Mental Illness During Rosella’s Time

While dark and disturbing, the short story, “Dawn Mason’s Extreme Hatred Bias”, shows the realities facing those in the dystopian U.S. deemed seriously mentally ill. It’s not a hope filled future for these individuals.

And despite Uzzia Banks’ attempts to lead a social revolution to overturn things, society was firmly set on its opinions concerning the seriously mentally ill.

By Rosella Tolfree’s time, the U.S. society still harbored a disdain and near hatred for those suffering from serious mental illness.

Those fears were further added to by the continual development of artificial intelligence into autonomous walking machines, known as androids.

Research of the time showed that the android brain was prone to psychological issues like that of a human’s brain. It was from this reality that scientists developed psychological control features for androids, but this didn’t comfort society. People became scared of a robotic rampage.

With the Hollywood Rampage event, in which a few cerebra cybernetic enhanced actors went on a killing spree in downtown Los Angeles, humanity’s fear of full cybernetic interconnection with the digital world would lead to problems were realized.

As a child, Rosella herself almost ended up in a state repression drug program. There was an incident when she was around the age of seven when the state of California did a reassessment on her. This was prompted by one of her online schoolteachers noting fantasy elements in a creative writing assignment that were too detailed. The details were so vivid it was as if she had been there and snapped a photo. The administration suspected Rosella might be suffering from dementia or schizophrenia. Results of the reassessment came back as inconclusive. Without a conclusive result, the state couldn’t place her in the program. The results spared Rosella the trauma Dawn suffered.

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Image- mental illness depression mental. By avi_acl, Source pixabay. (Processed using Adobe Spark).