role of mental health in Traveller

[Carlobrand]

...So I would play characters with average stats, or later with flaws (GURPS and White Wolf helped teach me about those, and the fun they can be). ...

GURPS does have that system where you can earn extra points for character generation by embracing some weakness or handicap, and mental illnesses are among the options. In certain games and settings, like GURPS Horror and Call of Cthulhu, it's next to impossible to avoid mental illness; it's a common consequence of player interaction with the game milieu.

I do not suggest no one should ever go there, nor do I suggest that it can't be dealt with sensitively by a mature player and game master. I am suggesting that players and game masters think twice before going there, and that they should make sure they understand what it is they are trying to emulate and why. It's far too easy for that kind of roleplay to devolve into offensive stereotypes or to be used as an excuse to indulge in Aurora-style mayhem and slaughter for "fun".

If by chance one of your players should, like me, be someone who's had personal experience dealing with loved ones with mental illness, I suspect he will be very grateful to see his peers and gamemaster approaching the issue with care and sensitivity.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I guess my question is "why would you want to?" I promised Marc Miller in a private message that I wouldn't bring up my personal stuff again, and I won't, but I will say that I was put through the wringer with "the wrong meds" so to speak to treat simple depression, and it was absolutely NO FUN at all. I never want to go through that again, and I can't imagine anyone wanting to experience a discombobulated thought process of anykind.

I can see wanting to RP someone who's a little off kilter, or eccentric. I RP'd a knight whose father was a longshoreman, and he had some Union/Teamster outlooks on life in a medieval fantasy world. Loads of fun I RP'd a Vargr who liked Shakespeare, and a few other personae dramaticus. But someone who's seriously mentally ill? I dunno. Just me.

 

[Murdoc]

Let me tell you a little thing I've learned about real life and entertainment: Many of the things we find entertaining we would absolutely hate if they happened in real life. Just look at stories: We watch/listen/read about people who have these terrible problems, sometimes life-threatening, sometimes tortuous or heart-wrenching... stuff we'd never want to experience in real life, but we find them entertaining anyway. It's the same with role-playing. I'd never want to be a politician myself, because I hate politics and think that it should go crawl into a hole and die somewhere, but I love playing one, because of the challenge, and maybe its fun to play a backstabbing, manipulative bastard sometimes. I may want to play a person who's destitute, gets kidnapped and tortured by aliens, dumped by the love of his life for a rich guy, and then had horrible medical experiments done to him, but would I want any of that in real life? Heck no. So no, I don't expect that your experiences in real life were fun at all, and I am sorry that you had to endure them, but the fact that those of us who have not shared them may find similar experiences entertaining in fiction in no way automatically means any kind of disrespect, because if that were the case, every form of entertainment everywhere would have to be completely devoid of any sort of conflict or negativity. Heck, I even hate driving when I have to do it, but when I don't have to, and can just do it for fun, then yes, it's fun. I'm only saying that so show the full spectrum of this concept I am talking about. Perhaps a bit clumsily, but I hope I am getting my point across.

 

[Carlobrand]

Let me tell you a little thing I've learned about real life and entertainment: Many of the things we find entertaining we would absolutely hate if they happened in real life. ...

Infinite diversity and all that. I don't find much entertainment in hardship, mine or others'. I'm more a Sherlock-Holmes-puzzler/solve-the-problem/beat-the-bad-guy type.

 

[Blue Ghost]

In Ye Olde Dayes, people used to go to the sanitarium to be entertained. That princible is still in effect, only you see it on the small screen known as TV. Cop shows usually show someone who's no in line with society, and because they operate outside societal norms, the have a tendency to break the law, but are often deemed "mentally ill". It's what modern theatre is all about.

Still, having said that, it's kind of fun to play the pirate once in a while (please, no more pirate threads).

 

[nerdygerdy]

I guess where I was headed when I first started this thread was how would high TL societies handle such ailments? I had suggested that they'd be engineered out of the person, anyway, but maybe that just creates new forms of illness. I'm sure it's been discussed elsewhere, but what happens to the TL8 ADHD sufferer who is whisked off to a TL15 world where (and I'm going to paraphrase here) "high technology almost appears as if it's magic" ? I keep thinking of the car chase scene from Fifth Element with everything flying in different directions and a poor TL8 person encountering it for the first time -- or just trying to cope with how fast everything is (like the old guy from Shawshank who gets out of prison and can't cope with the new cars on the streets and the pace of life). I get it that some like their fantasy to be devoid of any reminders of their real lives (that's why I started out playing D&D as a big fighter defending a scantily-clad babe at my feet a' la a famous Heavy Metal poster), but I also love a good story, so I want to play in a game where the GM has envisioned a person who all the "experts" have labelled as "schizophrenic" or "possessed" but who is really serving as a medium for communication from the Ancients (my apologies; probably an often-used trope). The person is just not able to process all the inbound information from "Above" and it manifests itself to others as schizophrenia and/or possession. And those of us who are puzzle solvers can deduce from the symptoms (with a few key GM-placed clues) that this isn't really what they thought it was... you need a really good script writer and a really good actor to pull it off as an NPC.

 

[Blue Ghost]

It depends on the ailment. Most of the most violent crime is perpetrated by sociopaths or individuals who are emotionally-retarded. These are people whose sympathy/empathy circuits are, quite literally, not wired to the rest of their brain. Therefore when you or I see someone hurt and react emotionally, they simply don't have the same experience that you or I have. I would imagine that, in theory, this could be fixed with neurosurgery, but it would also, I suspect, require some retraining; i.e. make sure said individual finds themselves getting worked up when they watch a film like Bambi or see a situation where a person is in distress.

For someone who is suffering from delusions, the cure there is to engage them in their fantasy so as to extract them from it. At some point they see that the fantasy they're in is nonsense, and they are thusly on the road to better health.

For someone who is schizophrenic, that's more of a hardware issue where there's a biochemical imbalance that has all parts of the brain perpetually networked with no regulator to screen out nonsense data.

For someone who is retarded; well, that would require a massive overhaul to the central CPU and RAM. I would imagine it could be done in a TL13+ environment, but it would, in my personal opinion, be prohibitively expensive for most people. If young Prince Raineer was born retarded (Down's syndrome? whatever the heck it's called these days), I would think the nobles would drag the best brain surgeon around who, in that era, would be a neuro-engineer/architect, and have piles of cash thrust in his face to make the young prince a normal operating human being.

This is what you get to learn when you're a sci-fi geek who's grown up with people in the field.

 

[Carlobrand]

My apologies if I took things a bit off course.

In the MegaTrav Referee's Sourcebook there's a tech level table that talks, among other things, about advances in medical technology. Relevant to this topic are the following:

TL11: nerve refusion, artificial eyes. So they can manipulate nerves with a good degree of success. Potentially implies some early potential for repairing the neurological causes of mental illness. This - or perhaps TL12 - should mark the end of seizure disorders and many mental disorders rooted in physical injury, anoxia, stroke and other insults to the brain, but other disorders may be too subtle to be reached by this kind of treatment. Also, repairing the brain doesn't unlearn what's been learned - the person would still have quite a bit of rehab ahead of him and may continue to have areas of weakness like social skills deficits.

TL13: Cloned body parts, reanimation. The latter implies a fairly significant degree of skill at repairing brain injury, since reanimation is not possible otherwise. I would say most if not all mental illnesses would be curable at this point.

TL14: Genetic engineering, memory erasure. The former implies an ability to identify and edit out the genetic causes of mental illness. The latter implies - well, I have to assume they mean memory erasure and you end up with someone with some cognitive function, or else it's just a fancy word for execution. Anyway, a rather radical but effective method of dealing with the kind of disorders that lead to serial killers and such: brainwipe 'em and retrain.

TL14 also introduces, under Computers, brain implants. if you can feed data to the thinking centers of the brain in response to signals from the brain, then it's pretty easy to introduce implants that do things to other parts of the brain: suppress undesirable emotions like rage or fear, stimulate your pleasure centers in response to specific desired thoughts and behavior, stimulate aversive feelings in response to specific unwanted thoughts and behavior. Actually, there's potential for that end of things to get downright horrifying, but it definitely has significant therapeutic potential.

Between the repair abilities implied by TL13 reanimation, the preventive abilities implied by TL14 genetic engineering, and the rehabilitation potential implicit in brain implants, mental illness at this point should be almost unheard of - assuming either you can afford it or there's someone willing to pay for it. One wonders how many gung-ho Marine recruits are carefully rehabbed psychopaths paying off their literal debt to society.

TL16: Brain transplants, crude memory transfer. The former isn't technically curing - more like killing the person and making his body available to someone else, but it might be a (somewhat horrific but effective) way to deal with brain disorder identified in pregnancy or early infancy: clone a healthy brain, transplant the healthy brain in place of the injured brain. Doom for the wee one, but the parents leave the hospital with a healthy "twin" of the unfortunate kiddie.

The problem here is being able to access and afford the care, which means a lot depends on the society itself. Some crowded high-law worlds might find it more efficient to practice euthanasia of the mentally ill, irrespective of tech level - or they may only offer the cure to those willing to accept certain attached strings (such as the aforementioned Marine enlistment). And, if you're living on a TL6 world, the fact that Rhylanor has a cure may do you no good whatsoever (unless, of course, Imperial recruiters are specifically recruiting from psych wards and maximum security prisons).

Fortunately, memory implants are a few tech levels farther on, or you could find that your soldier character's backstory was a carefully crafted lie implanted into his brain after he was wiped and rewired.

 

[77topaz]

I recall reading an article about "sanity levels" or points for Traveller, I think it was on the Freelance Traveller site.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

In GURPS Interstellar Wars two societies have certain behaviors considered to be mental illness. A clue to the Vilani response to mental illness how they dealt with the second case.

1.The Answerin consider fear to be a mental illness.

Fear, however, is viewed as a mental illness, and the Answerin have spent the last 3,000 years trying to cure it.
Answerin culture is structured around keeping fear from becoming an issue, partly through removing causes, and partly through carefully cultivating personal bravery as part of their lives. They’re not insensitive to danger, but they believe that an irrational response to it is counterproductive. During their lives, they bend every effort toward learning how to stay calm and continue functioning when every other Human race would be wasting mental resources battling fear, or would have given in to the emotion entirely.

G-IW p.81

2.The Dishaan are, by Vilani and Terran standards, constantly, pervasively, unstoppably, "dishonest".

The proto-Dishaan were pack animals, roaming in groups of 20 to 30 and driving predators away from their kills. Their social structure was based entirely around feeding rights, as maintained by continuous “pecking order” squabbles. Intelligence gradually developed as the Dishaan evolved ever more elaborate ways of subjugating their pack mates without resorting to physical violence.
The modern-day Dishaan is still constantly looking for angles, and has absolutely no compunction about doing anything that puts him one step ahead of someone else. He is honest exactly as long as it’s to his advantage. The second he decides that cheating is better, that becomes his strategy.

G-IW p.83

3.Vilani society clashes with the Dishaan mindset so strict control measures have been taken. The mindset itself is not addressed.

Within the Imperium itself, the Dishaan are not as untrustworthy as they could be. On their home worlds they are constantly watched (by other Dishaan, in fact, as “traitors” are amply compensated). Since the Vilani harshly punish lawbreaking, the calculation to break the rules rarely works out.
In Terran space, however, anyone dealing with a Dishaan needs to watch carefully – offworld they wear portable surveillance devices, but these don’t work very well outside of a Vilani infrastructure.

G-IW p.83