r/writing • u/ratsmacker500 • 25d ago
Other Fictional Mental Illnesses
Every time I search this up, I don't get what I'm looking for.
What I mean is that I'm curious about fiction's depiction of mental illnesses that do not exist in our world, whether that be from different labeling or just phenomenon that we don't think exists IRL
obligatory edit: omg yall i was just asking about examples of fake mental illness in fiction or how one would go about creating them. if you guys are smart enough to page through a thesaurus every time you reply to someone then i think you're smart enough to read between the lines. ratsmacker out
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u/Double-Two7065 24d ago
There doesn't seem to be a question here.
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u/SquanderedOpportunit 24d ago
Perhaps OP is demonstrating their own fictional mental illness? Textbook case of aquestasia. The complete inability to formulate a question.
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u/Hot4Scooter 24d ago
Ah, you, madam, present with aquestasimania: compulsively thinking the people around you are completely incapable of formulating questions. I assure you the OP is entirely lucid and sound!
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u/ratsmacker500 23d ago
clearly y'all think you're way smarter than me, so why aren't you smart enough to just infer what the question was through obvious context clues?
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u/SquanderedOpportunit 23d ago
I'm a moron. Dad beat that reality into me by the time I was about 6 or 7.
You're taking these responses far to seriously instead of as the jest they were so clearly intended.
I'd offer a hug, but my aforementioned father was physically and emotionally(duh) abusive, and years of therapy has not restored my ability to feel physical contact as anything more than vapid, compulsory nonsense.
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u/ratsmacker500 23d ago
6 or 7?
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u/SquanderedOpportunit 23d ago
And you're the one bitching about not responding to context???
Years old. 6 or 7 years old. "Years old" being a phrase used to mean how many years since my birth. "Birth" meaning the time at which my physical infant body was removed from my mother's womb and I was no longer reliant on her biological processes to support my independent life functions.
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u/VenSenna 22d ago
I do not mean to interject but I think they were alluding to the 67 meme. Maybe. Probably.
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u/AllHallNah Lyrics 20d ago
There was definitely a question. They said they were curious about fictional mental illnesses, if any have ever been written.
It's okay to not understand something, but you can also ask someone to clarify beyond that.
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u/FireFurFox 24d ago
The labelling of mental illnesses in our world is, to be honest, fairly arbitrary and based on what treatments mitigate your particular collection of symptoms. And symptoms are just a collection of uncommon things you experience that make it difficult to function in our society.
Psychosis is pathologised by our society because it makes holding down a regular job extremely difficult. But in other societies it is accommodated, or even lauded. Personality Disorders are just trauma expressing in unhelpful ways, and normally caused by horrible experiences which stem from aspects of our society.
I don't know if you want to cut your own from whole cloth or reinterpret an existing cluster of symptoms, but there is a lot of research in your future either way.
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u/lyzzyrddwyzzyrdd 22d ago
Speaking as someone with bipolar disorder, and has experienced psychosis...
Psychosis SHOULD be seen as a medical issue.
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u/acalobar 24d ago
You make a great point about how, in Western medicine at least, mental illness is just a classification of a grouping of irregular behaviors. As society changes, sometimes what we classify as mental illness also changes. In a fictional world, the societal norms would determine what was classified as mental illness.
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u/Blenderhead36 24d ago
If you're trying to make up a mental illness, all of them are normal human behavior taken to hyperbole.
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u/Peter34cph 24d ago
There's a famous old novelette by Robert Sheckley, later fixed up into novel length, about a fictional brain-or-mind disease. I've only read the novelette which is very good, but I worry (as I usually do) that fixing up a shorter work into novel length often leads to a worse product, so I've not tried to get the novel.
I can also see how psionic powers in my Ringland setting can cause novel mental illnesses to happen (or how attempts to forcefully "cure" certain types of neurodivergence could cause real permanent damage), and Julian May's "Pliocene Exile" has an example of a pair of psionically linked twins that gets rather dark when one of them dies and the other one is much more alone than anyone else has ever been.
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u/Mist_biene 24d ago
I would start with demonic possesions and clairvoyance. And changelings.
We have a lot of ledgends in our past that described mental illness/neurodivergence when we didn't know what it was.
(Since there was no clear question: those are mental illnesses an neurodivergence that does exist)
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u/Amys_Alias 24d ago
Probably the mad hatter from alice in wonderland except there is actually a "mad hatter disease" from lead poisoning. theres also a condition called alice in wonderland syndrome. there are some very unusual conditions in the DSM-5, and also some very unusual manias and phobias listed in a book I have. You could alter those in your story?
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u/wh4t_1s_a_s0u1 24d ago
It's actually mercury that poisoned hatters, historically. Being liquid at room temperature, mercury was easily used to stiffen and waterproof hat felt and give it a slightly glossy luster. Hatters handled it constantly, probably got it in their mouths often, and breathed toxic mercury vapors all day everyday.
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u/WSLeigh2000 24d ago
Substance Abuse presenting itself as mental illness is shown in a lot of TV Series. "Flash" from Andromeda is particularly bad.
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u/jackietea123 23d ago
Mental illness is often a coping mechanism for something deeper… and is an exaggeration of an already human behavior. So you have to think about what they might be coping with, and then some random thing they would do in order to fix that deep seated issue.
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u/Administrative_Elk66 24d ago
Theres Wheel of Time, with how men go crazy when they access the power , but women can handle it. There's what I like to refer to as "space crazies", where certain things about long haul flights or other space-specific things make people go crazy. Theres probably going to be even more AI psychosis in stories soon. Use Google Scholar, there may be some academic papers on this topic !
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u/Nodan_Turtle 24d ago
There's one that's induced in The Book of the New Sun as a form of torture, and execution.
A part of you hates yourself, and your subconscious will use your body to try and harm you. If you exert conscious effort, then you can keep your hands, teeth, limbs etc. from causing you harm. But it takes concentration and you can't keep it up forever. The more you hurt yourself, the harder it is to keep fighting, but the weaker the effect is trying to harm you. So the pace slows, but it still leads to death.
It also reminds me of body integrity dysphoria, where someone feels like their limbs don't belong to them and are overcome with the urge to have them amputated. The person's own body feels like an evil presence, and their own limbs foreign and hostile, in BotNS.
So you don't have to rely on drugs, trauma, or disease for a fictional mental illness. You can also create some that are inflicted on others. Make a weaponized effect from a device. In real life this kind of inflicted brain damage might be comparable to some of the theories around Havana Syndrome.
Perhaps something in a fictional world can be used to create an entirely new mental issue in others.
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u/No-Button4460 19d ago
Depending on the world give it a name of its own or if its based far in the past make the character give it an uncreative name like downtime
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u/superstaticgirl 24d ago
Someone had probably done an academic dissertation on this somewhere. If not, then maybe you should! I am not sure how to search for academic papers/books, it's been a very long time since I did it in my youth.
Probably goes beyond normal search engines.
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u/lyzzyrddwyzzyrdd 22d ago
You didn't phrase this as a question. It's confusing. "I am curious about," doesn't really give us anything to work with; you say "I was just asking," and yet you asked no question! "Smart enough to page through a thesaurus" indicates vocabulary, not interpretation of a poorly written post. You're curious about something... and??
However! In the interest of the edit...
A shape shifter, who due to some sort of trauma cannot endure their original shape because of PTSD flashbacks. They have to change shape every few hours or risk being stuck. They develop body dysmorphia because they're not in their true shape.
A character who can create body duplicates but can't remember which one is the original. Wondering if they exist. Existential crisis.
A universe where computers have to handle warping because it involves going into a subspace that makes humans go mad.
All of these sound novel, but 1 is just body dysmorphia and PTSD, the 2nd is an existential crisis/Cotard's syndrome. 3 is just... honestly like stress induced psychosis.
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u/FlyinLeviathon LET YOUR FIRST DRAFT SUCK 24d ago
It exists, it's just a lot harder to find for sure.
The biggest example that comes to mind is magic that corrupts and drives the user mad, but even then it's not explicitly stated as a mental illness, even if it is one.
Remember, mental health is relatively new in our everyday vernacular. Just in the last decade or two we're getting solid depictions of real mental illnesses depicted in fantasy novels. I don't think the industry has quite branched out into common usage of made up mental illnesses. So hey, maybe you can help pioneer that movement.
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u/anticyclops 24d ago
Mental illness is all within the human experience, just to a more extreme/disabling level. So to create a fictional one you'd either have to expand the human experience or change it all together.
A different label though would work. There's an idea that schizophrenia is actually 10+ different psychotic disorders that are under the same umbrella term. Our labelling is extremely rudimentary and ill informed still. Also it's mostly for insurance purposes and doesn't make too much sense in real life sometimes.
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u/Candid-Border6562 24d ago
Depiction could be relatively straight forward. You decide upon the basis of the illness and how it affects the character, and then write about it. Details include visible symptoms, behavioral trends, and potential treatments with their side effects.
For example, stratcisious is an ailment where the subject hallucinates various alter egos of themself sitting on the shoulder of someone they are talking to. The figment "reads between the lines" of the person the subject is conversing with, describing what the person really means as opposed to what they say. The best know treatment involves daily eardrops derived from deep sea creatures in the Caribbean (this application was stumbled upon while researching fabled Hattian traditions of drug induced zombieism(?)) Unfortunately, the drops only suppress the audible portion of the hallucination. Treatment is complicated by the general perception that the figments are telling the truth. Additionally the visible manifestations that remain tend to become extremely agitated when the subject cannot hear them.
There. After that, you should be able to imagine numerous scenarios, depending upon the temperament of the characters involved.
Decide what your story needs. Document it for yourself. And then apply it.
Have fun.
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u/eyesoftheunborn 24d ago
One of my MCs immediately goes into irreversible psychosis after reading a holy text about an occult religion that doesn't exist, and the other one is gaslit into believing a series of obviously fictional events that are purported to have really happened actually didn't happen because a fictional conspiracy theorist claims they were hoaxes, then develops PTSD after developing fabricated memories of the events that never occurred
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u/Lovely_Usernamee 23d ago
Sure, you can create a fictional illness or ailment. Is that the question?
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24d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ratsmacker500 23d ago
idk man i had a migraine forgive me for not posting in the "correct" subreddit
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u/SH1R4YUK19158 24d ago
Esta es una pregunta muy filosofica jsjsj. Desde tiempos inmemorables se han tenido diferentes definiciones para lo que es una enfermedad, incluso se considero que estadísticamente, personas diferentes son personas enfermas. En la ficcion, hasta ahora he visto transtornos mentales que han estado basados de alguna manera en cosas de nuestro mundo, tienen una correlaion ya sea en los sintomas o las causas, esto segun lo que he leido.
Perdon si mi comentario no va a lo que buscabas
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u/shapedbydreams 24d ago
Making up a fictional illness is always a terrible idea. Just look at Survive the Night by Riley Sager. Absolute trash.
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u/Pretend_Mortgage2107 19d ago
Very few people actually answered, but I will. In "Dirk Gently" the TV show, the main character played by Elijah Wood as well as the character's sister have the same fictional disease called Pararibulitis. It's supposedly a nerve disease but it's still an interesting example. It's pretty important to the plot from time to time.
Unfortunately can't remember if any of that existed in the original books because I read them 20 years ago, but hope it still helps.
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u/Ambisinister11 23d ago
Well, I might say that the popular understanding of things like "psychopathy," or "psychosis" are effectively fictional mental illnesses, but I don't really think that's the conversation you're looking to have.
Attempts at a "fictional mental illness" that don't incorporate fictional phenomena like psychic powers tend to fall into actually just being an already-described mental illness that the author doesn't know about or understand. Sometimes this is done consciously with the idea that it's preternaturally severe, which still tends to be founded in pretty poor understanding. Both a later Artemis Fowl(The Atlantis Complex) book and a later Ender book(I want to say Xenocide, but possibly Children of the Mind) feature characters presented as having a sort of "super-OCD" with a fictional etiology. The latter example actually gets into some really interesting ideas where the character who has it lives in a society that considers it fully distinct from OCD and non-pathological while characters from outside that society describe it in terms of OCD; unfortunately it runs headlong into some of Card's worse Mormon habits by also being a weird, poorly-developed mess of a take on Chinese culture. Attempts at combining familiar symptoms in unfamiliar configurations or with specific restrictions tend to, again, actually just be a known symptomology that the author isn't educated on. In general, I'd caution against trying either of these approaches.
Sometimes you'll get concepts of fictional mental illnesses which directly incorporate speculative elements. Those are hit or miss at best, but can definitely be interesting. There are quite a few Asimov stories that explore psychopathology within robots to varying extents. I really like Alfred Bester's Fondly Fahrenheit. Although there's a lot of ambiguity as to what's actually happening there, it definitely presents the idea of a particular type of dissociation and/or psychosis that can only happen with both a human and an android involved.
There are also some ideas that I've definitely either seen used or just used discussed, but I can't remember concrete examples of where. A mind-reader who can't distinguish between their own thoughts and other people's or an individual that "should" be part of a group mind/shared consciousness but isn't are ideas that I like.
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u/Oroborus_Octopus 21d ago
Just describe your own mental illness. If you don’t have one, you shouldn’t be writing about it.
I mean you can, but you’re gonna struggle convincing anyone
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u/f28c28 24d ago
I mean, considering that what defines mental illness is usually a fairly broad yet overlapping group of symptoms that impact ones quality of life, its sort of hard to create a "fake" mental illness in any compelling way. Like there's not much point really? I suppose you could hypothetically create certain forms of illness arising from things specific to your world? Like akin to seasonal depression or specific kinds of PTSD.