Meta on Legacy: But why were they so STUPID?
Legacy is chock full of angst and teamy goodness and loyalty and friendship (and bare Daniel toes, if that's your kind of thing). It is also, however, generously supplied in the plot hole department, particularly in the matter of the characters actually thinking. In order for events to unfold as they did, too much of the story depends on
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Oh, please do. :)
Short version: what Daniel has is an extremely rapid onset of hallucinations, mostly visual ones.
Given what he's perceiving, he's completely lucid. He's not delusional (he comes up with theories to explain what he's experiencing, but he says they're just theories). He's perfectly capable of recognizing that what he's seeing may not be real, even though he's disturbed by it.
He displays ordinary emotions (i.e. he's not gone "flat" in his affect), he's capable of carrying on a conversation just fine, he's not showing any "knight's move" jumps of logic, and he's perfectly coherent until Mackenzie drugs the crap out of him.
None of this looks anything like schizophrenia.
You could maybe handwave it and say that it's possible that he's having a psychotic break, but with hallucinations in someone who's otherwise lucid and rational, it's way more likely that you're looking at some kind of drug influence or maybe something like a brain tumor -- or, in their situation, some kind of alien influence.
Instead, Janet and Mackenzie talk some utter rubbish about migraines being one of the first signs of schizophrenia (nope, completely unrelated), and say that the dopamine levels in his left hemisphere are elevated (which they'd have no way of knowing short of injecting him full of radioactive tracers before doing a scan, and has no diagnostic value here anyway).
Mackenzie then announces that Daniel may be manifesting "full blown hebephrenic schizophrenia". For starters, "hebephrenic" is term which isn't even used any more.
Secondly, even when it was used, "hebephrenic" refers to "disorganized" schizophrenia, where hallucinations often aren't a major part but when coherence breaks down and you get symptoms like "word salad" and behaviour and emotions which are inappropriate and often "silly". And it's associated with early onset -- in the teens or very early twenties.
In other words? Pretty much the least plausible diagnostic label to slap on Daniel.
(To be continued.)
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I was amused, however, by he's not showing any "knight's move" jumps of logic, because seriously, that sounds like a textbook definition of Daniel's brain for any day of the week!
The coherence is, I think, the most powerful argument - he was rational, he knew he was hallucinating, he was lucid in between, and he responded to his hallucinations in what would have been rational, had they been real.
In other words? Pretty much the least plausible diagnostic label to slap on Daniel.
Is there, in fact, any plausible diagnostic label that could have been used?
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*snerks* No, see, Daniel skips five steps ahead in his logic, but he's perfectly capable of backtracking and explaining coherently to people once he's reminded that not everybody's brains work the way his does.
He's not jumping from one idea to another based on random or tangential associations.
Is there, in fact, any plausible diagnostic label that could have been used?
Well, all the diagnostic manuals have various dump-bin categories for "atypical" whatever (translation: we're not really sure what's going on with this person, but here's the closest we can get in the meantime). And you could say that he's having hallucinations which might be some sort of atypical psychotic break.
But (caveat: I am not a psychologist, I've just spent way too much time talking to them) his symptoms do point rather heavily towards some kind of external influence (possibly a drug, IRL) or a seriously odd presentation of a tumor, or a migraine syndrome -- or even some kind of epilepsy, actually. Those would all be logical possibilities to rule out.
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a seriously odd presentation of a tumor, or a migraine syndrome -- or even some kind of epilepsy, actually.
::nods:: See, if they were insistent on Daniel getting misdiagnosed, all these would make sense - with the epilepsy at least offering the possibility of hospitalized, barefoot Daniel angst, as they could be worried about dangerous seizures if he's left alone.
That, of course, would have demanded research. Can't have that!
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Well, probably not -- hospitalized, maybe, if they wanted to run a lot of tests very fast or were scared he had something degenerative. But he hasn't shown any sign of seizures affecting motor control, and even if he had, the appropriate strategy in the hospital would be more like telling an aide, "Hey, make sure he doesn't crack his head on the table if he falls" *g*.
(I have very odd temporal/parietal seizures, where my brain briefly loses the ability to orient me in space, and nobody's tried to take my shoes away yet ...)
They could have set up Daniel's symptoms and history in such a way as to make psychosis at least vaguely plausible as a possible diagnosis, but that'd take actual work.
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How much more work would it have taken if they were already doing some kind of quasi-research? I don't suppose they picked the word "dopamine" off the net...
On second thought, maybe they did. ;)
(Ooooh! I've got it! Machello's stupidity rays reached all the way to Bridge Studios! And hasn't dissipated yet.)
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Nobody ends up in a room like that unless a) they're being so violent to themselves or others that it's the safest way to contain them (and even then it would be a temporary measure), or b) they're in a developing country or somewhere with seriously crappy psychiatric care. I know that there are still hospitals like that around, but not that the SGC would be dumping their people there.
(My best handwave is that the SGC has very limited options for long-term care for people who have headfuls of classified info, and that keeping things hushed up gets prioritized over decent care by the highers-up, and that this is why Daniel got dumped in here -- and why a similar thing seems to happen to Orlin, once he's a perfectly ordinary kid with a fairly mild developmental delay who should be in a school. But that's me waving my hands frantically.)
Then you've got Mackenzie raising the injected dose of whatever Daniel's on to "5mls at four hour intervals" -- which, if he's talking about an anti-psychotic like Haldol, is a terrifyingly high dose, and well into the level where you expect rapid and severe side-effects.
(And in Haldol's case, the possible side-effects can include confusion, agitation and depression; given how abruptly Daniel's apparently deteriorated, I for one would be wondering how much of it is actually iatrogenic.)
Beyond that, it's bloody stupid to keep raising and raising the dose of a drug which isn't working, without ever considering that it might not be the right drug. Doctors do do this IRL, but it's not good practice, and you'd think that the SGC would manage to get someone good.
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It's one of those episodes about which I want a word with the writers. And I'm bringing my rubber band gun--along with a very large bag of rubber bands.
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And WORD on the 0-60 with absolutely no sense, from a practical, medical, or security POV. And don't get me started, please, on the many fics out there who have poor woobie Daniel abused (either by unnecessarily rough handling, or the worse definition of the term) by the eeevil, ignorant staff members of what we must assume must be a top-security facility for one of the most important civilians of the Stargate program.
Thanks for chiming in here with such interesting information. It makes the search for an explanation, even a farcical one, pretty desperate, doesn't it?
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I'm probably alone in fandom in that I pretty much hate Legacy. I mean, Daniel angst fun and all, but I can't get past the bad psychology. Plus. Well, I have to generally erase the episode from my memory because otherwise I can't see Daniel trusting...just about any member of the medical staff at the SGC ever again. (His team I have less of a problem with because even though they should have gone "hello, we work with funky alien technology, maybe something else is going on here", having someone tell you "hey, your friend has developed schizophrenia and you might be next" is bound to throw you off your game.)
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