Thread:Jester of chaos/@comment-29414935-20190923113331/@comment-1705775-20191214184615

mentally ill is for individuals who are not considered "incurable" - which would be most people if we dealt with reality, however since we deal with fiction there's many characters who are considered completely unable to be cured of their mental illness and are going to be dangers to society and themselves pretty much forever, revolving-doors who constantly go off the deep end and do not respond to therapy, drugs or anything short of a full-on lobotomy (which is not a cure so much as a literal sledgehammer).

there can be hope for mentally ill characters to improve and they have "cool" periods of acting relatively sane or within society's norms - psychotic characters are pretty much "100 percent crazy, 100 percent of the time" - or very, very rarely show any signs of improvement or sanityy.. if they do it will quickly fade back to insanity again.

(this is for fictional portrayals, obviously, it is not the same as any real world illness - closest you'd get is extreme examples of schizophrenia.)