Words on Bathroom Walls

“INITIAL DOSAGE: 0.5 mg. Adam Petrazelli, 16 years old, is a subject of the clinical trial for ToZaPrex. He is reluctant to engage during therapy sessions. Nonverbal communication only. Not uncommon, given his reluctance to participate in therapy aspect of the drug trial.”

Chapter 1 opens with an example of the ToZaPrex drug trial notes that appear at the beginnings of subsequent chapters. Noting Adam’s dosage, symptoms, and prognosis, these clinical-sounding passages contrast with the more private and emotional journal entries that follow. In these sections, Adam is less person than patient—something he struggles to overcome.

“The whole seeing and hearing things that other people can’t is like something straight out of Harry Potter. Like in The Chamber of Secrets when he heard the voice through the walls. Keeping it a secret made me feel privileged, like waiting for my letter from Hogwarts to arrive. I thought maybe it would mean something.

But then Ron ruins that possibility when he says, ‘Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.’ Harry ended up being fine. Nobody sent him to therapy or tried to give him pills. He just got to live in a world where everything he thought he’d heard and seen turned out to be real. Lucky bastard.”

These lines from Adam’s thoughts show the disconnect between mental illness and fantasy fiction. There is nothing mystical or necessarily meaningful about the symptoms of schizophrenia or any other mental illness—the hallucinations Adam sees aren’t prophetic or symbolic. By contrast, fantasy fiction often incorporates the symptoms of mental illness into magic systems, falsely glorifying these diseases. In this way, fantasy fiction establishes the harmful and incorrect idea that mental illness is somehow associated with magic and the fantastic.

“By now, training myself to behave a certain way no matter how I’m feeling is second nature. Church is for people who believe in things they can’t see. Life for me is about seeing things I probably shouldn’t believe in. So there’s a nice symmetry there.”

In this passage, Adam has taught himself not to react to what he sees, wearing a mask to hide his reality from the shared reality. This forced behavior is harmful: Rather than being himself, Adam must appear “normal” to be treated like a person, rather than a danger. The comparison between Adam’s hallucinations and religion is interesting: Whereas religious belief in the unseen is socially acceptable because it is shared by many, Adam is not “supposed to” believe in his hallucinations because only he can see them.