*Please note, this post contains spoilers for the audio drama*

The English adaptation of Chilean audio drama, Caso 63 by Julio Rojas was released on 25th October 2022. Case 63, a Spotify Original from Gimlet Studio, stars Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac.

Case 63, an audio drama

Over the course of 10 episodes, we are introduced to the mysterious Peter Roiter and Psychiatrist Dr Eliza Beatrix Knight. Peter claims to have travelled through time from the year 2062 and finds himself held in a medium secure psychiatric hospital under the care of Dr Knight. As listeners, we are immediately drawn into Peter’s story and alongside Eliza, we try to establish whether Peter is trully from the future and on a quest to save the world from a new deadly pandemic; or is infact experiencing an acute episode of psychosis.

I thought this could be an interesting story to explore as I have the opportunity to consider both of these hypotheses. This may map onto Eliza’s journey of discovery as she grapples with Peter’s reality. I will therefore be presenting two very different formulations.

Formulation 1. Hypothesis: Peter is not from the future and he is experiencing delusions and paranoid thoughts related to psychosis.

The first formulation, is based on the assumption that Peter is not from the future but that his claims are delusions and part of his current experience of psychosis. This is likely to be more in line with Eliza’s assessment of Peter during the early episodes of the series. Using the cognitive model of psychosis (Morrison, 2001), I will explore his experience of psychosis and how he makes sense of the delusions and paranoid thinking we glimpse during the audio drama. For this formulation I will be ignoring information from later in the series and and basing it entirely on the assumption that Peter is experiencing symptoms of psychosis which are driving his current actions and claims of being sent from the future to save the world.

Formulation 2. Hypothesis: Peter is from the future and is in a mission to save the world

The second formulation, assumes that Peter is telling the truth and travelled from the future. It explores Peter’s life and journey to the past as finds himself risking his life to save the world from Pegasus. As the series progresses, Eliza comes to believe Peter and as a listener it becomes clear that he has been telling the truth and this is his reality. To explore this, I have I have chosen a Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) based approach. I have used this to explore his early experiences and the environment that he has grown up in. It is clear that as an “inter-pandemic generation” child, Peter has grown up around constant threat of infection, death and the breakdown of society. The formulation in the diagram below, considers the impact that this may have had on how he sees himself and others and is likely to develop into key fears about himself and the world. In an effort to protect himself from these fears, I have considered the likely defensive or safety behaviours that Peter has adopted. As we can expect, these can lead to further difficulties (unintended consequences). We then consider how this is likely to impact on how Peter sees himself (self-to-self relating). As can be seen in the formulation below, this leads to a vicious cycle as Peter battles against these insurmountable threats and his quest to save the world from a deadly pandemic which puts his own life and existence at risk.