hadriel | [TEXT]

Greetings to all Hadriel denizens, and a welcome to those of you who have only recently arrived. My name is Dr. Hannibal Lecter. My colleague Dr. Lee Rosen and I are both psychiatrists, and would like to extend our services to all of you.

Perhaps you have never experienced therapy before. There are many misconceptions when it comes to psychiatry. You may think that only those who are not mentally sound seek therapy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sometimes the healthiest thing is to seek the assistance of a professional when desiring to understand how both the past and the present are affecting you, and what sorts of behaviors you may alter to ensure for yourself the best future. This is important even in the most mundane of situations, yet ours is far from mundane. The gods play with our emotions. Sometimes we are left to wonder if what we felt was real, or merely an illusion. Either way, the pain is real. And we can help you. Recently the gods allowed us to speak to each other anonymously over the network. The outpouring of raw feeling, of fear and worry and sorrow, was striking. There was some solace in speaking to our fellow citizens. Perhaps even more may be found in utilizing the training and talent of Dr. Rosen and myself.

We would like to hold open office hours at the clinic, if those who run the facility are amenable. In the meantime, you may contact either of us for an appointment. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dr Lecter says you both have training as physicians?

Yes. Although we did not receive our training at the same institutions.

[Or even the same version of earth.]

May I ask why you specialized in psychiatry?

Is there a certain kind of answer you are looking for? I'm afraid my reasons for choosing psychiatry are not exactly sentimental.

I wasn't looking for sentimentality, only truth. I'd never heard of psychiatry before and I'm intrigued... that it's still considered medicine, but not something I could heal.

I apologize. It is just that I have become used to my answer disappointing people who hoped I would say something like "It was my dream to help people."

While I do want to help people, I would be dishonest if I said that was the whole reason. I started in neurology, and I became obsessed with the way the human brains work, and that inevitably led me to the ways in which brains could be different or how they could be healthy or unhealthy.

Healthy in a physical sense, though? Or one's thought processes?

I've found that those two things are inseparable. But my work does prioritize the physical.

So the way a person thinks could be determined by how their brain works? How do you 'fix' problems in that case?

I don't like the word 'fixed' when its applied to mental health. While it does control the mechanics of the body, the brain is not a machine. It is, in many ways, a being in and of itself. So, with that in mind, how do you aid problems with a living thing? Generally, you try to find ways to either adapt its surroundings to better put it at ease or you give it tools with which it can adapt or feel better equipped to deal with its environment.

Like what? Or does that depend too much on the patient for examples?

Well there is no one way. But perhaps I could give you an example. I have a patient who, due to the way in which her brain developed, has perfect short term cognitive and visual memory. You can show her a manual for building a car engine, then take it away and she can build that entire engine without having to look at the book again. However, because the part of her brain for short term memory is so overdeveloped, there is an underdevelopment in the part of the brain for long term memory. Because of this, by the next morning she will have forgotten everything from the previous day. She won't even remember building the engine. This means that for her, there is no sense of temporality. Time is meaningless if you have no sense of its passing. To counteract this we have given her a tape recorder, along with a computer with video recording, so she can start making a timeline, however limited, of what she has been doing. So even if we have yet to find a way to enable her brain to sustain long term memory, she can still begin to have a sense of her own temporal progression. This allows her to have some sort of anchoring in her life. It gives her context.

Does that make any sense?

It... does, but it brings up more questions. How does she keep up with it all? Don't you get to the point where there's so much past for you to relearn that you no longer have time for a present?

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