An Approach To Insanity

Since mental illness tends to pop up in my writing every once and a while in varying forms, I was wondering if anyone else wrote about it frequently. If so, what's your approach? How does it affect your characters and the plot?

Share your stories of madness here!

edited 27th Jun '11 7:28:01 PM by KSPAM

Monomania has a certain utility. (Edgar Allan Poe used it a lot.) The most fun I've had with madness, though, is in giving characters unusual speech patterns (though it's worth noting that all of those characters have turned out to actually be sane.)

Almost every story I've ever written has mental illness to some degree.

What I usually try to do is try to pinpoint what sort of pathology my character has and how it's both an ability and disability. (For example, if a character is a psychopath, that makes them utterly brilliant in a corporate/political setting, but prevents them from being a complete person in a social setting. Yeah, not giving a shit about anyone's feelings but your own works great when you're trying to be successful, but not feeling a damn thing when your own child smiles at you makes it real hard to be a nurturing parent.)

That's pretty much what pathology is. It's basically something which makes a person "broken". Everybody has degrees of it in some ways or another, but if it's strong enough to be a mental illness, then there's going to be a piece missing somewhere.

I did a short film where a stressed and depressed MBA student has a strange day filled with strange events connected to his PDA. A viewer can't be sure if he was delusional or actually experiencing a paranormal event. A number of big time movies play with this where the narrative is basically first person, but that person has a mental condition that forces the audience think about it rather than taking a WYSIWYG approach.

My moon mages are insane, loony, crazy, mad. They behave erratically, cannot differentiate between dreams and reality, and are emotionally empty during the day, but prone to mania at night. Their madness is slightly contagious, and it can rub off on people around them, but only temporarily.

Sometimes, I use specific "disorders" without actually naming them. Autism, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, etc.

Oh yes, use this a lot. It's all a part of the Dysfunction Junction I have going on. If the character doesn't have issues at the beginning of the story, they probably will by the end.

With that said, I'm often afraid of outright naming the problems since I'm not qualified as a psychiatrist and I'm afraid that I'll have people claiming research failure. I do research obviously, but there is only so much you can get from the internet.

I've written a number of characters with some kind of mental illness in the past, but I leave most of them unspecified - among other reasons, many of these characters are Psychos For Hire and assigning them a specific real-world pathology could come with quite a few unfortunate implications. The sole exception so far is comics Big Bad Evil Alex, who is explicitly a psychopath. I tried to do the research here, as well as having his Start of Darkness story emphasize that it's not the reason he went bad.

Naomi was happy and healthy until age 11 when she was sold into slavery and tortured. At age 17, she escaped. Sometimes, she remembers the torture and screams; sometimes she suppresses the memories and acts like a happy, healthy 11 year old; sometimes she cavorts with her boyfriend because she is 17.

I have not studied Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Naomi has whichever mode, the plot requires.

I write PTSD a lot. And recently I wrote about repressed memories, to explain why one character didn't break The Masquerade for awhile. (A girl who'd learnt how to repress things from being abused, saw her foster father murdered in an obviously supernatural way. She fled and claimed she'd been elsewhere, and started believing her own lie. Then when she found proof of a vampire, she remembered what actually happened.)

Not so much other kind of insanity. But I do write developmental disabilities and brain injuries a lot. And lately I've been writing a lot about a kind of Mind Control that tends to seriously disrupt the mind's functioning in ways that resemble brain injury. If you know what you're doing with this, you can also give them fixed beliefs of your choice, such as making one guy think his best friend murdered his mentor. It's quite difficult to break these beliefs, even years after they were implanted.

I have an immortal serial killer with a conscience and minor schizophrenia. He turned into a Nietzsche Wannabe very quickly.