Mental health status is private and unique to the individual. Being a witness to an individual’s mental health fluctuations and deterioration, though, makes it a shared experience where one person can only be the observer and cannot understand what motivates the shifts in response and behavior. The observer can intellectually understand a diagnosis but being exposed to it in daily life is entirely a different story.

A particular condition, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, can be generalized to the extent that it can be diagnosed and differentiated from other conditions. But the manifestations of a condition, while roughly hewing to the diagnostic criteria, can be painfully individual. Like everything with a pattern at generalizable scale, the real-life implementation is singular and layered.