Writing a Mentally Ill Character

This guide is pretty grand and is something I have been using for other people to refer to.


In any case, I just wanted to add something I find to be really key about writing mental illnesses. There just has to be a balance. People can suffer from a mental illness in many varying degrees, but no matter what, a mental illness, or any other kind of disability for that matter, does not define a person. People will always have a personality. While it can have a big impact on their life, it becomes somewhat of a norm to people, so it isn't something that is constantly on their mind by any means. It is very possible for people to have a mental illness and function properly in society.


With that being said, don't underestimate it either. A mentally ill character is more than just a plot device. This kind of goes with romanticizing mental illnesses. Don't just make a disorder come into play when it's convenient for you for some insta-drama. Similar to my pet peeve about how the pregnant woman always seems to give birth when everything is going wrong, all too often do these disorders only seem to come into play when it would be most exciting. Make it affect them in normal situations and everyday activities.


Just... balance.
 
I don't remember if I mentioned that in the introduction or Misc. section, and if I did it was probably a lot shorter than your reply, but I agree. Writing all your posts about your character's illness and them worrying about it or something would be as inaccurate as it never being mention or affecting them- some symptoms might affect people all the time, and some episodically, but either way it does just become the norm. At least it does for me and some people that have written first-hand accounts that I've read.


I guess a comparison would be someone's OC who has a prosthetic leg- imagine that in their post, they mention once per post or in every paragraph their leg. All the character does is moan about it and the things it prevents them from doing, whether this complaining is in thoughts or actual dialogue. The player points it out a lot. The entire character's personality and thoughts revolve around this. Or, on the other hand, it's mentioned in the CS but never does it ever come up in rp ever again, even in situations that it should.


Imagine that every day when this character wakes up, they cry about it. Even years after the original incident, or even if they've had is their entire life.


I think it's more apparent that both ways is ridiculous when you compare it to something that people can understand better.


While depression or DID may never go away for someone to use Sapphire's examples, I don't think I'd go so far as to say that it completely consumes them every single second. People are more than just a diagnosis.


Even within something that's a huge part of who someone is like personality disorders, there's a spectrum of intenseness and variations in personality. Some diagnosed ASPD people I know joked that it's easy to tell a "poserpath" that's just trying to be edgy from people that actually have it because the poserpath colors everything they say with references to their supposed illness and that they basically "have no personality."


However, it's also not called an illness for no reason. I completely agree that balance is the key.
 
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Expect some revision of the information on psychopathy soon. The information on ASPD seems to be fine, though.
 
"Soon."


Haha. Ha.


Anyways, I finally got around to editing the info on psychopathy. My eyes are tired because I've been doing a lot of staring at a computer, so I may re-look it over in the future. Basically it still might not be perfect and may contain grammar errors or be worded or flow strangely since I didn't do a complete re-writing, and instead just edited sentences and tacked updated info on despite the fact that it would've probably been best to re-start, maybe keep some parts.... and..... yeah I'll look at it later.


Like I said, the only info that needed to be changed really was the stuff on psychopathy. ASPD stuff is fine. The only major changes is that I had to re-word some things because the way they were phrased implied something totally wrong, and I didn't explain some things that needed explaining, like for the fear-mongering articles I was really thinking of sites like psychopathfree that focused on "I dated a psychopath because non-disordered or empathetic people can't be abusive, right?"


Some of the info that was wrong was probably caused by the fact that early on I though ASPD and psychopathy were much more similar, almost to the point that the terms could be used interchangeably. They can't be. This led to... idk. A nicer portrayal of psychopathy?
 
Dropped by to leave a like. Great work, Ghost. After our PM exchange, I already adjusted Cathy and I think it's already a little better. I'm sure lots and lots of people will profit from this. (^.^)
 
Can I just...wow. It's wonderful to see that there are people who actually want to lift the stigma misinformed people can spread.


Long story short, I just wanted to say that you did a wonderful job there and that now it'll be a lot less time consuming to explain that Wikipedia is not the only source out there... and that i'll be definetely using your guide!
 
Ahhh, thank you so much! ( // /- v -///)


I'm really glad everyone seems to like/approve of this guide. I did my best. ╭( ･ㅂ･)و ̑̑ ＂
 
One can clearly see that you put your heartblood in it...and ahhhh that smiley is so cute (*´∀`*)
 
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Are the post-jumpin links not working for anyone else? If they aren't, I'll try replacing them and seeing if that fixes it.
 
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This is a fantastic thread; thanks for making it. Like others, I'll be keeping it around both for myself and others.


The only thing I could/can think of—and it's not a suggestion for an addition—is that while research is mandatory, being open to readers/partners/what have you about the character's afflictions (would this be a polite term? I can never find a good word) doesn't need to be obvious. I say this beyond a character being private about their issues, because that goes without saying; the stigma and embarrassment and surroundings the character might be in could all influence a choice not to be open about it. I'm not open about my problems 99% of the time because of the reactions that come of it, and I'm even reluctant to go through it with friends and family.


What I mean is that I've seen people, mostly on other websites (but they're still roleplayers/writers, so I think this is important) trying to flaunt their character's diagnoses, if any, to make it very clear to the audience what is going on. I don't see this as particularly helpful to the writer or the readers, because it conveys the wrong messages from the writer and may give the wrong ones to the readers (or augment any assumptions they have). If a mental illness is a central part of a plot, this is understandable, but if the character simply has this issue and it is not something that the plot relies on, there is nothing obligating a writer to tell the world in their prose about how "fucked up" their character is, which is a problem I see a lot, and not just in romanticizing it. This adds to the misconceptions and the stigma, but also says that the writer, while they did research, are still displaying this character's issue as some form of identifying badge.





This is meandering and probably doesn't make sense, but my point is that I've seen people across websites (I'm new here, so I can't speak for this one) state outright that their character is X, and then proceed to "prove" it in their writing. This always comes off—to me, anyway—as an obvious attempt at showing that they did research but in a gauche way, because it still expresses hidden messages that might not be intended by the writer.


Say that someone researched quite a bit on ASPD or psychopathy after deciding they wanted to portray a character with such a diagnosis. They went to painstaking effort to do this, took every bit of information they could and soaked it in, and even took in a lot of firsthand experiences—but right from the outset, whether the writer says it themselves, the prose does, or the character's attitude does (in a distinct manner), there's a blatant statement that "this character has X" or that the character is somehow "off".


I'm using ASPD or psychopathy as an example because the conditions themselves have a fantastic ability at 'going incognito', as mentioned. Also, given people's views of the very words "sociopath" and "psychopath" (not the same, woo newsflash), if something was stated outright, they'd automatically be slated as bad news bears. I can understand this narrative if it's used to prove people's perceptions wrong, but it's usually not, and in many cases I've seen with ASPD or psychopathy (and many other mental illnesses), care is taken in research but less with the execution (unless the person is serious; of course I don't mean those people) and it comes out looking like they did no research at all or they researched just to demonize a character, if that makes sense.


I'm still making less sense than I'd like, so I'll use Horns as an example, a book I just finished: mental illness wasn't mentioned. At all. The antagonist was revealed in an indirect manner and the reader is given a flashlight and gently guided through the dark, not dragged around. He killed an animal as a kid (children abusing animals is usually seen as an ill portent), he killed people, he lied and manipulated, he had no emotional empathy or remorse, could fake emotions, etc. He worked with a Congressman (as a lawyer lol), volunteered as a youth minister and taught kids, and so on. But early on he talked about people like a scientist looking down at a rather fascinating set of experiments. There was a huge disconnect or dissociation between himself and others and it showed. (I can talk like this, it by itself doesn't mean anything.) By this point, people could make their own assumptions whether they're right or wrong, right?


Point is, no one said outright that the guy was mentally ill, nor that whether or not he was mattered at all. It could be inferred if one looked at his actions, how he spoke, what characters said about him to the MC (which ran contrary to how the MC saw him, because MC is naive), and his own narrative in the section dedicated to him. He did some shit. lol. My point here is that even if you don't bring in any explicit statement about a person's condition, it can be inferred—and not telling the audience might be preferable because it could leave doubt in whether or not the person is "mentally ill" at all, thus avoiding romanticizing the condition(s) to begin with. People doing shitty things doesn't have to be explicitly connected to mental instability. Anyone can do shitty things. It's the context that matters and there is literally no need for a character to prance around IC or OOC wearing a flag or neon sign saying "I am mentally ill!" Real people don't, so why should characters with any depth?


I didn't dislike the character because someone came out and screamed at me that he was a mentally unstable man that needs to be watched; the narrative told me he did shitty things and killed people without highlighting any actual formal diagnosis. (They even put in a very subtle cause for how these changes came about. Changes. The character went through physical trauma.) The idea that he could be "mentally ill" wasn't even part of the picture, but I make those inferences now more to make a point than anything else. He may or may not have been a ~"psychopath"~ but the point was that that didn't matter in the narrative. I do not approve wholly that someone "traditionally ASPD" was portrayed as the usual villain, but it was done so in a way that didn't put light on mental illness at all. If he had anything, it was like the more criminal aspects of psychopathy, but that is still inconsequential because the focus should be on the characterization of the individual, not on whatever label they have slapped on them.


This guy could have just been a really shitty dude because no one put a focus on a specific diagnosis. ("Really shitty" can be relative depending upon how you view morals and how attached you are to fictional characters and events, but I digress.)


In my opinion, if you want to center a character around a specific type of mental illness, or build one off of one, do it subtly. If you want practice, do your research. A lot of it. But when it comes to things like ASPD and psychopathy, profoundly ill-defined and ill-understood concepts, take even more care. The character I've laid out could be put under Hare's happy little list for criminal psychopaths, but my point is how he was characterized. He wasn't demonized. I still think he's a phenomenal(ly written) character. His actions weren't even put in any direct light, like "this is bad". They simply were. They could be interpreted on their own merits (tinged by the MC's idealism, if one allowed). No one said "Hey look, a psychopath", because that would have taken away from the narrative. Anyone with mental illness can commit crimes. That doesn't mean they will, and it doesn't mean that all criminals are mentally ill (and if they are, is it that big of a deal? People tend to make assumptions that if a criminal is mentally ill, then correlation = causation and obviously being mentally ill = more likely to commit crime, which is incorrect).


So, in summary: the mental illness doesn't have to be part of the narrative, and any issues a character has can be a lot more profound if they're explored in indirect (or direct, via actions) prose. Show, don't tell. We don't need to know if someone has major depressive disorder, or a panic disorder, or bipolar II, or dysthymia, or schizophrenia, or whatever. You, as the writer, can know that and use it as an anchor for your portrayal. The character will help do the rest, by living out their lives within the frame you (and other people) have given them. Your research will do leagues in dictating what they tell you with far more accuracy and less misconception and bias. If they have any issues, they'll express themselves on their own. There's no need to go out delineating in character or during writing what they have.


This post isn't trying to discourage anyone from anything other than going out and screaming to the hills that a character has a specific "issue". Doing that tends to make readers make premature assumptions to begin with—and again, I could see its merit if someone took that in mind and wanted to prove it wrong: it may actually help people learn something. The things I'm laying out tend to be more important if one is writing a full-fledged book, but roleplaying isn't a monologue.


It's my opinion that explicit statements of mental illness should be avoided unless there's a direct point to displaying them, because just being open about mental illness, in real life or in fiction, opens a floodgate of judgments on the person. I wouldn't want readers to be clouded by whatever bias they have, especially if I'm trying to focus on something else.


If I'm playing a "mentally ill" character, as can be examined from the outside, they aren't mentally ill IC. I have characters with mental illness but that is by observing them from the outside; in experiencing and writing them, there isn't any label telling me "this is how a person with X should be". They are expressing themselves as human beings, because that is what people with mental illness are. Humans. And that's probably the best thing to keep in mind as a person researches and looks to portray mental illness.


edit: lol just realized Pine said something like this but I don't care


edit 2:

if I had to recommend any fictional books about mental illness, the main one would be Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See by Juliann Garey. It focuses on bipolar disorder. It's not a happy book. lol.


Anyway, I say this as an example of successful portrayals.


I mean, I could also recommend The Bell Jar, which is a semi-autobiographical about clinical depression (Sylvia Plath), Still Alice, about early-onset Alzheimer's (Lisa Genova; I can't speak for her other works, but she is a neuroscientist). I'd have to read I Never Promised You a Rose Garden fully before I could recommend it. A Gesture Life surrounds a veteran doctor (and his experiences serving the Japanese Imperial army during WWII) and the eventual explanation of his experience with a Korean comfort woman (sex slave) and her fate, as well as the experiences he has because of it. I'm sure I could find better examples for PTSD, but that's what I've got at the moment.


The Glass Castle is a non-fiction memoir around alcoholism and depression (I believe), and Willow Weep for Me is about an African American woman with depression (important, trust me), and in the same realm, Lay My Burden Down, which focuses around mental illness in African American communities in a very white medical system. There's also Just Checking (has an extended title; it's about OCD); Wasted (another extended title; deals with eating disorders), and Trauma and Recovery (pretty self-explanatory lol). M. E. Thomas's Confessions of a Sociopath could be useful.


Even comics can be helpful.


I realize this isn't the place for book recommendations but if people wanted more 'personal' views of these things (and books actually about mental illness, not just alluding to it), then there's a few.
 
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@castigat, woah that's a big post. I read it all. Thank you so much for writing it! :D I think I discussed something along these lines with someone before, and I totally agree with all your points. Additionally, it's just a lot more interesting for the reader and writer too. Or at least, I think so. Lol.


Would you be okay if I just linked your post at the bottom of the Misc. section? It's something important to consider, and not everyone reads the comments on threads.
 
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Thanks! It'll happen soon....I'm tired ( @ m @
 
A practically flawless thread. The amount of care and insight put into this is worthy of respect. As someone with a mental malady (I know, it's curious of me, but I personally dislike to use the term 'mentally ill' because of all the negative connotations along with it. It so happens to cause me discomfort), I appreciated how you took into consideration our side of the story, and wanted us to be represented properly, and not under some silly stigma created by healthy minded people.
 
Thank you so much! I did work very hard- the initial, massive post took about an entire day, and further revisions have taken additional hours. So people approving of it makes me happy, and I'm glad it can help people. I tried to be as non-offensive as possible and list all the things other people could do to avoid the same (that and just general proper writing is the entire point, after all), as even though I'm not totally mentally healthy either, I don't think my experiences are typical for the majority based on what I've read, and I tend to just not be as offended very easily if at all (and therefore, I have to think it through or remember what other people have said, rather than rely on personal experience or think about what would offend me.)


As for using the terms that I did, such as mentally ill, again I just chose what seemed like the best and least offensive descriptor based off of what I've seen other mentally ill people use and say about the topics.
 
Ah, this post is much appreciated! I did my senior project on Cluster A personality disorders and it really got me interested in mental disorders/illnesses as a whole, as well as the psychology of it all. During my research, I realized to what degree mental disorders and the like have been romanticized and twisted, in a way, by various people or groups who may mean well, but have simply not done proper research or have been misinformed. I'm definitely going to keep this post close at hand as a reference for anyone who has need of it. Cheers, mate!
 
Thank you!


Yeah, my research started out from self-interest, but I kept learning more because psychology is such an interesting subject to me. I think it's kind of surprising how romanticized it all is considering just how unpleasant mental illnesses can be. Just as an example, I've even seen some posts by people (not here) who were so accepting and intent on making sure people felt good and normal that they were basically anti-recovery/anti-treatment.


Again, thanks! ♥( • w •
 
Agreed I hate the romanticizing of mental illness


Also, what an amazing, well written, and detailed tutorial!
 
Thank you so much!


Also, teeny update: I happened upon a free PDF of the DSM-V, so I'll add that to the links section.
 
Thank you so much for writing this guide! I made my own research before on my native language, but this differs a great deal from it. Must be older textbooks? And judging from your descriptions and guidelines, maybe my ex-girlfriends therapist wasn't on the top of his game...
 
This is a great guide! Maybe it could come with like, written RP samples for common mistakes (like a do/don't), that'd make it even clearer. Though, since those who are suffering the most from an illness can definitely also romanticize it, it'd be hard to tell if it's the author or the character's problem if the author's writing style tells the story from their character's point of view.


@castigat: yeah, I think that's basically one of the problems I have with some RPs. In the character application, you're supposed to state a character's mental illnesses from the get-go, and the RP is all about these character's mental illnesses affect them and those around them. It feels so limited, and like people are defining their characters by their illnesses... if every time I caught a flu my whole identity revolves around the flu, or every time I got injured my life revolves around the injury, that'd be absurd. Beyond even the realm of mental illnesses, when I have a complicated character with complicated problems, I get people telling me they don't make sense. No, really, they do make sense if you're aware of all of their motivations. Also, you -can- have conflicting motivations. A character that's difficult to understand isn't necessarily a bad character.
 
Ah, thank you, you two! I completely missed these alerts when I got them so that's why I'm responding so late ( ; v ;


@LadyStanhope It could be different for a lot of reasons, I think. America uses a different diagnostic tool than the rest of the world (DSM vs the ICD) but the criteria is usually pretty similar... One of our sources might also be older than the other yeah, I can't really say if it's yours or mine, I tried to make sure all the info was accurate but I'm not a professor haha
 
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