right away, and eliminated Holly shortly after

We were waffling on who should be the next two; they don't know anything about Warrior Cats so I would suggest and talk about some characters and we'd consider pros and cons of that particular one having BPD. Eventually we just started talking about artists that made relatable art, and Edvard Munch of all people came up

Something that gets lost a lot in discussions about BPD is that... it's not just the "Bad Relationship Disorder." It's a mood intensity one. We were talking specifically about The Scream, you know, this painting,

And how Munch painted it because, in his words,

"I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

And Partner said that they REALLY related to that sudden intensity of their surroundings, because they looked at the night sky during a mood drop and were overwhelmed by the sudden darkness that was just, everywhere all at once, more vast than they were capable of comprehending

Me, brain floating in a soup of funny battle cat: "hey thats just like this one scene where cinderheart catches a bird"

So I posted the scene from Sign of the Moon and talked about the canon context, and how that context will be made different by my rewrite, and they were like "Yeah that's relatable, it's the way she starts overthinking out of nowhere and the mood crash that came with it"

So that was when we checked off Cinderheart as one of the characters I'm going to approach with BPD in mind, so that I can focus on how this affects her emotional state and how she copes with it. Her simplicity will let me just explore her during the relaxed, episodic version of Po3 that I'm planning to do.

She's also especially unique since none of the conflicts of canon, nor the one I'm planning in the rewrite, has to do with abuse.

In the Bonefall Rewrite, she has conflict with Lionblaze over his neglect/endangerment of their children for unrelated reasons to the health of their relationship... and it doesn't happen until late OotS/early AVoS. Leaving plenty of time for Cinderheart to have her stories.

We're also considering Lionblaze having BPD, especially to have a male character with it. BPD is often stereotyped as "Crazy Girlfriend Disorder" so we think it'll be good for a boy to have it too, and it could give the two of them common ground to discuss their emotions.

If not Lionblaze, then I could see Breezepelt having it, especially because he is becoming a major POV character in Bonefall AVoS and won't be having any relationship problems with Heathertail when they get together at the end of the arc. But anyway-- this post is about Cinderheart.

#BPD #Neurodivergence #Bonefall Rewrite #Cinderheart #Bonefall Po3

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