Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-7454797-20140609232032/@comment-24608253-20140610001029

I'm no expert on mental illness, but I do have some experience. It seems that Ariel has schizophrenia because she was so depressed, thus meaning that she has depression with psychotic features. The MPD is not called that anymore, but I don't remember what it is called. It may be called disassociation, or that might be what causes it.

Asylums do not exist anymore (from what I've read and heard), instead there are mental hospitals, so if you are going to keep it as an asylum you might want to make it back when they existed and were completely awful. If you want Ariel to be tortured, then send her to an Asylum and look up the time period and do some research. But if you want her to wreak havoc, then make it contemporary. Contemporary can go two ways: the patients are treated like they are in a hospital with all the care they deserve; or they are fed medicine and treated like cattle (and if it's a place the patients are to live, then they are not helped and fed pills until they are transferred).

This is the experience I have had with mental hospitals in my state, but if anybody has had any other experience you can decide among those as well.

You might want to watch your sentences, some things repeat themselves and you leave out some words. Work on grammar and punctuation, which means you should read a lot and write as much as you can.