My online friend has been trying to write a story/ARG and in the process has gone absolutely cuckoo.
Here's the thing: there is the concept of doing a few things to make a story feel real, but this is going way too far.
My online friend has been trying to make some kind of ARG/story for YEARS now, and I genuinely think it has psychologically destroyed them. They won't even listen to me anymore because they only care about "finishing" the story. It's been agonizing to watch. I'm basically their only long-term friend left at this point, and to be completely honest, they are NOT okay.
When people make ARGs, sometimes they involve their friends or blur reality a little bit, sure, but losing over 50 online "friendships" over a long period of time because of your story is insane. They think everybody secretly hates them, and honestly, most people eventually cannot tolerate them anymore.
They claim to have ADHD and autism, and they genuinely cannot focus on anything except this story. At all.
And then there's the alt accounts. They have an absolutely absurd amount of them, like 20+, and they can literally pretend to be entirely different people. They even know how to argue with themselves convincingly enough that I get called one of their alt accounts just because my Discord account happened to be created after theirs.
People ask me:
"Why don't you just get them to stop?"
I can't. They refuse. They say they physically "can't" stop, and honestly I think this story has become their only lifeline because their real life is not exactly good.
By technicality, I genuinely think they have committed more real-world felonies for this story than I have committed in my entire lifetime.
And when I say they're obsessed with realism, I mean OBSESSED.
They've intentionally disabled their antivirus and nearly destroyed their operating system just for "realistic glitches". They spend hours researching genuinely concerning subjects like real-world drugs, and sometimes they start acting like they're actually on those drugs because they get way too deep into whatever they're writing.
And before anyone asks: no, not illegal drugs. They overdosed on prescription ADHD medication because they thought it would help them focus harder on the story. Not recreational use, though it was to nearly lethal levels.
Why not call 988? They're Canadian. And even after I tried getting them help, they basically just got called "dedicated" instead of mentally unwell.
Why not a psych ward or psychological evaluation? They've already had evaluations in the past, and the most recent one I basically had to force them into somehow STILL ended with them talking their way out of it by the skin of their teeth.
More extreme options? I genuinely don't even know what's left anymore. At one point I considered hiring a private investigator until I realized I would actually need a legal reason to do that.
And before anyone says I'm overreacting: this story has gotten so bad that I have literally had to explain to this person that they cannot kill themselves "for the plot".
The ONLY thing that got through to them was me saying:
"The only people who would even see your story at that point would be the police."
I also had to tell them:
"You can't publish something when you're dead."
Meaning I basically had to partially LIE/manipulate them just to keep them alive.
Still think this isn't that bad? They have literally told people to hang themselves over cheating. And I mean cheating in relationships. Their opinions on it are genuinely insane. Like:
"If somebody cheated on me, I'd tell them to break up first, then I'd still refuse to date them and tell them to kill themselves."
That level of opinion.
And before anyone asks why I keep calling them "they": it's not because they're schizophrenic or something. It's because they insist they're male, but at the same time they act ridiculously feminine to the point where I genuinely don't even know what to call them anymore. Like, they act genuinely cute in a way that feels completely natural to them. They'll literally say stuff like "I'm not cute" in the most obviously cute way possible. Their entire identity just feels weirdly blurred together with the ARG at this point.
And the sentence that finally broke me was this:
"The best stories are real ones." - Tommy Gray (if that's their name)
At this point I genuinely cannot tell where the ARG ends and where their actual personality begins.
If anyone has help or support options, please let me know! It would be greatly appreciated.