Is there any way this can work?

[nchaos]

As I now know from the responses on my other thread "Looking for an opinion so far", my initial idea of schizophrenia was totally incorrect and pretty awfully stereotypical.

I'm wondering now if there's ANY disorder that would work for this, or if I need to rewrite the story/change it to an external, paranormal source.

To make it as simple as absolutely possible:

-The guy has never had problems prior to recently, at least none that he mentions/will mention in the short story.

-The 'hallucination' (or whatever it might be) is always the same guy named Daniel, who constantly insults and harasses the main character, trying desperately to get him to kill people for various, inane reasons (Example: Main character's boss starts bitching at him for slacking off and the main character sees Daniel standing behind him, screaming that he should kill the boss for having the "Audacity to tell HIM what to do".

-When the main character continually refuses to act as Daniel wants, Daniel starts threatening him, going so far as to 'choke him' at one point. Now, that's in quotations because I'm not sure what that will actually mean in the long run. It could be the whole ordeal is a hallucination, it could be the MC choking himself and thinking it's Daniel, Daniel could end up being a ghost doing all this and the MC just THINKS he's going insane.

-Eventually, the MC was going to crack for whatever reason and start listening to Daniel. If I go for the ghost option, it'll be either fear or possession (which I really want to avoid). If I opt for some psychological thing, I'm hoping for something that would either include delusions of this magnitude, or something that would make a guy fabricate this whole 'other person' as a place to shift his guilt.

Damn. If you managed to read though that and make sense of it, thanks. I'm sorry that I'm so all over the place, the more I look at this story the more frustrated I get. And it's bugging me.
So...any input, on any of these points, would be great.

...I'm starting to feel very, very out of my depths here.

[Truth is Harsher]

Hmm maybe Dissociative Identity Disorder? Or something like that? I think that might work, you might have to change some things I guess but DID could work.

[Tim Willard]

Don't give a clinical description or name the disease.

Just do the symptoms, have it progress the way you want, worry about the story first.

[PRINCESS TROLLESTIA]

Dec 7, 2010 4:34:00 GMT -8 Tim Willard said:

Don't give a clinical description or name the disease.

Just do the symptoms, have it progress the way you want, worry about the story first.

I pretty much agree with this. I mean, what you're aiming for could be any number of mental diseases at this point. I think it's more important to capture the progression of the disease and conditions as opposed to just having the disease itself.

[Psychomacologist2.0]

Sure it works.

*puts on psychologist hat* People can hallucinate for lots of different reasons. Drugs. Random brain lesions. Psychotic illnesses. But even just stress can cause people to have weird mental break downs. You could very easily play this as Daniel being the character's repressed inner desires - to smack his boss, to act out against the rules etc. Say MC feels constrained by his job and his life; constrained by society and expectations. If he comes under a lot of stress, I have no problem believing that this starts coming out as a hallucination of an actual person telling him to do things. When he starts listening to Daniel, essentially he just starts listening to that repressed part of himself and starts doing all the things he really wants to do, but has been prevented from doing because they break social norms. Simples.

Psychologically, it makes sense. Go for it. Shifting guilt and socially unacceptable desires/wants/needs onto an imaginary person to the extent that you start hallucinating them is a-okay, as far as I'm concerned. Add some kind of trigger: general life stress, or a particularly stressful trigger event - and you're golden.

Now, get writing!

[nchaos]

^Damn! Thanks so, so much man. It's settled, that sounds perfect then.

Tim, I was going to do that originally but I felt like a decent amount of people would complain and end up calling/seeing it as a cop-out.