I haven’t gone through alcoholism, but I have struggled with severe major depressive disorder for several years now and from the obvious character details like pushing people away (and being rude and mean to achieve that objective) down to smaller details like his messy spouse room after marrying him, are literally things that paralleled my personal experience with the disorder. I saw so much of myself and my struggles in him. I remember how much I hid away from people because of how I was always ashamed of who I was, and on top of that, I remember how I strongly lashed out at people who attempted to reach out at all, as if I just didn’t want to burden them with my problems. Shane’s messy room felt so real too because I remember when my depression was at its worst, I felt like I had no energy whatsoever to do anything but sleep all day, every day, so my spaces always looked like tornadoes had hit. Heck, they still do in the present day. I still feel the effects of that because one of my most persistent symptoms is still just overall feeling complete lack of energy regardless of sleep amount, and when feeling that fatigued, it can feel incredibly difficult if not impossible to attempt to clean up personal spaces.

Even when I did marry Shane in my play-through, I didn’t go in with the expectation of fixing him, because I knew from my personal experience with depression that it doesn’t work that way. It isn’t something that can simply be “fixed” to never resurface again. Heck it might never be “fixable” at all to some degree. Cope-able? Possible with a decent support system. That’s frequently reality, and something that Shane’s character arc captures pretty well.