Jeremy Henry

[Thyme]

Name: Jeremy Henry Leeland
Age: 33
Gender: Male
Personality:

The first thing people realize is that, compared to many of the patients at Nethering's, he has very little wrong with him. He has no explosive anger issues, no schizophrenia, no destructive mental disorder of any kind. A In fact, the only thing wrong with him is his hypomania and his delusional disorder, which leads him to believe that it is, in fact, 1894.

It doesn't really matter what Jeremy Henry was like before his delusions set in because they completely changed him and he can no longer remember a time when he didn't believe it was the nineteenth century. One of the most important things about Jeremy Henry now is that he is a gentleman. Although he was not raised to be any more polite than normal, and although he can get angry and forget his manners, he speaks formally and cordially, no matter who he is talking to. He has courtly manners and generally treats everyone with respect. He's charming and still fairly handsome despite his various physical issues, and is highly intelligent. He values beauty in all its forms, but he has a particular fondness for classical music -- especially the violin. A ballroom dancer, cook, singer, and lifelong student, Jeremy Henry is the classic Renaissance man. Before he became convinced the year was 1894, he was quite adept at science and had a special talent for machines and computers. The education provided for him by his wealthy parents made him very clever with words and logic, leaving him with the ability to either talk or think his way out of most anything.

He's naturally cheerful, but a lot of anti-psychotic medicine has an adverse side effect and turns that cheerfulness into full-blown hypermania -- which means that he's constantly energetic and excited and needs very little sleep. Oftentimes he's foolish and childish, and thinks everything that goes on at Nethering's is a government conspiracy trying to convince him that he's insane in order to stop him infiltrating their defenses. He's also fairly hypocritical: if you told him you'd been to the moon and back, he'd probably believe you, but if you told him the date wasn't 1894, he'd get very upset and you would be hard-pressed just to convince him not to sulk for the rest of the day.

The Jeremy Henry people know is quite different from the one that emerges when he is in a bad mood. Though both tall and strong, he is normally a pacifist. Even when his hypermanic mood fails and he slips into a periodic depression, he would only consciously take out his frustration on inanimate objects. He normally abhors unnecessary violence and values life and all the good that comes of it. But when he slips up, he has enough strength and energy to cause serious damage. Most other negative traits of his are all related to his childish, petulant attitude: he is often stubborn, rude, insulting, melancholy, attention-seeking, and innocent about the ways of the world. He consistently fails to recognize the different between false and sincere flattery, and his mood is easily soured by stress or physical pain, leaving him world-weary, cynical, withdrawn, and, above all, self-condemning.

Appearance:

Unlike many other people, Jeremy Henry is both sound of body and very attractive. Standing at five foot eleven, he is lean and well-proportioned. He never played sports in his life, but developed his broad shoulders and an athletic build after years of dancing lessons. As far as facial features go, he has a square jaw and a mane of unruly black curls. He also has bright, intelligent blue eyes that, more often than not, twinkle with the euphoria that his hypomanic state induces. These are by far his most striking physical feature because they are the best way to gage his mood. Whether crinkled up in happiness or shut tight in disapproval, he cannot seem to keep any emotion secret.

Over the course of several years at Nethering's, he has been the guinea pig in many an experiment. Some of them he escaped from unscathed, but others left more permanent marks. For example, his right eye was seriously damaged in one of the scientists' attempts at creating x-ray vision, leaving him with a ragged, enlarged pupil that covers nearly all of his iris, making they eye appear to be entirely black. The problem with this is that the larger the pupil, the more light it absorbs, so brightly-lit rooms Jeremy Henry is forced to wear either an eyepatch or a bandage over that side of his face. However, the experiment did succeed in some respects: a pupil that large gave him excellent night vision. He lost his fourth and fifth fingers on his left hand to a scientist who claimed he had discovered a way to make the body regenerate lost limbs. Ever since one doctor decided to find out whether grafting extra muscles onto the knee would allow it to move in different directions -- which it didn't -- Jeremy Henry walks with a bad limp, and there is a long, jagged scar down his right leg. He has numerous other small scars across his body, but his limp, his hand, and his right eye are the three most prominent.

Clothes-wise, what Jeremy Henry wore before he came to Nethering's would, to most people, look like some bad costume straight out of a fan convention. However, to him, his clothes were perfect, especially considering that he's still under the impression that it's 1894. He wore collared shirts all the time, and often couples them with black silk vests or waistcoats. For fancier occasions, he would change into a tail coat or a three-piece suit and long trousers, and took with him a silver-topped cane. All of these clothes he found at thrift or antique stores, and had tailored to fit him.

Desired Position: Patient
Diagnoses:

-hypomania
-delusional disorder (he believes it's 1894)
-amnesia (he doesn't remember anything before waking from his coma)

History:

Jeremy Henry was born to two very rich parents, Rose Gregson and Henry Leeland. His family was not a loving one, but it was certainly supportive -- although it was also condemning when Jeremy Henry failed to live up to his parents' standards. Growing up, the Leelands never really had one home; they traveled from place to place, which means that all the Leeland children turned out to be well-educated and well-versed in the mythologies, cultures, and languages of a number of different countries. And, just like Rose and Henry wanted, all the children grew up to be incredibly successful. The eldest, Brooke, married an all-star athlete; the middle child, Georgaina, got a job designing clothes with a high-end French company; the youngest, Jeremy Henry, got a internship teaching medieval history at one of the more prominent English colleges.

But then things went all wrong. When Jeremy Henry was 27, his flat in London caught fire and burned down while he and his girlfriend were inside. She died, but he was rescued by firefighters and brought back, unconscious, to the hospital. The doctors were dubious: they did not believe he would last the night. One of the gas pipes in his building had burst and the noxious fumes had poisoned him badly, leaving him struggling to cling on to life. But Jeremy Henry didn't die, and instead fell into a two-year coma. And when he finally woke up, the doctors had to sedate him immediately because he had been so terrified by the technology around him. It took several days, but finally a psychologist was called in and the reason for his sudden terror was discovered: he had a delusional disorder, and believed that it was 1894. Still, the doctors proclaimed him harmless -- because he was; if anything, the delusions had benefitted him because he became much more cheerful, and began to enjoy life more. When they released him from the hospital, he moved out to the English countryside and rented a room on a farm for double the asking price. There, Jeremy Henry continued to live his life peacefully, ignorant of his family, his dead girlfriend, his past, and even the date.

Henry Leeland would not accept this, however, nor would Rose. To have a crazy person -- even a harmless one -- in their family was anathema to their ambitious goals. It took them nearly a year, but finally they located some clause or another that allowed them to seize control of all of Jeremy Henry's estates and of his person and send him away to a mental institution. This was a shiny new facility -- not Nethering's -- and was reserved for the upper to middle classes. At first, he was fine there, but the longer he stayed the more manic he got. Eventually, his hypomania faltered and he fell into a deep depression punctuated by random outbursts of violence. After every incident, Jeremy Henry was completely apologetic, and swore never to do it again, but at some point the nurses and doctors there had had enough. He was deemed too unpredictable for them -- and he was sent to Nethering's. There, he was not allowed to contact the outside world often enough to get himself transferred somewhere else. A number of experiments were performed on him, and over the course of his time there he lost two fingers, the use of one eye, and a great deal of blood and tears. Now he can't leave, and who knows what will befall Jeremy Henry next.

[/blockquote]Additional Comments:

Jeremy Henry refers to himself as just that: Jeremy Henry. It sounds strange, but it's actually his given name, and is a compound of two different first names, just like Mary Kate or Carol Ann. Other people tend to call him Jeremy, however, or Mr. Leeland if he's in an officious mood.

[Emily]

ACCEPTED! Beautiful bio! Loved how you incorporated the plot and everything into it!
You are accepted into Ward A as his main ward.