DIAGNOSES

• PTSD comprising of nightmares, hallucinations (tactile, auditory, visual), and infrequent panic attacks, as well as a form of agoraphobia which causes him to seek out small, confined spaces to 'hide' in, particularly cardboard boxes. May also have caused some of his dissociative symptoms, such as difficulty distinguishing between memory of watching a fictional event and memory of having experienced it himself.
  
• Acute psychotic depression (seemingly agitated by PTSD into bizarre delusions)
  
• Some level of anterogade amnesia, possibly stemming from delusions.

DELUSIONS

Halley is convinced that he is 'Solid Snake', a Special Forces soldier who had worked in the past for the CIA as well as for a unit he calls 'FOX-HOUND'. He claims that he has been on a mission to a fortress called 'Outer Heaven' in South Africa, as well as to a made-up foreign country called 'Zanzibar Land' with a geographically-impossible location, where he had been on a mission, and he is now 'in retirement'. He also seems to be convinced that he has many fans who admire his work, although this is more properly defined as a paranoid delusion rather than a grandiose one since he apparently hates the attention. Despite this, he appears fairly lucid and controlled in conversation, if highly defensive and occasionally hostile. His thinking does not appear to have been impaired.

His delusions are at the very least inspired by Hollywood action movies. His description of sailing on a hang glider over a bridge is similar to a scene from the John Carpenter film Escape From New York - possibly the name 'Snake' derives from this movie as well. He describes having been locked in battle with two cybernetic beings he claims resembled the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, which may derive from the fictional character of the Terminator. His description of burning his father so that his robotic limbs are exposed also appears to have derived from this film. Many more of these similarities exist, although when observed Halley refuses to acknowledge them.


SUMMARY OF HISTORY

Justin Halley was born along with his identical twin, James, to Aya and Evan Halley. Identified as gifted, with IQs of 180, from a young age, the twins were able to skip years at school, and this furthered their sense of othering as they had little interest in the older children around them. The two loved each other dearly and were hardly ever apart, but were fiercely competitive – both trying to grow up faster and win more fights and get better scores at school and more friends and prettier girlfriends than the other. This spirit of competition between the two of them was their lifeline, as their mother was aggressively pushy with her two genius boys – James, more courageous and open, was her favourite – and their father believed strongly in maintaining a dominant, distant authority, as much as he loved his sons. The situation became worse with the birth of their younger sibling, Jason, who Evan suspected was not his child, and Aya's refusal to either admit this or tell him he was wrong drove a wedge between them.

The brothers sought attention from one another and from the easiest thing available to them - fiction. Often they would return home after school to an empty house, and they would take this opportunity to watch violent Hollywood action movies or play console games - growing up in the Eighties, they swallowed the brunt of the NES and SNES eras of gaming, enjoyed the Star Wars and Ghostbusters crazes, and idolised actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russel and Sean Connery, to name a handful. Justin, the more introspective twin, obsessed more fiercely than his brother, and as he grew up started to seek identification with the protagonists of his action movies - evidence from schoolwork from around the time and testimonials from James showed that he ascribed feelings of isolation and powerlessness to his favourite action heroes, even those who showed no evidence of those feelings in the story. When his teacher asked him at the age of seven who raised him, he reportedly told her in an innocent voice "my TV".

When Justin was thirteen, Evan left his wife for a young man, Adam. While the boys still visited him frequently, they were both awkwardly growing into young men, and James elected to live with his father instead of with his mother as an attempt to be separate from his twin. Feeling deeply abandoned and with his mother's fervour now focused almost entirely on him, he isolated himself as much as possible from his friends and family. At seventeen, he enlisted in the military, in the unit his father had been a senior officer in before his retirement, considering it cutting the ties of his overbearing mother, unfaithful brother and aggressive father. He blossomed under military discipline, and soon became deeply faithful both to the Army and to his comrades in arms. The combat stress would occasionally trigger periods of depression, which he found he could alleviate by hiding in small spaces. He would risk punishment by sneaking from his bed, and seeking enclosure in his locker or in an upturned cardboard box, as he found it helped with his insomnia.

He became very attached, in particular, to Jack Doughter, an older, more experienced soldier who he found himself drawn to. He also met Doughter's fiancée, Gustava Heffner, an amateur figure skater, and fell for her. However, he knew his feelings would never be reciprocated and never did anything about them for fear of hurting her and Fox, who he loved, although he tried to push her out of his mind with a short-lived and damaging relationship with a female soldier named Helen Wright, which ended in her hating him. Around this time, he began to report feelings of dissociation and occasional panic attacks, and was placed on medication by military psychologists (diazepam and SSRIs). He also began to refuse to give his name unless forced, usually giving a stock reply along the lines of "Names mean nothing on the battlefield". When persuaded, he would usually give his name as 'David'. When this persona became Solid Snake is unclear.

Halley claimed he was at his happiest fighting alongside his allies. After losing most of them in a disastrous assault before his very eyes, however, the loss of his loved ones combined with the combat stress forced him into a dissociative universe of his own invention, cobbled together from a nightmarish mix of PTSD hallucinations, his own psychological issues, and a slew of the Hollywood movies he had grown up watching.

Unlike Justin, Solid Snake had no family besides a few vague memories of a mother and a brother buried at the back of his mind. His father was an authoritative commander, giving both the cool military discipline Justin craved and the love he craved; and, yet, Solid Snake had killed him, exerting his dominance and finalising his feelings of guilt. Justin had been hurt by meeting Jack's family, so in the fantasy world he created, Snake and Fox never talked to one another about their personal lives; and while he was still unable to have his best friend's fiancée, Snake never fell in love with Natasha Markova. Unlike Gustava, Natasha's relationship with Fox had failed, and she was killed by him, declaring her powerful attraction to Snake as she died in his arms.

In the military, instead of being an awkward recruit who needed the work more than it needed him, Solid Snake was a talented, sexy action hero, always morally above fighting, yet always the charismatic star of every battle. Justin's military psychologist theorised that Solid Snake twisted Justin's feelings of loneliness and inadequacy into something on his own terms, caused by his own actions. Snake had full control over the things that happened in his life, being responsible for the deaths of his friends and family; Snake just craved self-destruction, and in a strange way it represented fantasies of control to Justin, who had never been responsible for anything that happened in his life.

Fortunately for Justin, his military psychologist decided that he was unfit for service, as Solid Snake was also reckless and deeply haunted, especially during one of Halley's depressive fits, and could not be trusted in battle. Justin was allowed leave for six months, but upon being contacted at the end of his leave, responded with paranoid and violent behaviour indicating that the time spent away from the military had merely plunged him further into his delusions. In light of this, during a brief period of lucidity induced via strong psychiatric medication, he was persuaded to enter Landel's Institute by his favourite instructor, Donald Mills; acting under the recommendation of Justin's CO, Colonel Lloyd Callahan.


POSSESSIONS

Clothing
Grey-green button-up shirt (sleeves rolled up to just before the elbow, top two buttons missing), light brown cotton trousers (pressed), formal brown shoes (lace), dark grey socks, cotton briefs (black), "Metal Gear" brand men's watch.

Other

• A black wallet. Contains $42.16 in cash, a few credit cards, a wrapped condom two years past its expiry date, a military ID, a driver's license and a crumpled-up photograph of Justin's former unit (in which Justin is towards the left of the picture).
  
• A packet of cigarettes.
  
• A metal, cylindrical portable ashtray (has been emptied and cleaned by Landel's staff).
  
• A plastic comb.
  
• A strip of dark blue cloth that Justin apparently was using as a bandanna. It is ragged at the ends and appears to have been torn from a larger piece of material.
  
• A bottle of diazepam tablets, diagnosed for the panic attacks induced by Justin's PTSD.
  
• A cheap brooch with a broken clasp. It is gold-coloured, flat, and in an abstract, twelve-sided, boxy shape that resembles a Z with an L sitting in its crook. Apparently it belonged to Gustava, although whether it was given to him consensually or whether he stole it is unclear.
  
• A home recorded music cassette tape - plays classical music. The labels on each side read 'Side A' and 'Side B' in Gustava's handwriting, suggesting he, again, either recieved or stole the tape from Gustava.