Does anyone know anything about post-traumatic stress disorder? How extreme can it get? What are the symptoms?
I'll give you some background:
A part of the evil army (plural: Vauglim, singular: Vaug) is surrounding the "village"-basically where the good side (Empowered) live, train, etc., and it's surrounded by a thirty-foot tall, four-foot thick wall that the Empowered have to use their power to get through, no one else can get through. The Empowered are under siege in this fortress, as inescapable to them as it is unenterable to the Vauglim. The army goes out to fight them, to draw them away and create an escape route for a messenger to begin his journey to where the main portion army of the Empowered is, fighting the main Vauglim army. That day, during the fight, five hostages are captured, in order to trade for the girl who is prophesied to defeat them all and is in the village at the time.
Hostage names/ages:
Riese, 18
Brade, not mentioned but late teenage, maybe early twenties
Jaina, 16
Connar, 17
Allosyn, 14 (not being of age to fight in the battle-16-she sneaked out, wanting to help, because she's tall and strong for her age)
Skipping a lot of happenings here, this girl rescues the hostages, and learns that they had been tortured, and one of them killed. The methods of torture were strange and outlandish. With Jaina, they told her that people she loves are dead, and when she doesn't believe them, they somehow made her see it, in her head, her family and friends being tortured and killed brutally.
Riese has had a problem with nightmares all his life; he is shot up with some kind of drug or poison that makes him sleep without waking and have worse nightmares than he's ever had.
Anyway, the main problem I have is with Connar. Allosyn is his beloved little sister. He is made to have visions of her turning into a Vaug, doing all these disgusting evil things, attacking him and such. This goes on and gets so bad that he's not exactly himself afterwards. He's been driven out of his head. And so, later, he comes back to himself mostly, but it's like he has another person inside of him, arguing with him uber-pessimistically, making him question everything he knows. It even gets so far as to cause a panic/anxiety attack. I just want to know, basically, if this is at all realistic, and what should happen in his downward spiral (don't read this part if you want to read my books and don't want it to be spoiled). The pessimist in his head eventually turns from pessimism to evil, and convinces him that he has to kill someone for everything to be right again. So yeah... Any thoughts, or info would be welcome 
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), but for some reason I write them somewhat-well. Not sure why that is... but yeah. 
OMG YOU ARE TOTALLY MY NEW BEST FRIEND OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOGMOGMOGMOMGOMG
I am nowheres near that degree of helpfulness. However, I promise you I'll comment if I think of something that might prove helpful. 
That's not fun...
