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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agemegos" data-source="post: 1572476" data-attributes="member: 18377">I'm mentally unstable too: I have bipolar affective disorder (type II). But I don't think we can blame D&D for this one, because my great-grandfather, my grandmother, my father, my father's eldest sister (who had type I), two of her daughters, two of their six children, one of my sisters, and at least one of my nieces had or have the same problem. I have never had the slightest tendency to confuse my identity with any of my characters. (On the contrary, I have occasionally be criticised because some of my characters are too like the real me.) One of the fellows in my usual gaming group is schizophrenic (and has been since before he started playing). He soometimes has trouble with reality, poor chap, but in the fifteen years I have been playing RPGs with him he has never got any of our games muddled up with reality. He rather tends to have hallucinations based on the 'animations' from Monty Python's Flying Circus.It's a bit odd that this should come up now, because just the night before last I took in an episode of a show called NCIS to see whether it was to my taste (it isn't). The mystery in the episode I saw turned out to involve the death of a brilliant but unstable computer jockey who had [spoiler]mistaken himself for his character in an MMORPG and tried to (a) live out the game by engaging in a sword-fight with another seaman and player of the game, and (b) tried to walk ashore with fifty pounds of weights chained to his waste to prove that he was his character[/spoiler]. It really struck me (as irritating) that a psychiatric disorder that is so very rare in fact should feature prominently in so much third-rate drama. I think that lazy writers who wont do their research do us a great disservice in their attempts to make the improbable seem plausible.The finale of this show was that one of the regular characters (a silly, vain, dishonest, deceitful shirker) summed up his reaction to the tragedy by saying "I'm really glad my parents pushed me into sports in high school."Feh! What imbecility! I was on my school swimming, hockey, and Rugby teams, as well as playing club hockey on weekends, swimming in club competitions, training five mornings a week through the swimming season, competing in surf carnivals with my volunteer lifesaving club, and fencing and playing water polo in university. that didn't discourage me from RPGs, and it didn't save me from mental illness.</blockquote>

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