When Images Start Functioning Like Sentences
How Visuals Inherit Grammar)
Language doesn’t disappear in psychosis.
It recruits help.
In Chapter Four of Fought Disorder (“Blunts and Roses – Use Your Delusion, Part II”), meaning begins to leak out of words and into images.
Pictures stop being representational.
They start behaving like arguments.
The First Visual Turn
Up to this point in Fought Disorder, language has carried the burden of interpretation.
Lyrics, quotes, memories — all verbal.
Chapter Four marks a shift:
Screens replace sentences
Images replace explanation
Seeing becomes a form of reading
And unlike language, images don’t hedge.
A Short Passage
“The coincidences were stacking up at a distressing speed.”
This line is doing heavy work.
It signals a change in epistemology:
Meaning is no longer inferred — it is accumulated.
What’s Happening Linguistically (Yes, Linguistically)
This chapter introduces a fourth distortion:
Visual syntax.
In ordinary cognition:
Images are ambiguous
Meaning is negotiated
Context is flexible
Here:
Images are read sequentially
Details function as clauses
Coincidence becomes connective tissue
A wristband isn’t just a wristband.
Its colour, position, recurrence — all operate like grammar.
Images begin to say things.
Why Images Are So Persuasive
Visual information feels:
Immediate
Unmediated
Objective
You don’t “interpret” an image — you see it.
That’s why this shift is so powerful.
Once images begin functioning like sentences, doubt has nowhere to stand.
There’s no tone to question.
No metaphor to soften.
No irony to retreat into.
The image is the claim.
Coincidence as Syntax
One of the most destabilising moves in this chapter is how coincidence changes status.
Instead of:
“That’s strange.”
It becomes:
“That confirms it.”
The logic is subtle:
One coincidence is noise
Two are interesting
Three form a pattern
Four become proof
This is not irrational logic.
It’s over-applied pattern recognition.
The Reader’s Discomfort
By now, readers often report a shift in their own experience:
A tightening
A sense of inevitability
A loss of interpretive freedom
That’s because the book has quietly removed your usual exits.
You can no longer say:
“It’s just a metaphor.”
“It’s just memory.”
“It’s just a quote.”
Now it’s just what’s there.
Why This Matters Clinically and Culturally
Much public discussion of psychosis focuses on hallucinations.
But this chapter shows something far more common — and far more relatable:
The over-interpretation of real material.
Nothing here is fabricated.
Everything exists.
The illness lies not in perception, but in assignment of meaning.
Why the Book Sustains This Pressure
A single image can be dismissed.
A stream of them cannot.
Fought Disorder maintains this visual-linguistic pressure long enough for the reader to experience what it’s like when:
Evidence never resets
Meaning never drains
Confirmation never stops
That sustained exposure is the point.
Where This Leads
After this chapter, the world begins to respond.
People seem positioned.
Spaces seem staged.
Language feels choreographed.
Once images have grammar, reality has a script.
