Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-14138255-20140829002738/@comment-209421-20140829045928

MetallicArcher wrote: Ok, maybe I didn't explain myself well, I acknowledge it's crack anyway.

Depending on the kind of poison, it could affect her Central Nervous System causing the insomnia, paranoia and obsessive behaviour. Poison doesn't need to be in her food, it could be in her clothing to be absorbed through skin or in the water she drinks (it's easier to forget to eat than to drink), loosing your appetite can be a symptom of poisoning (ie. if it's affecting her digestive system), changes of colouration in the skin can indicate problems in the liver.

And yet that spurns us on to two more factors - why and how. Blake isn't the only Faunus at Beacon, so getting the poison to her is a difficult prospect. I presume the students look after their own clothing, not to mention that they'd have to get past the other members of team RWBY to put poison on the clothes. On top of that, putting something in her water? Well, easiest way to do that is to put it in the general water supply, expect Sun would likely drink the same stuff while on campus, and guess what? He's totally fine, so no, neither explanation quite cuts it in my eyes from a logical point of view. Not to mention there are doubtlessly more faunus than the two of them at Beacon.

From a psychological point of view (I'm a Psychology student with training in creative writing, so I'm doing my best to be liberal with my ideas), all of the traits you've outlined are symptoms of an anxiety disorder, primarily of an extreme kind. To put it simply, Blake has put everything she feels she can afford into stopping Torchwick. Unfortunately, that means that she neglects everything else around her, including her own physical condition. If she collapses, either at the dance or before it, then again, there's numerous biomedical explanations that could cover this - malnutrition from lack of eating, dehydration, stress/panic attack and sheer physical exhaustion all work, but the point of the matter is - Blake is suffering from her own demons, and she can't cope. If, as everyone suspects, Adam shows up before she recovers, then there is a high chance that she'll break, and I don't just mean cover.