Jasnah childhood illness

[stonewarden1]

So, I recently thought of this and can't find anyone else who has (so not sure if it holds water or not)

Facts that support my theory: In WoR, Jasnah's shadow pointed the wrong way when she was at the treaty signing.  Sja-anat can appear as a shadow that points the wrong way.  Sja-anat "enlightens" spren by injecting voidlight that interferes with their Honor and Cultivation bits to make them free thinkers.  Jasnah was raised in a strictly Vorin household but rejected the religion.

Theory:  Sja-anat tried to enlighten Jasnah as a child after becoming her friend that caused her psychotic episode.  This caused Jasnah to become a free thinker that led to her rejecting Vorinism.  

I dont believe that she is still "enlightened", because she fought off the voidlight, possibly with the help of Ivory.

[PanLin they/he]

An interesting theory, and I love anything involving Sja-anat.

8 minutes ago, stonewarden1 said:

In WoR, Jasnah's shadow pointed the wrong way when she was at the treaty signing. Sja-anat can appear as a shadow that points the wrong way.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the first sentence was just the influence of Ivory and a hint that she's an Elsecaller, arguably the order most closely tied to the cognitive realm (where all shadows fall the wrong way, explaining the second sentence).

9 minutes ago, stonewarden1 said:

Sja-anat "enlightens" spren by injecting voidlight that interferes with their Honor and Cultivation bits to make them free thinkers.  Jasnah was raised in a strictly Vorin household but rejected the religion.

These are both true, but:

• I don't think we have any evidence to imply that Sja-anat can enlighten people directly
• Ivory doesn't look like an enlightened inkspren
• Sja-anat has only recently been enlightening true spren (so likely couldn't have enlightened either Jasnah or Ivory while Jasnah was a child)

Sorry to directly poopoo everything—that evidence certainly could point to something like that if we didn't already have better explanations for it all (hello, Occam).

All that said, it's true that we don't know exactly what happened to Jasnah when she was young. Maybe Sja-anat, as someone with access to the spiritual realm and futuresight, did attempt to interact with either Jasnah or Ivory while Jasnah was young. I don't really think there's much to posit that as a probable theory when it goes against what we actually do know about Sja-anat and, again, her childhood can more easily be explained by simple parental abuse or cognitive realm shenanigans (although it would be very on-brand for Sanderson to reveal some super realmatically important explanation for Jasnah's childhood when she gets her own POV book).

[Vatsug]

I don't know the answer, but I think I would prefer it if her illness was natural. 

[earthexile]

I have suspected for awhile that Jasnah's illness will turn out to not even have been an illness. It'll be one of those insane cultural things, like how in America rich people have had their 'troublesome' daughters hospitalized and even lobotomized. Twelve-year-old Jasnah probably made some comment about religion, or gender roles, or her utter disinterest in kissing boys and picking husbands, and freaked everyone out. And it's just been "her madness" ever since, and we don't talk about it.

[Cocoa he/him]

I don't much care for this theory (neutral observation). Even speaking as a heavily religious person, I don't agree with this sort of leap in logic that someone being a non-conformist atheist in a strictly religious household/society is a sign of outside influence or her mind being tampered with, rather than just being something she actually believes.

My interpretation of Jasnah's 'lunacy' (though I doubt we'll get concrete answers until book 10) is as follows, from what I consider most likely to least:

1. Jasnah had some kind of of run-in with a Radiant spren, and it was mistaken for mental illness. Evidence for this is that when she sees her shadow going wonky ( a sign of general cognitive realm shenanigans, not just Sja-Anat) at the feast her first thought is 'Not again,' plus the fact that she checked if anyone else had seen it (possibly her trying to figure out if her senses were deceiving her, but also a bit of an odd thing if she was trying to convince herself that she was hallucinating), and thought about how her 'other experiences' meant that she was aware that some superstitions were rooted in fact. However, also of note is that the night of the assassination seems to have been her first time getting a real look at Inkspren, so it probably wasn't akin to how Shallan got scouted by Testament.
2. Jasnah had a legitimate mundane mental illness episode of some sort, which gave her partial insight into shadesmar while it was occurring, similar to(Mistborn Secret History)
   Spoiler

   Kelsier managing to kinda-sorta talk to insane people while he was a ghost,

   which is why all the cognitive shadow stuff seems at least somewhat familiar to her.

3. Jasnah suffered a legitimate but mundane psychotic break around the ages of 12 to 13, possibly due to a mix of preexisting risk factors, hormonal changes from puberty, and/or stress from being a king's daughter. That's it. She would have (and did) eventually recovered on her own, but her brush with the Alethi mental healthcare system left her understandably even more traumatized. However, this doesn't give a satisfactory explanation for why the backwards shadows seem to be familiar to her.
4. Jasnah did have a run-in with some kind of voidish force, possibly up to and including an Unmade, which caused/was mistaken for a mental illness. The primary reason I think of this is because she mentions 'a childhood illness nobody else seemed to remember, for all it had done to her.' Now, this could very well just be that everyone else shrugged off what happened as a phase while she was emotionally scarred from the experience and being effectively locked in solitary confinement because that's how they treat mental illness, but if taken literally it has that same kind of eerie 'something is missing here' theme that's shown up in other places with Odium's touch like Kholina, Vyre, and Shinovar (indirectly).
5. Jasnah was subjected to or had some kind of near-miss with being sexually abused, though I don't think by any family member given her later attitudes towards all of them. The only real piece of evidence for this in the books is Shallan's "who hurt you," thought after she kills the gang in Kharbranth, but that could easily be Shallan misinterpreting Jasnah's emotions and motivations. If it is what happened, it's not that this 'drove her insane' so much as Gavilar didn't know how to/didn't care to deal with her trauma and for political reasons didn't want the incident aired publicly, resulting in Jasnah getting locked away both because that was the 'treatment' available and to get her out of the public eye, lasting until Navani returned from wherever she was and intervened. The catch here is that I simply don't know that it's something Brandon would want to write; he doesn't shy away from acknowledging the subject of sexual violence (Mistborn, Warbreaker, Beryl's commentary in TRoW to an extent), but this would be more stark than anything he's included so far.