V Max One and Being Crazy

I, Dalton Lewis, wrote another novel about me being batshit crazy beyond comprehension. In reality I live with my parents because I can’t function well enough to live on my own or work. The illness make me sit around playing video games, reading, and writing. Depicting a mental health breakdown in my novel seemed essential — so I worked hard at showing that one can overcome mental health issues and have a full, real life. In V Max One Ares Morgan is sent to a hospital for having a breakdown — for not being able to function and be innocent in the universe in the year 2174. Then the facility turns out to be more than merely a hospital — it’s a paramilitary organization. Then the events spiral into a large confrontation with criminal elements and eventually the inevitable space battle that comes with this genre of story — the space opera.

Back to the real world — many schizophrenics are homeless and desperate, unhappy and unable to communicate with the world around them. The nature of the illness makes it harder to work, to stay skinny, to communicate with others, and without a support system they can’t handle the real world and its responsibilities.

Let’s be honest — schizophrenia and psychosis are linked with beating and raping people by ignorant, fearful normal people. I wanted a story about educating an angry outsider and convincing him to not turn into a rapist or a stalker or a murderer.

Aliens aren’t talking in our heads. We have a condition, a mental health condition, known as paranoid schizophrenia. God isn’t talking to us. I read an article on the internet theorizing that aliens could be making people crazy to make certain that no one believes them about the aliens. That’s interesting to me — that people can think that.

Articles like this frustrate me. “Brunswick police killed a 30-year-old man with schizophrenia who stabbed his mother to death Thursday night, according to a police statement released Friday morning.

William Sears died in the encounter with police that happened just after 11 p.m. in a home on Alda Parkway just west of Bettie Lane, Brunswick police said in a news release,” someone wrote on cleveland.com. The schizophrenia is inexorably linked to the crime even though it shouldn’t — people should understand that schizophrenia does not make me go out and stab my mother.

That’s what makes the headlines, though, about schizophrenia, that and drug trials and books written by people who don’t understand mental illness like I do. The treatments make people gain weight and make us sleep twelve hours a day. We have to live with that. The treatments don’t stop the voices, but they slow our brains down until the voices are more manageable. That’s all they do.

In the story people need treatment, and they get treatment, but they are also put into the world around them. In V Max One people talk to schizophrenics and teach them to talk to people, to know people, to have a social circle and responsibilities and a chance to know and care for people. I don’t want to end up like that guy who allegedly killed his own mother. I wanted to show a positive view of dealing with mental health issues in a possible future.

Thanks, and take care, friends.