[WP] A psychiatrist that can see physical depictions of their patients' mental illnesses.

We all have such subjective tolerances for various ills. For the myriad afflictions and challenges that the world creates for us. Impersonal and indefatigable, existence itself will make fools of us all. Time wears us down, physically and mentally; each passing year taking more and more of us with it as rushes by. We get eroded. Triumphant mountains worn to paltry molehills.

But the journey there is so different for everyone. Of course, across the billions of lives, I’m sure patterns form. Trends and tendencies reflecting the finite number of ways a body and mind can become wounded.

I have not confessed my secret to anyone, but I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore.

For years, I worked as a personal psychiatrist, treating a number of patients for a wide selection of mental illnesses. Each illness manifested in an idiosyncratic way, though themes emerged over my career.

One of my first patients after becoming fully certified was a hypochondriac. His illness manifested in a horrifying way. Whenever he entered my office, he was followed by a shambling, rotting husk. A humanoid collection of leprous extremities, withered limbs, and jaundiced skin. Its mouth hung loosely, unable to fully close and consequently unable to hide the infinite supply of rotted teeth sprouting and falling out over and over, like water in a fountain. Even now, despite everything, I can still recall the olfactory rush that crashed against me when he first entered.

As I treated him, the husk shrank. Its limbs healed. I could track his specific progress by examining his unknowing companion. I could target my focus based on the parts of the creature that were most disfigured or wounded.

Eating disorders acted much the same way: a projection of the patient that revealed the patient’s true self-image. Likewise, Phobias behaved similarly. Flickering images of horrifying scenes. Insects grown to massive, impossible proportions. An imagined version of the patient falling infinitely. And so, so many clowns.

For nearly a decade, I helped my patients. Sure, I collected a healthy salary, but – unlike some other psychiatrists – I could visually track my progress. And I always made progress.

Until that day, when he entered. I knew his name once, but the memories of that day have become clouded. Blackened. Infected by the growing illness that gestates within me now. Time stopped when this sickness entered me.

It seemed innocuous at first. He sat on my couch, and I hardly looked up from the file on my desk detailing his latest medical reports. He was, by all accounts, in good physical health. I only remember this detail because it seems to ironic now. He was ‘healthy’.

When my eyes met his, I saw the problem immediately. The manifestation of his illness was unmistakable and unassailable. Each of his eyes seemed like black holes, opening and emptying themselves into an inky cloud behind him. At first, I thought it was an imagination of space. The vastness of cosmos can be frightening, after all.

But it was not that. It was nothingness. There were no stars. No wonders to be discovered. It was a pure, unending void. His existential depression followed him, a looming specter that darkened his worldview and grew from his eyes out of the back of his head, like an impossibly heavy crown. I cannot imagine the struggle he must have faced each day, trying to climb out of bed with the heft of infinite inexistence weighing down each muscle, each sinew, and each bone.

I began to speak, but no words came forward. My mouth was drained of sound. My throat was drained of moisture. I sat paralyzed as I gazed into an honest, unerring depiction of eternal emptiness. A vacuum beyond end and beyond comprehension. It did not exist in reality, but he made it part of my world.

Only then did I realize the gravity of the situation. Unable to move. Unable to speak. Unable to do anything. What followed – I still don’t know. My last memory of being in my body was the moment when my eyes locked onto his and began to scan the cloud behind him.

The deep, pitch nothingness of existential depression and hopelessness. I had seen it in small quantities in the past. A gestating growth on a shambling husk of anxieties and deformities. But this – to gaze upon a boundless emptiness – was unprecedented. I felt my own void forming behind me as my mind seemed to leave the shell that, moments earlier, was my body. My gaze could not be moved from that abyss, which sucked all the vividness and life from me. In its place, I grew a matching void. I’ve been these ever since. I cannot say what happened to my body. I cannot see anything in this place.

I used to think it was a gift. Seeing the afflictions of my patients. Of the sick. I could use this to treat them. I could diagnose in a way no other specialist could. I did not think it would come to infect me. I had not expected to see pure, unalloyed misery, and to comprehend unadulterated meaninglessness.

How could anyone persist in the face of that? I certainly didn’t.

/r/WritingPrompts Thread