That's very interesting, because I didn't notice the mental health stuff or even the printing press at all, but the ciphers really bothered me -- not the ciphering itself, which I really liked, but the part where the whole discussion was predicated on the ciphered language being English -- at which point I started saying, wait a second, how does it happen that random fantasy kingdom is using a language that in our world developed as a mongrel of many different influences and origins, whereas in this world all the kingdoms seem to speak the same language? That was the thing that kept throwing me out of the story (which otherwise I very much liked).