Luna Starts Studying Marine Biology And Her Friends Frequently Send Her There Are Many Benefits To Being

Do you know what the Valeria Richards / Bentley-23 relationship is? Is it’s Calvin and Susie from Calvin and Hobbes. It’s as simple as that.

playing around with some luna vibes.

Lockjaw #4 (2018)

written by Daniel Kibblesmith art by Carlos Villa, Roberto Poggi, & Chris O'Halloran

my fav mutie & FF member 😸

He's helping them beat a level!

when’s Franklin going to get his pet Galactus?

Ahura Boltagon and Misidentified Child-Age Psychosis

Schizophrenic psychosis in childhood is extremely rare.  It’s not unheard of, but is highly uncommon.  Children can demonstrate psychotic features, but more often than not these symptoms are the result of other factors.  Psychological trauma, clinically significant troubles with anxiety and/or depression, and even the natural organic development of the brain can bring about transitory states that look like schizophrenia.  And yet properly distinguishing such features from true psychosis is crucial in that it informs treatment approaches.  Prescribing neuroleptic antipsychotic medications to child-aged patients can have the affect of quelling the overt aspects of the difficulty while further compounding the root cause. 

I had a patient during my training who had been diagnosed as child-onset schizophrenic.  He was allegedly hearing voices and demonstrating highly destructive acting-out behavior.  At the time of this initial diagnosis, however, he had just been removed from his biological parents due to physical abuse and placed in foster care.  He was prescribed a high dose of the medication, Aripiprazole (a newer generation neuroleptic often used in the treatment of schizophrenia and Bipolar 1 Disorder).  This left him in an almost zombie-like state. 

Fortunately, shortly after I began working with this little guy I was able to get him reevaluated by a new psychiatrist who opted to discontinue the antipsychotic medication.  This led to a return of the acting out behaviors, but also left him cognizant enough to participate in psychotherapy and learn new, more effective coping skills.  The ‘voices’ never returned and the acting-out soon abated.  Through out work together, he was able to better work through his anger, sadness, and anxiety over the abuse he had endured and the trauma of being removed from his birthparents - progress we would have never been able to achieve were he still on the Aripiprazole. 

Anyways, all this has a lot to do with why I am such a fan of the character of Ahura Boltagon.  He has been just a terrific representation of the complexities of childhood psychopathology.  As a mere toddler, Ahura was misidentified as mad, and this ‘madness’ coupled with the nature of his powers made him a threat to those around him. 

At first he was sent into foster care with a kindly family of farmers (as seen in Daredevil #s 279-283 by Nocenti and Romita Jr).  This didn’t work out so well in that his symptoms were mistaken for demonic possession.  Ahura was ultimately returned to Attilan and handed over to the Pacifiers.  These mystical pacifiers were able to suppress Ahura’s powers (and psychopathology) but at the cost of rendering him into a zombie-like state.  This was shown in Hine and Irving’s terrific mini-series, ‘Silent War.’  There is a haunting scene in the series where Medusa goes to visit her son in the care of the pacifiers.  Ahura is all but catatonic and barely recognizes his own mother.  The scene was especially striking to me in that it so reminded me of the first time I had met the patient mentioned above. 

Thanks to Medusa and Maximus’ intervention, Ahura was eventually removed from the Pacifiers and returned to his mother’s side.  This was shown in Fraction, Allred and Quinone’s current run on FF.  Ahura continues to have difficulties with behavioral acting out (he released Maximus from his prison and has caused all sorts of trouble in the Baxter Building), but the psychotic features have yet to return.  In hindsight, it seems obvious that Ahura’s so-called madness was merely the result of normal cerebral development, an adjustment to his super-human powers, and the traumatic stress of being removed from his parents. 

The anti-psychotic meddling of the pacifiers only acted to quell and suppress the symptoms of Ahura’s difficulties, while leaving the root cause unaddressed; and it is only now that he has been taken off of psychotropic medication that his true recovery is being facilitated. 

quick thing of luna maximoff 🌛🔮🧠🔮🌜

Fantastic Four vs X-Men (1987) #3, published April 1987

I was doing something completely unrelated when I came across this

I had no idea