A Descent Into Madness: How to Portray It?

Hey there, friends! I'll get right to the problem at hand.

The main character of the story I have in mind is slowly losing his mind after being bewitched by a sort of eldritch horror and is seeking to regain his sanity before he succumbs to madness. Very Lovecraftian in inspiration. My question is how should I portray this slow decent into insanity in a way that is both natural and interesting?

I'm not asking for a step-by-step guide as much as simple ideas. I was initially planning on writing the story in third-person omniscient perspective, but I'm thinking now that first-person would give more insight into the inner workings of his head. I'm just not really sure how to go about it. I admittedly haven't read much literature featuring unhinged main characters, but I'm extremely open to recommendations if anyone has any for me!

Anyways, that's my issue! Have you written a character like this before? If not, how would you go about it?

 

I once wrote a negative character spiral for one of my characters, I was however very young XD But I think my basic ideas were good, the writing and implementation just wasn't the best.
So I think a good place to start with madness is normal forgetful behaviour. Maybe your character is sure they said a thing or sure they didn't. A thing they bought isn't with them when they get home. Then start with maybe full days missing or wrong according to friends, their memories don't match up with others. Then make them see things maybe, just out the corner of their eye, a shadow, a flicker. They hear their name called in a crowd. Maybe after then they feel like their body is doing things every now and then that they didn't tell it to do. Now they're starting to hear full phrases, but its 3 in the morning and the street is empty outside. They pick up things and they aren't what they're seeing in their mind's eye. 3 days have gone by, but to them they just bought those apples this morning, why are they rotting? The voices get louder, things appear in their full vision now, and they're getting more and more horrifying.
I think its important that the start of the madness is stuff that we all do normally so it can be brushed off and each step isn't a big leap from the last, you've got used to forgetting, that's just normal right? so's seeing things out the corner of your eye, right? we all lose a few days when we have a busy life, we just go into auto mode, right? Set a new normality at each step, this is normal now, so the next step only seems slight weird. However step 1 and step 10 are a million miles apart, these aren't normal, but the steps in between and the slowness of it tricks the mind.
That's just an idea though, this old thread might have some ideas for you too.

 

"Insanity" is defined in a similar way to psychosis. It's a state in which your perception is so impaired that your behaviours and interactions are inconsistent with reality. So I would suggest researching psychosis and how psychotic people present, then gradually introducing these traits, behaviours and perceptions into your character. Be cautious of point of view here. If you are writing from the point of view of the psychotic character, then you have to portray his state of mind as rational. That's because from his point of view, he is being rational, and everyone else is behaving in a confusing or irrational way. So, it's the difference between:

I had no idea what he meant. I understood the meanings of the individual words, but when combined, my brain just couldn't make any sense of it. I was struck with the terrifying prospect that I was losing my mind.

and

I had no idea what he meant. I understood the meanings of the individual words, but he combined them in ways which were designed to confuse. I was struck with the terrifying prospect that this man was trying to manipulate me.


The former shows awareness of his own impaired perception, which implies rational thought. The latter shows that he believes that his faulty perception is accurate. You could do both of these - have him initially suspect that he might be losing his mind, but as he descends further, have him come to a realisation that it's not him, it's everybody else.

 

One way:

1. Mild foreshadow.
2. Action.
3. Dialog.
4. Dreams,

Action + dialog connected. 1 - 2 dreams separate.

 

I am attempting to write about mental illness in a way that makes sense to me, and to anyone who reads it. I've done a lot of research, through the
Web, and am continuing to do so. I am interested how the characters, male and female, react to and then cope with this, not their descent into it, and think first person is the way to go. So, I think,.....research the story, it will let you feel you at least know, and represent it well, what you're talking about, and.....write it in first person. It will lend intimacy to the story.

I like the idea, but I don't know about the Lovecraftian thing. But, this could be simply because I haven't read much of him. Another thing you could do, read stories of madness. Again, research.

 

It really depends. Personally, I think there is two main deferent “descent” into madness. A “break” where it suddenly occurs in a short period of time. Usually as a result of something traumatic. Or alternatively over a longer period of time.

Insanity or madness is difficult to describe. Many people do not know about their own insanity because as @mashers said, you think it is rational. Some others become aware of their own insanity, but fail to prevent it or otherwise more just mask it. These are often the more subtle and less severe for small of insanity where a person still had all his faculties.

Also, insanity is almost always different from person to behave, act or think differently.

 

So I have a character with pretty severe PTSD which gets into dissociative/hallucination/lost time territory so I might be able to help.

1. Character is at work doing something routine, they taste/hear/smell/feel/see the start of something associated with what happened to them and then they're back home cutting up food for their kids lunch tomorrow with no memory in between and they don't question it because it's normal for them.

2. They're at the park with their spouse. Someone sets off a handful of firecrackers. They turn around and see a small child running away from something but in font of them is an IED. They don't know why it's there but they run up and grab the kid before he gets blown up. They carry the child away from the IED and don't understand why their spouse is telling them to calm down or why two random strangers are yelling at them. Then they turn and realize the IED was actually a football.

3. They're at a movie and during a violent part it gradually starts playing memories of people in their platoon being gunned down and gradually halicinations start to crop up all around them and they're no longer in the movie theater at all. They're being shot at in real time by real enemies and when they snap out of it they're hunched over in their chair covering their ears and the movie is over.

 

Use a slow and steady drip. If you start with an ever-man, you need to outline the events that lead him to lose his mind. Even in Lovecraft, characters didn't immediately lose their mind upon seeing things they shouldn't have. They first try to comprehend it, they try to maintain their lucidity, but the strangeness and scale is just too much for them.

For me, great portrayals of people losing their minds are those where the reader themselves come to question what they are reading. Stephen King is a master of this. In Gerald's Game for example, for almost all of the story, you have no idea if the Space Cowboy character is real or not. He seems to appear and vanish when it's convenient, but he's got qualities that aren't in line with the MC's personality and hallucination tend to be extremely personal. Insomnia is another great example by King. The character starts out just agitated, then slowly over the course of 100 pages starts to see random things like auras, then he starts seeing people, then those people become more developed and even have a mission and a leader. Then, he slowly loses his grip on reality and isn't able to determine what is real and what's not. By the climax, he's completely lunatical and willing to kill lots of people for some bigger purpose that may or may not even be real.

 

I've known two people who descended into extreme mental illness: a neighbor and a coworker. The behavior of the people who are around the person who's descending is an interesting study.

In the case of the neighbor, she became more and more paranoid and obsessive about things like, "Did I leave the water running?" and would call various neighbors multiple times to go to her house to see if the bathtub faucet was on. The neighbors complied, at first, because she was well-liked and it seemed to keep her calm, then it became a source of irritation for the neighbors to get her calls as the requests increased. It started off slowly, then built to a cascading crescendo that made it difficult for her to leave the house because she was afraid she would leave the water running. Her husband finally threatened to take their children and leave if she didn't get help, so she was hospitalized for a couple of months. ETA: Somewhere in there, her husband told us she heard voices, but I don't know at which point.

In the case of the coworker, it started out as hilarious sarcastic irritation she expressed at daily inconveniences on the job, then real irritation with coworkers mixed with odd behaviors, then she was fired, then we started to see paranoia mixed with extreme anger, and from there she went totally off the rails. There was also a lot of drinking wine to self-medicate. In her case, from the coworkers' point of view it was uncomfortably funny as she skewered clients behind their backs, then it got more uncomfortable to watch as the venom increased, then people expressed concern, then everyone started to fear for themselves. As far as I know, she never got help.

 

I don't know if anyone on here watches 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' - but the final season entailed this ancient demonic entity sending an army of 'bringers' to murder potential slayers across the world. The show ended with slayers across the world being 'chosen' via a spell. Anyway, I wrote a story involving a girl who was put in a coma by said 'bringers' - and awakens as a fully fledged slayer.

I have been trying to input some PTSD into the story to make her more realistic. And these are some very helpful examples. So, thanks for that.

I've also been contemplating expanding it into my own series - but I'm a little stuck on that, though. I come up with ideas of a 'threat-of-the-week' kind of thing - but I have no clue what to actually do with it.

 

Present

Reminds me of Dana from the Angel spinoff.

 

One thing to note is that in most of Lovecraft's stories, the protagonists aren't going insane in the sense of losing touch with reality, it's more that they're seeing reality too clearly and desperately wish they could go back to a state of happy ignorance about the true nature of the universe.

The first thing that sprang to mind was a video game from a few years back called Spec Ops: The Line. It starts off as a standard modern military shooter, but then things start to get...strange. I recommend finding a playthrough on Youtube to get the story. Video games can be a very good way to convey an unhinged main character, because the player is controlling the character and having them act based on what they see, so the connection is more intimate.

 

Have you read Anna Karenina by any chance? I think Anna's internal descent toward the end of the novel is probably one of the most tragic and brilliant things I've ever read. If I had to give advice, it would mirror a lot of what has already been suggested above, especially what newjerseyrunner said.

 

Best way to understand it is to simply go into madness itself.

Or do an in depth study of characters that are already mad.
The Joker is a good one.
Konrad Curze is another.
Good luck and have fun.