Psychology's one of the fields I specialize in, even if not professionally. I'm usually able to analyse a person's mental state very easily and get in their head, and honestly I've been acting as a psychologist to people for most of my life.

I won't comment much here, simply because my situation is overtly complicated even for people with circumstances involving 'mental illness'. I won't go into any detail about what ailments people believe I do or don't have, but I'll say that virtually all of the conditions I've been diagnosed with throughout my life have later turned out to be mistakes. With this in mind, it's not actually possible for me to properly tell you what ailments I do or don't have because to this day no doctor has possessed the ability to give a realistic analysis of it.

Since I don't know what classifies as talking about personal stories as opposed to using experience as a means of making analysis (the latter is the primary reason why I'll bring up my past in any conversation, since frankly I don't give a shit about my past and I've overcome it, but it's still offered me worlds of personal insight into a lot of matters that most people don't have and will simply make 'educated guesses' regarding), I'll just not even bother going into any detail about my opinions of how mental illness impacts this site.

What I will say is the mental health issues are actually incredibly common, primarily because the very notion of 'normal' is superficial and subjective to begin with. Sure, you'll find some people who're really 'out there', but overall I think you'll be hard pressed to find many people in the world who don't deal with some sort of ailment at some point in their life. With this in mind, it's my personal opinion that it's completely unsurprising that a large majority of people on this site likely suffer from some sort of mental illness. To be perfectly frank with you, there isn't many 'normal' people in the world who've got the capacity for creative writing in the first place. There's exceptions to every rule, but there's a fine line between 'madness' and creativity.

That being said, I'm actually one of those who [i]doesn't[/i] use role-playing or writing as a means of escapism at all.