Asylum Squad: Comic Strip 7

To anyone curious, this character is loosely based on a friend of mine from high school (if he was schizoaffective, I suppose). I also unconsciously based him on Buddy Cole from 'Kids In The Hall', Corky St. Clair from 'Waiting For Guffman', and later still he even reminded me a bit of Chris Crocker (an internet celebrity made famous because of his ridiculous "Leave Britney Alone" videos on YouTube).

I wanted to make an important point about this character's situation as well. I never saw 'A Beautiful Mind' in its entirety (my copy gave out at the point in the movie when John Nash is released from the psychiatric hospital after the insulin shock treatments), but what bothered me about what I had observed was how unrealistic its portrayal of psychosis felt. Nash was able to converse and interact with his delusions as though they were real people. I could be wrong, but I don't believe any form of psychosis is like this at all. In my case, it was all voices, visions, distortions, and delusions - if the Dalai Lama were to appear in my room as a hallucination, the Dalai Lama wouldn't have been able to relate to me the same way a real person would. Visual and auditory hallucinations often have tremendous power over the individual experiencing them, but that power has nothing to do with them looking or sounding like anything from the physical world.

So, getting back to the Henry character: he does believe that he has an "intimate" relationship with Set (the Egyptian chaos and storm god), but when any seemingly physical activity between him and his delusions occurs in the comic (such as his interaction with Set in the last panel of this particular strip), it is a vision within Henry's imagination that produces the interaction - like a daydream, but so clear in the mind that it seems like a clip from a television show. (This will be clearly explained in time.)

-Sarafin