Mental illness among KR

[Vessel of Theory]

So stormlight, as so helpfully proved by the injury-prone Windrunners, is able to heal people's body's, to the extent that the Lopen is regrowing his arm.

However, stormlight is not able to cure the Heralds' madness(not sure what causes this, prob not best example). Across the Cosmere there are cases where madness or other mental illnesses happen in conjunction with magic(sorry if this is poorly worded, we just put down one of my dogs and I'm having a hard time thinking)

Essentially, what I'm asking is a two part question. 1: is it possible for an individual with above average levels of Investiture(specif. Knight Radiant) to have a mental illness? I imagine this would somehow relate to Cognitive Realm and Spiritual Realm. 2: If it is possible for a KR to have a mental illness, such as amnesia, are they able to forget one, or any, of their oaths? If possible, what would the effects of this be?

[I Am A Fish]

57 minutes ago, Falkir said:

Essentially, what I'm asking is a two part question. 1: is it possible for an individual with above average levels of Investiture(specif. Knight Radiant) to have a mental illness? 

Kaladin has depression, Dalinar has PTSD, and Shallan has DID, so...

Yes.

I'd say that it's possible for KR's to have mental illness.

[The Awakened Salad]

To answer your first point, yes. Kaladin is confirmed to have depression, and Brandon has stated that Shallan experiences something similar to DID. Many other characters like Dalinar and Jasnah also suffer from mental illness, but I’m not sure if it’s been confirmed what, and I don’t want to haphazardly apply a label to them. I’m not an expert on Realmatics, but I believe healing with Investiture has to do with how the person perceives themselves. Similarly to how Kaladin’s slave brands are a part of him, his depression is as well. 

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Questioner

Stormlight, I know it heals wounds and stuff like that but can it heal illnesses like colds?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes it can.

Questioner

So if Kaladin suddenly contracted brain cancer...

Brandon Sanderson

It's plausible-- it depends, see what it does is it takes your body and makes it align with your spirit, and partially through the filter of how you view yourself. So if you view yourself as sickly, then you won't.

Salt Lake City Comic-Con 2014 (Sept. 4, 2014)

There’s also the issue of the thematic implications if stormlight was able to magically heal mental illnesses. Obviously that’s not how it works in real life, and it invalidates the struggle faced by many. I’ve bolded some parts of the WoBs below that phrase it really well.

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Glen Castergene

Where did you research addiction, and what made you put a character into your books who was battling addiction?

Brandon Sanderson

So, this character that was battling addiction actually started, first appearance was in Mythwalker, which is the book that became Warbreaker. It was my ninth novel. (During those days, for those who don't know, I wrote thirteen before I sold one.) This character really stuck with me; it was me trying to do something that is very different from my own personal experience, looking to try to make a character sympathetic who struggles with something that a lot of people struggle with in our world. And one of my goals in putting characters like this into my books is to try to help humanize, because we all have these issues we deal with, and we all have different things to our psychology, and some of them can be pretty difficult to deal with. Some mental illness can just be a real kick to the head. And I see a lot of fiction that does a poor job of humanizing people like this.

And this was a character that, when I wrote him, I didn't know what I was doing, but the character really connected with me. And so, I put the character back in, I added them to the Stormlight Archive, and then I started to do my research. You can read, in the acknowledgements, some of the people that have been very helpful in me understanding addiction to the point that I hope I can get it right in the stories. But it is really important to me. There was something about writing this character that made me understand addiction, and people who were dealing with addiction, in a way I hadn't before. And that's something that I love about writing.

The other thing is, I didn't want magic to become a panacea, to get rid of hard things in people's lives. That's kind of important to me, because I think it can be very dangerous to write, "Well, the way to get over this sort of thing is just to get some magical powers!" (Which, of course, doesn't work in real life, in the real world.) And I don't want to not give people who deal with things like this the escapism that some of us will get my being able to read a book about someone who has a magical cure to an affliction they're dealing with. That is part of why they read, is this ability to escape from our problems into a world where the problems become different, and perhaps more surmountable. I acknowledge that what I'm doing does make that difficult, but I feel like the humanizing of people who are, maybe, not psychonormative or who deal with serious issues like addiction is more important to me.

And the writing felt right. At the end of the day, there's all these reasons that we can give for why I do things, that are intellectual reasons. But at the end of the day, it just feels right. The characters I'm writing feel like themselves, and that's who they are. And to not write them well would be a betrayal of trying to tell this character's story.

YouTube Livestream 2 (Jan. 20, 2020)

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PallonianFire

If a Shard were to heal the cracks in someone's spiritweb, like Sazed did with Spook, and that person who was getting healed has a Nahel bond, would that break the bond?

Brandon Sanderson

No, because the Nahel bond is already filling in those cracks, so you would have to rip it off to put something else in there.

PallonianFire

So it wouldn't really be-- the Shard wouldn't be able to heal--

Brandon Sanderson

Well, the Shard-- Like, here's the thing we have to get at with this, what we're getting at, which is the question of, for instance, is Kaladin's depression a flaw in him that needs to be healed? And that is a question for philosophers. There are certainly people, cosmere and outside the cosmere, that say "Yes, this needs to be healed" and things like this. But what about somebody who's-- say, someone who is autistic, and their mind just works in a different way, and this way allows a certain bond to happen that couldn't otherwise happen? Is that a flaw, or is that-- is it a bug or a feature, to speak in coding terms? Is what's up with Kaladin a bug or a feature? I know that my wife would probably get rid of her depression if she could, but it's also been fundamental in how she sees the world and who she is, would that change her into a different person? And things like this. So, I want you when you discuss this, to be very careful about treating mental illness as a flaw as opposed to an aspect of a human personality that allows certain different things to happen. Does that make sense? *applause*

PallonianFire

The way I was sort of thinking, was, could Odium say, "Oh, I'm just going to fix this" and then you can't Surgebind anymore?

Brandon Sanderson

Right, right, yeah. If he-- if there w-- that is possible, but it would be hard to do without the consent of the person, but that is possible… You can fix somebody in a way that they didn't want to be fixed, and it would ruin things.

JordanCon 2016 (April 23, 2016)

And to answer your second question, also yes. Shallan does have amnesia, and it’s been confirmed that she has regressed in her oaths. I can’t find a WoB on that right now, but it’s likely we will see the effects of her regression as the series continues. 

Edited October 26, 2020 by The Awakened Salad

[Frustration]

2 hours ago, The Awakened Salad said:

And to answer your second question, also yes. Shallan does have amnesia, and it’s been confirmed that she has regressed in her oaths. I can’t find a WoB on that right now, but it’s likely we will see the effects of her regression as the series continues. 

memory suppression and amnesia are not the same thing.

[kaellok]

3 hours ago, The Awakened Salad said:

And to answer your second question, also yes. Shallan does have amnesia, and it’s been confirmed that she has regressed in her oaths. I can’t find a WoB on that right now, but it’s likely we will see the effects of her regression as the series continues. 

If I remember correctly (as I also cannot find the WoB I'm thinking of frustratingly enough) the WoB was talking about Shallan from childhood until WoK -- she regressed, suppressing memories of what had happened.  I don't remember reading anything of similar lines for Shallan regressing after WoR.  There's an argument to be made that she did, however, since she creates personas in order to hide from the Truths she spoke that she can no longer suppress as she had become accustomed to.  If you progress by speaking core truths that reveal who you are, and you hide from that pain by changing who you are, then it's pretty fair to say that you're regressing.

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PallonianFire

The way I was sort of thinking, was, could Odium say, "Oh, I'm just going to fix this" and then you can't Surgebind anymore?

Brandon Sanderson

Right, right, yeah. If he-- if there w-- that is possible, but it would be hard to do without the consent of the person, but that is possible… You can fix somebody in a way that they didn't want to be fixed, and it would ruin things.

I'm about 1/3 of the way through my re-re-read of Oathbringer right now, in prep for RoW, and there's an interesting thing here when Kal and Syl are with the Parshmen.  Syl says that humans had ripped out a part of the Spirit of the Parshmen, which is what kept them docile and servile, hard to think or act unless given specific direction.  But the Everstorm healed that damage in them. I'm morbidly curious about what the old Radiants (and one, in particular) did to cause such long-lasting Spiritual damage to an entire species.  And if it's something that was exploiting a unique vulnerability of the Parshmen, or something which could be done to others as well.

I also think that the quote is a direct allusion to what happened to Eshonai--she consented to the form change, but did not know what that would actually entail.  So she was fixed, but not in a way that she wanted (see: internal screaming), and as a direct result most of her people died.  Her not doing that would have had an indirect result of most of her people dying, so it's not like she had good choices to make, but she was also lied to about what that decision would entail.

[The Awakened Salad]

2 hours ago, kaellok said:

If I remember correctly (as I also cannot find the WoB I'm thinking of frustratingly enough) the WoB was talking about Shallan from childhood until WoK -- she regressed, suppressing memories of what had happened.  I don't remember reading anything of similar lines for Shallan regressing after WoR. 

Yeah, that was my fault for phrasing it badly. I meant to say that we might not know if Shallan’s oath regression pre-WoK had any other effects. 

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memory suppression and amnesia are not the same thing.

I’ve heard that memory suppression can lead to amnesia. I’m not a medical expert, though. 

Edited October 27, 2020 by The Awakened Salad

[danex]

It’s not just that Knights Radiant can have Mental Illnesses, they almost need to. The cracks in their SpiritWeb that trauma causes is what allows investiture to fill them in the form of the Nahel bond. 

Same principle with Mistborn snapping and the Mist Sickness. Gotta break the SpiritWeb a bit if you want to be able to use innate investiture.

This is also the basis of Hemalurgy, where instead of natural snapping to crack the Spiritweb, you forcefully and intentionally rip a piece off and staple a new bit on. 

Edited October 29, 2020 by Danex
This is all correct right? I don’t wanna sound like I know what I’m talking about if I actually don’t.

[ftl]

1 hour ago, Danex said:

It’s not just that Knights Radiant can have Mental Illnesses, they almost need to. The cracks in their SpiritWeb that trauma causes is what allows investiture to fill them in the form of the Nahel bond.

Not sure I agree there. While our main PoV characters are all plenty broken, radiancy is definitely accessible to all sorts of people without mental illness. If you "have to be broken" to become radiant, that stretches the definition of "broken" so far that literally every human being qualifies.

Which, in a way, is true. Everyone has their struggles.

1 hour ago, Danex said:

Same principle with Mistborn snapping and the Mist Sickness. Gotta break the SpiritWeb a bit if you want to be able to use innate investiture.

That's been changed in Era 2, though! 

[danex]

1 hour ago, ftl said:

That's been changed in Era 2, though! 

Kinda, mistings do still need to Snap, Harmony just changed the way snapping worked. It is still necessary though. So that fact speaks volumes actually, the fact that he couldn’t just remove snapping, he had to just change it. 

1 hour ago, ftl said:

radiancy is definitely accessible to all sorts of people without mental illness.

I agree, that’s why I said ‘almost’ in my first sentence, and said ‘trauma’ instead of ‘mental illness’ in my second. 

It’s more like the Illness and the SW Cracks are both caused by trauma, rather than the SW Cracks being caused by Illness. So there’s correlation between Mental Illness and SpiritWeb Cracks, but not necessary causation.

Trauma is definitely necessary though. Dalinar killing his wife and subsequent alcoholism, and failing to save Gavilar. Shallan killing both her parents and basically just having a horrible childhood in general. Kaladin’s internal struggle between Medicine and Warfare plus watching Tien die. All trauma that caused their Mental Illnesses and their Spirit Web cracks.

Dalinar in particular is a good example of the very close correlation between Illness and Radiancy, because we see his Mental Illness widen the cracks, even though they didn’t cause them. This is through his alcoholism. 

It is definitely possible to have some sort of Trauma without developing a Mental Illness though, but the Trauma could still cause Spirit Web cracks. 

Edited October 29, 2020 by Danex