In real life, I am a psychotic. I would very much love to be free of the psychosis, by whatever means I could manage. Within reason, of course. As a Multiverser character, I have the ability to use magic or psionics to heal my character of psychosis.
The thing is that doing so would change who I was as a person, and I don't think I could effectively play that. It would be like a blind person trying to play an RPG character that could see.
I'm not quite sure what I want to know here, but any thoughts would be useful.
Well, it's called role playing, and within the hobby people role play many things that are very different from their real-life selves. I could easily see a blind person playing a sighted person, and in fact I know a blind gamer who probably plays sighted characters all the time. I've also had quite a few reasonably normal players play psychotic or other mentally disturbed characters.
I do see, though, that playing a normal when you are psychotic might be more of a challenge.
You might ask yourself whether, given the choice, you actually would choose to be cured of your psychosis, particularly where you are. It's entirely possible that your character might think that the entire multiverse is a psychotic break with reality, and that the idea of being cured of the psychosis by some fantasy within the psychosis is the ultimate psychotic break to be avoided at all costs. (For an analogy, think about Arnold Schwartzenegger's character in Total Recall, when the manager of the virtual vacations program shows up to try to persuade him that none of this is real. If he kills the guy and the guy is right, he'll doom himself to this forever, but if the guy is lying he had better pull the trigger. In your case, if someone offers to cure you of the psychosis, they might be a hallucination themselves, and there's no telling what happens if you believe them.)
If you decided that your character would do that, then of course thereafter you have to play him as "normal". That's a challenge, but it's not so difficult as it sounds. For one thing, you have plenty of time to think about each decision, to ask yourself whether this is what you would do were you "normal". I don't think any of us will second-guess you very often, at least, and it might actually be therapeutic for you to be asking yourself constantly, "what would a sane person be doing (in this insane situation)?" It might help you understand yourself better. A lot of psychiatrists and psychologists have used role playing games in group therapy toward the end of helping patients understand themselves, and you could accomplish some of that through how you perceive your "normalized self" acting, and how that is different from how you would act.
Those are my thoughts. At the moment, there's no one saying you ought to be cured, but you're right that the possibility exists.
--M. J. Young
Yeah, but the thing is that no matter how well I described it to you, you could NEVER fully understand how it is for me to be psychotic. No "sane" person could play a psychotic, any more than a blind person could truly play a sighted character. And for the record, psychotic is NOT a synonym for crazy. A crazy person thinks they are fine, and the rest of the world has a problem. I realize that I have a problem, therefore, I'm not crazy. I know you didn't mean anything by that, but I find it very offensive when someone thinks that psychotic is a synonym for crazy. Compare it to someone saying "He has long hair, he must be a lazy, good for nothing hippie." The difference though is that you could get a haircut.
Oh and I am sane. The difference is, like I said, a "crazy" person thinks they are normal, and the rest of the world has a problem. I know I have a problem, so I'm sane. Psychotic is NOT a synonym for crazy.