Not a chapter, I just want to respond to a misconception. I appreciate everyone who reads through anyway, I don't think it's too long.

This is not meant as a reprimand, I just want to say my piece. Mental health is a very important topic to me and it's a central theme in my work.

Mental health disorders are hard to understand and very tricky to talk about if you've not experienced the thing you're referring to. I can only speak from my experience, so my discussion and representation of this topic will always be imperfect and I want to acknowledge that at the top. However, if individuals cannot share their perspectives then I see no way to inform people about mental illness at all.

I think it is important we are always striving towards a more empathetic and compassionate world, and I think that fanfiction is a vastly underappreciated vehicle for this, but given some of the response I have received I also need to address the meta because some things just don't fit into dialogue.

There are a lot of words commonly used in conversations about or around mental illness that aremisrepresentative and/or that easily lend themselves to being used improperly.

Insanity is one of these terms. (So are mania/manic, bipolar, psychotic, etc.)

As far as I have ever heard it used, insanity can be implemented in two different ways.

First, to say of oneself that they are feeling insane. I'll admit to having done this at points in my lifeto say that there is some ineffable disconnect between what you understand and what the world reacts to. E.g. some medications will jumble the connection between your brain and mouth, so a person is able to construct coherent thoughts but when they speak none of this comes across. This often leads to people with this side effect saying they feel like they're 'going insane' because they're constantly telling friends and doctors what they're experiencing but these people cannot respond meaningfully to them and often begin to infantilize them because they appear to be losing coherence. This quite literally feels like your reality is separating from other peoples', and so by saying they're 'going insane' a person with this symptom is conveying that there is something very wrong in their treatment plan and interactions with the world – which is a serious and important thing to be able to say.

Second, to call another person insane. This is usually said to discredit the person being called insane, saying that their experiences have no basis and therefore ought not to be believed or dealt with meaningfully. Thishas a similar effect to calling a woman 'hysterical'. I think people who call others insane, even if they don't mean it in a mean way, are unknowingly contributing to this culture of silence and disregard around mental health. As soon as we allow ourselves to label other people this way, we empower others to take mentally ill people's experiences and shove them in a box that devalues them.

A psychotic person, and I mean that literally as a person who is experiencing hallucinations, is not insane. They are experiencing real things which need to be acknowledged and heard. They might say they are feeling insane as a way to convey how their experiences feel out of touch, but what they are experiencing is a neurochemical process that is very real, even if their hallucinations or delusions are not consistent with the larger progression of the world.

It is understandable if this scares you, or makes you uncomfortable, or leaves you unsure of how to handle a specific situation. I'm not saying all people are always coherent, or that you should take the delusions of someone as empirical fact. The severity of some people's illnesses might leave them permanently disconnected from reality. I am only saying a specific diagnosis or symptom will never be the indicator of if that is true, and regardless – people deserve our compassion and to always be treated humanely.

To talk specifically about the scene with Frog:

First: Kakashi was neither insane nor did he feel insane. He was having a flashback, he understood he was having a flashback, and he was taking as best steps he could to manage that flashback.

Yes, he was having trouble identifying what was real. While that involved symptoms with a similar expression to psychosis, Kakashi was not psychotic (and even if he was, this would not have changed the scene in any way. There is nothing inherent to psychosis that should carry a negative stigma or change the way you perceive someone.)

Second: While Kakashi's inner monologuewas irregular, it was very deliberately logical. When Kakashi's mind initially became disoriented, he grabbed the last thought he knew he had and he tried to ground himself in it. He took 'frogs' and 'hear' and attempted to figure out why he was thinking about that. It wasn't anuwurandom boy moment. I should have conveyed that better, I'm sorry I did not.

Third: A hug and somePakkunpets are not going to suddenly 'fix' Kakashi. His experiences are never going to lot of the things one might take as proof of Kakashi's 'brokenness' are the very steps to coping. Sticking his head in an ice bucket to ground himself via dive reflex and temperature differences? That's fantastic, let's normalize it. Sometimes people don't 'heal', they just manage symptoms.

Sorry to get anybody's hopes up for another chapter when it's just a rant.

Also, because I know it would give me anxiety, if you have to ask yourself if I'm replying to your comment, I'm not. And even to who inspired this – I don't think badly of you. I hope this did not come across as accusatory or mean, I just think the current way mental illness is dealt with is so under-satisfying.

I appreciate all the love so far more than y'all can know. New chapter in the works! (Despite this chapter not being a creative piece I still welcome any thoughts people have on it. If you feel I misrepresented something please call me out on it.)