That's not really what I'm going for. I'm trying to keep more or less the same symptoms. it's just a matter of exactly which ones and how they relate and are motivated. One of the key themes to his character is the fact he's quite fragile, but it's in a more of a self-destructive, tortured way than a reactive, fearful way. And there are other colours that could be involved anyway so it would feel odd to pick just one. Red, his mother's blood. Green, the bamboo plant his sister got that he associates with his past.
Oh to quite the contrary, I wouldn't say that anorexic people are fragile. That expresses that they are weak. I think it's quite the opposite. It takes a lot of strength to live life hating food yet not just give up and kill yourself. At the same time, a person can have a fragile body and be a complete pig at the table. It could be a metabolism problem that causes that. A person can also be self-destructive without being anorexic, they could be a self-mutilator. I think you are just taking in too much at once. In my opinion, if you are going to go with something that is main stream, just make him have PTSD and go with that. Leave out all this other anorexia stuff.
I think those are more your perceptions of why it's needed. As I said, treatable pathology is not dependent on a diagnosis. Cognitive-behavioural therapy (a prominent paradigm of psychotherapy), for example, and strictly speaking, makes little to no effort to understand what causes depression in a clinical context: it focuses on "misconceptualized" beliefs and attitudes the person experiences, and is helpful to virtually any degree of depression and anxiety. And I'll also speak for myself on this point: by not labelling the disorder you avoid numerous hazards of misrepresentation, seeing as I have no reason to think yet that you've experienced it firsthand, and especially in light of planning to detail personal matters such as a love life. A unique problem leaves readers to not draw conclusions about others better than a popular diagnosis. And because in reality the sky's the limit for how a disorder can impact one's life, there's no typical experience. You can draw any inference from symptoms to how they affect people, not that I'm trying to dissuade others from sharing ideas with you. That being said, I encourage you to bounce whatever you envision happening off people to iron out any potential issues.
Well, the thing is I'm juggling between PTSD and anorexia as explanations for his non-depressive symptoms. i know he's definitely going to be depressed because he's quite sad, guilty and hopeless. If I go with anorexia, I get rid of the flashbacks which allows me to make him feel less symptom-heavy. The food element is essential because he is supposed to look a bit underweight representing his fragility physically. I don't mean he's weak, I mean he's damaged and is still vulnerable as a result. He draws his strength from his closest companions, Ivana, and his new acquaintance turned boyfriend Chen(chinese guy). They give him hope by connecting him with life, but when things go wrong he can lose that hope and begin to break. Tai is also shy, nervous and gentle so I wouldn't call him strong exactly, not at the beginning of the story at least, he develops more conviction and even a little confidence(eventually).
As I stated earlier, PTSD does not have to come with flashbacks. In fact, most people with PTSD (even ignoring Type II, which may be less prone to flashbacks) do not have flashbacks with severity after 3-6 months.
+1 to this. Eating disorders, much like self harm, have a bit of a bad wrap in popular consciousness for a bunch of reasons (mainly a lot of teenagers getting labeled when they are acting out rather than mentally ill; that doesn't mean those kids don't need help, just it's not the same kind of help) but the truth of all eating related disorders is pretty hard to understand if you haven't been mentally ill. They are fundamentally about control. Some suffers feel powerless and find something they can exert control over, others are more uptight control freak types who absolutely must control everything. It's absolutely impossible to starve yourself like that without absolute iron discipline. And that's why it's so hard to get over of course. It's not 'just have a sandwich'; it's that having a sandwich feels to sufferers like they are failing themselves. I would agree that characterizing your MC as anorexic probably isn't a great idea. Aside from anything else, anorexia really isn't something that can typically be traced to a single trauma. Maybe if you were an abuse victim then in the long term you might develop that as a way to find personal agency but that's not something that happens over night. Even a really extreme trauma won't just 'break' eating for the rest of your life. I think PTSD is where you want to be looking at; it's a much better fit for what you want to do. But... That said I don't know how long eating could continue to be a trigger. The way you're supposed to handle trauma healthily is to face the triggering thing as much as possible and let yourself figure out it's not the eating that's messing with you. Since your MC has obviously eaten regularly enough to survive for some reasonable period since the event it's hard to imagine that he could still be getting flashbacks every morning at breakfast. Not to say it's not possible, just that (as any Jungian will tell you) the human mind has a great capacity to heal itself, especially over time. Maybe if it was some much more obscure thing that triggered him (say the smell of Laosian cooking) then it might be years before anything triggered him again and that'd sit better for a repressed trauma but it's hard to reconcile someone who knows very clearly where his problem stems from and still having daily issues with it. The kind of stuff you can't learn to cope with by yourself is the kind of stuff that genuinely stops you successfully functioning; like serious psychotic episodes, severe delusions and frequent hallucinations. That stuff absolutely will stay around for years on end if it isn't treated (it's medication or bust on those really) but if it isn't treated you aren't someone who can live quietly as an illegal immigrant or really as anything. Along with a strongly distorted picture of reality comes severe problems just surviving. How can you keep a job when you sometimes just lose chunks of time or think your boss told you to do something else? How do you get to work when you don't know for sure which of the things around you are actually real? I would look for something less common to be his trigger for PTSD. That I think works better.
The food isn't a trigger. It's a feeling about food. The trigger is things that remind him of the incident, that is where flashbacks would come in if featured. (My main trigger idea is the phrase "You're disgusting", which is featured as a spark for his contemplation of suicide in the bathroom, combined with stress) And on your suggestion, do you mean just PTSD or PTSD and depression? I suppose it is possible for PTSD to explain all of his symptoms maybe? That would certainly simplify things, not that I want to make it super-simple but I don't want it to be convoluted.
I hate to nit pick but I doubt your character is depressed in a medical sense. He certainly has a bunch of problems for sure, but he's aware of them and his sadness is, in truth, a reasonable reaction to what he's lived through. Simply being sad, even for long periods, isn't really indicative of clinical depression unless it is divorced from the rest of your live. As someone I was once in group therapy with quite eloquently put it 'Depression is a black hole in your brain that eats everything happy' and that's pretty accurate. It's not so much about feeling bad stuff a lot, it's that you stop feeling able to be happy, even when doing things you know you like. There's a very characteristic numb, empty, greyness that comes with it that feels impossible to turn back. Perhaps fortunately for me I'm bipolar (manic-depressive) rather than straight depressive so for me those down periods weren't forever but I've known enough depressives to say that when it goes on long enough you feel like you don't want to be helped anymore. Again in the words of an old friend; 'it feels like you're just waiting for something to snap so you don't have to feel anymore'. I think your guy is just a troubled, complex person. I think he probably has PTSD, but I don't think much else. You can absolutely be troubled by stuff in your past without it being an illness.
I think you hit the nail on the head about one thing. One of the symptoms of true depression, is that you feel less of a desire to do things that you previously enjoyed. @Oscar Leigh if you truly believe that your character should have depression, maybe you should research the DSM-V for what symptoms it would take for a person to be diagnosed with depression and then include those symptoms in your story.
Well, I don't necessarily want him to have depression. It just felt like a natural fit for his sense of hopelessness that takes over on occasion and his inability to get over his emotional troubles. However, if that can be explained by PTSD then he should probably not be clinically depressed because, as I said, I don't him to feel overwhelmed by his issues. There's a lot more going with him, and in the story as a whole. (Researches PTSD. https://www.beyondblue.org.au/the-facts/anxiety/signs-and-symptoms.) Yeah, I'm going to go with PTSD because it works. I'm going to make the food thing part of his hopeless, he doesn't eat much out of withdrawl from life and his disgust is limited to meat and rice. I'll include triggered flashbacks, and have it that he hasn't had them in years. He'll also have some mild insomnia and a similar attitude to drinking as food. There we go. Now let's get back to the original question. What tips would you have on portraying a mentally ill character? Especially @LostThePlot since you have bipolar. What is it like in a relationship? How does it affect your interaction with them?
Huh. You're going to shotgun blast a bunch of maybe-maybe-not related symptoms onto a character and diagnose some really serious mental health issues under the umbrella of PTSD because fuck it, it works. And then ask for tips on portraying a "mentally ill" (the book covering mental illness is rather thick and varied) character, especially from the bipolar person despite bipolar and PTSD having so little in common with each other I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're damn near opposite. Bipolar is massive waves and troughs of manic and depressed episodes (can be frequent or develop over time) while PTSD is more like a calm sea of I-couldn't-care-less plus random rouge waves of violence. Buuuuut I have been diagnosed with PTSD. War is hell. What is it like in a relationship? How does PTSD affect my interaction with people close to me? I haven' talked to my sister in 7 years, my father in 5 years, or my mother in 2 years. It's a lot like getting a bunch of birthday cards as a kid and your parents make you call everyone to thank them, so you get more cards next year. But then you don't have to thank anyone and one day you realize everyone stopped sending cards and you're just like, eh, whatever. Except these are the people who raised me and love me unconditionally and would move mountains for me, while I simultaneously hold no animosity AND no real desire to connect to them. I'm trying to find elaborate ways to describe just not caring. I don't have any real lasting relationships with people. I guess I feign caring with significant others when girlfriends confuse my sympathy, desire to throw money at a problem to make it go away, or sex with love. But in the end someone I have been with a year or two or three can walk out the door tomorrow and I'll shrug my shoulders and go to work. I will go out with coworkers who ask me to do so, but many will sincerely ask me if I'm having a good time because I don't look like I am enjoying myself. And really nothing I do brings me happiness. I play an insane amount of Minecraft, I write, I paint, I lift weights, and I embrace work with everything I have just so my brain is kept occupied. In that way people think I'm driven, am a hard worker, am motivated, but it all really is just an attempt to not have to deal with real life. I get angry and violent at the drop of a hat, and alcohol exacerbates that problem. Work suffers because of that one. Customer service and food industry jobs are the simplest to get and hourly pay + overtime beats salaried management considering how much I just want to work. But I do need people to understand I am in no way there to help them. The majority of people who want to conduct a simple transaction, or have honest questions with simple, direct answers are treated with the utmost respect. Those few who want to get emotional about a company and direct that at me because of a logo on my chest... the loud ones get a stfu, the ones who want to get in my face I will go toe-to-toe with immediately. I tend to have several part time jobs rather than relying on a single full time one so there's always a source of income. But that's me, and my experience is in no way indicative of anybody else. Good luck.
See later posting I made. I missed what I think is an important post you made. However, I'll keep this post active, in case I said anything that makes sense! I think I'd ask whether or not this is a story ABOUT his mental state, or is it just a characteristic that he will battle against during the process of the story? Some of your question above can be answered by asking another question. Does he realise he's got problems, or does he think a lot of what he does is normal behaviour? If he sees himself as beset with problems while the rest of the world goes by more easily, this will impact on his personality. So will him viewing himself and his behaviour as 'normal.' Both will impact on him, of course, but the impact will be different in each case. In the first case, he'll want to heal himself (or wish he could be healed.) In the second, he'll wish the rest of the world understood him—or would make his particular obsessions easier to live with. I'm leaning toward's @Tenderiser 's view here. If you label Tai with a certain disorder (or combination), you're going to run into difficulties with people who say 'oh, no, a such-and-such sufferer wouldn't do that,' etc. Why not just give him the characteristics you want him to have, based on what you think might have caused them? I think it's a mistake, sometimes, to shove people with mental imbalances into categories, the way we like to do. People aren't always that boxed-in. A dozen people can suffer the same 'trauma' and all twelve manifest different reactions to it. I'd go with that idea. By all means do research, but only to give yourself ideas outwith the stereotypes. The important thing is your story, and what this character will be doing in it. I created a character for my novel who has nearly ALL the classic symptoms of a psychopath. However, I wasn't aware I was constructing a psychopath when I wrote the story, or aware of the markers a psychopath usually exhibits, so I omitted one very common trait from this character—and much of the story rides on this particular omission. Because I never labeled this guy AS a psychopath, I get away with it (I think.) I leave it to others to label him, if they must, and grinch over the fact that he's not TOTALLY a psychopath. By not labeling him at all, I've sidestepped this argument.
Um, okay. Don't pick an argument with me in this thread, then? I'm so sorry for taking the time to answer your question about Tai and his conditions. I won't bother next time.
That's one hell of a good description of ...hell. Thank you for your personal contribution to this thread. I'm so sorry this has happened to you. How are you different now, from what you were before this happened to you? Do you remember what things felt like to you, back then?
I don't have a problem with your answer, I just disagree. I'm only asking you not to debate it here because it would become a big argument and consume the relevant discussion. If you wish you to discuss on that other thread, please go ahead.
Ah, I missed this posting. So perhaps you do need to label him? But maybe not, either. I don't know. Does a psychiatrist 'label' each patient they see, or do they just try to cure what ails them?
Woah, okay first of my apologies if I offended you or something. I'm just trying to write a good character here. Have you gone to therapy? Because it sounds like it's really getting in the way of your life and I would medicine has enough to offer to at least alleviate the symptoms a little. And in you opinion is it possible for someone suffering PTSD to less apathetic and more self-deprecating and hopeless? Your account is so strong I'm going back into "I don't know" territory on how to do this character. The thing is on the labeling issue is as said before it just makes sense to me that it would be diagnosed. I will concede this is a more difficult for labels than the sexuality discussion because there's the real possibility of unknown conditions being misinterpreted because they haven't been recognised yet. I kind of want to do a poll on this. I hate that you can't do polls here except when you first post the thread. Gah, I'm going to need to have a big long think about this.
I'm wasn't saying you derailed it. It hasn't been derailed. I was saying that discussion would quite possibly derail it and I'd prefer that the rest of the people here don't have to suffer that. However, I'm considering a no labels perspective in this case due to lack of knowledge. Perhaps one of those ambiguous other classifications a medically informed description could fulfill the place of a full diagnosis in giving a sense of psychiatric analysis. But I really need to need to think about this more
Oh no, his problems aren't all there is to him. As I mentioned before, he has his relationships with Ivana and Chen, and his interaction with Beta Tai(Tai from an alternate universe). The main plot point of this story is the alternate universe. Five people in Sydney begin interacting with their counterparts in that universe(hence the five/ten main characters). He also deals with his cousin Akuma, an antagonist character called Suhan Renn, and the other people with counterparts and their counterparts. The mental illness is his version of Beta Tai's more morally wrong problems. Both are troubled, Alpha Tai is still damaged, while Beta Tai is more okay now but has some very questionable behaviours like commiting violence for money as a gang enforcer. It's kind of an irony dynamic, two different reactions to the same traumatic event. They seem more different than they are. Beta Tai helps Alpha Tai finds his strength, which helps him in therapy, and Alpha Tai encourages Beta Tai to open up more frequently and to follow his good side and reform. Do you want me to go on?
I'll be consulting people I know and researching for a bit so don't expect me to say anything as quickly as I usually do. Plus, I'm literally in the second last day of my Christmas holidays. So I'll soon be distracted by the HSC which will slow things down even more(you may as well assume i'm going to die, I'm clearly doomed).
I am in no way offended. I'm going to draw a comparison. You say you want to write hard sci-fi, then ask how Star Trek style warp drive works. There are one of three solutions. 1. Drop the label of hard sci-fi and use warp drive. 2. Drop the use of warp drive and alter the story to suit hard sci-fi. 3. Keep the label, keep the warp drive, and hope people either don't notice or are willing to overlook. Same difference for me here. You want a character to have certain issues stemming from a traumatic event in his life, issues that could be clinically diagnosed as a thing in order for it to be cured. That's just not how it works. So I see one of three solutions. 1. Keep the symptoms, drop the diagnosis. 2. Keep the diagnosis, make the character fit into that rough mold. 3. Keep the symptoms, the diagnosis, and the cure, and hope people either don't notice or are willing to overlook it. I like #1. You absolutely do not need a diagnosis of anything in the story you are describing. Some people will think PTSD, some will think depression, some with think phobia, some will think weak willed. Doesn't matter. But if you want to go with #3, kewl. Just know you'll likely end up writing out your own version of clinical psychology, and no one can really help you with that. At a certain point all the help will be telling you to turn left and you'll just have to turn right to keep the story going.
