Dysphoria

Dysphoria is the negative and distressing experience when someone's internal sense of body does not match their physical vessel. This condition is seen everywhere on Mutania in various forms and is seen in all cultures and sapient species.
The development of treatment for dysphoria has resulted in significant increases in the general quality of life for many people. Not only does it help people live with less pain, but it opened up avenues for personal expression that did not exist prior.

Symptoms

Dysphoria manifests as a deep discomfort and is often associated with depression and dissociation. Its opposite is euphoria.
There could be many reasons why someone feels dysphoric. Commonly, dysphoria can occur when individuals in a sexually-reproducing species feel that their sense of self aligns closer to a different sex than the one they were born with. Or, someone of one species could feel dysphoria about not having certain traits of another species. A notable case of this kind of dysphoria was an ildoar body family named Sidhomko. One of Sidhomko's entities, Wor, desperately desired to have the six limbs that teronura have and experienced frequent bouts of depression because they+red did not.

Treatment

Treatment for dysphoria can be tricky. Some dysphoric individuals consult medical magicians who can often make certain adjustments to the body, such as permanently removing tusks or changing someone's fur pattern, or can be involved in the healing process of body modifications that decrease dysphoria for some people.
Body modifications for dysphoria range from surgically removing external sex characteristics to piercing one's ears or notching one's beak.
Surgical procedures have improved significantly over time. Professors teach the treatment of dysphoria in the halls of the Kvotomschiizh school in Yoozii. At first, these surgeries were often relatively crude, focused mostly on removing body parts and healing them safely, which often resulted in losing sensation in those areas. As time went on, medical magicians were able to use more advanced techniques to increase sensation for those who removed body parts.
At this time, there is only one known method for reliably adding fully-working body parts to one's body, and that is through touching wormstone. Because of the unpredictability and danger of wormstone's effects, this is not a recommended treatment by anyone except by the most desperate, and even then it is difficult to find a vubopa who will agree to it.

Prevention

On a societal scale, there's no way to completely remove dysphoria from the population. Bodies and minds are strange and unpredictable, and there will always be people who would feel comfortable with their bodies if only certain things were changed.

Cultural Reception

Many cultures approach dysphoria differently, but there are certain cultures where dysphoria is discussed more openly. The Kugma and Iwati people consider any given body to be full of multiple entities. An entity's understanding of its own body could be detached from its biological reality. Dysphoria can result, and it can be hard to treat if treating one entity's dysphoria would aggravate the dysphoria of other entities.

history

The perfection of the medical magical surgery to permanently remove tusks changed conceptions of privacy for Kugma ildoar. All ildoar have tusks, and these tusks were often engraved with information about their physical body, such as date of birth or mountain family. When more people began to choose not to have tusks, that information was no longer accessible to strangers. Others started to question the utility of random people knowing these things about them and wore down their own engravings.
The pressure to adhere to standards of the mountain family lessened when it became easier to obscure which one you belonged to. Ildoar became freer to express themselves as individuals. Tusks became canvases, and people used dyes, paints, and engravings to communicate whatever information they want to convey, if any.

Origin

Natural

Cycle

Chronic, Acquired & Congenital

Rarity

Common

Affected Species

• Ildoar
• Sela
• Teronura
• Rarites