Characters and mental illness.
Nov. 17th, 2007 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiercelydreamedOne way to think about psychological functioning is that mental illness and mental health are separated by differences in degree, not in kind.* By that interpretation, we all have different quirks that, dialed up high enough, might match diagnostic criteria for a certain disorder or family of disorders. So as a healthy and functioning person, you might lean in an autistic direction, or an obsessive-compulsive direction, or a schizotypal direction.
If you can apply this to people, you can apply this to characters. Which can lead in some interesting directions.
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shaenie and I have been discussing John Sheppard. If you take the canonical character at face value (instead of writing some things off as unfortunate actor or writer choice), it's hard to avoid the awareness that there's something off about him. As she put it: he has moments of impressive tactical cognition, and then moments where you honestly just go: what the hell, John? What the fucking hell? [...] Anyone who behaves as erratically as he does sometimes is pretty obviously a little bit fucked in the head.
This conversation got me thinking about which spectrum John's quirks fall on (please bear in mind that I am not a psychological researcher or practitioner, just someone with background in the field):
When you talk about symptoms related to schizophrenia/psychosis/etc., "positive symptoms" are things that are "loud" or "present" -- delusions, hallucinations, really unusual speech patterns or behavior. By contrast, "negative symptoms" are "quiet" or "absence" -- displaying little emotional reaction, limited speech (where statements are extremely short/minimal), and lack of desire/motivation/persistence.
Thinking about John in this context, he's got a touch of these negative symptoms. I'm not saying he'd qualify for a diagnosis of schizophrenia-related mental illness, but if you go with the idea that all of us have quirks that tend to lean along a certain axis, I think someone who wanted to could make a good case that this is John's. For a good laugh, here's the Wikipedia definition for schizotypal personality disorder: "a personality disorder that is characterized by a need for social isolation, odd behaviour and thinking, and often unconventional beliefs such as being convinced of having extra sensory abilities." Really, put yourself in an uncharitable frame of mind and then dial up his characterization to 20% (or just take at face value the eps where the writers and Flanigan had a mutual off-day), and that's kind of Sheppard all over.
You can see this idea played with in both canon and fandom: that the line between mental health and mental illness isn't a line but a gradient, and that your frame of reference changes where you position someone else on it. In canon, you see it most often when characters take actions that look irrational, even crazy, to other characters or to the viewer: SGA does this in "The Real World" and "Tabula Rasa," among other times. In fandom, I've seen it tackled more directly: think about John's psychological profile incesperanza's MVP, or the organic twists seperis makes in her WIP Crimes Against Humanity.
This is the kind of thought-game I like to play, because my favorite stories (to read, and often to write) are the ones where neither the reader nor the viewpoint character has a stable understanding of what's going on: what's real or not, who's right or not, what's happening and what's mis-perceived, etc. These questions make an appearance in just about everything I've written for SGA, and a lot of my earlier stuff: West, for me, was always about watching the characters walk the border of sanity, Calibrate about revealing the hidden mechanisms of power and consent, and To the Dead about how hard it can be to tell the things people do to you from the things you do to yourself. It's a pretty rich vein to tap into as a writer, and you can pay it off equally well in a big reveal or an ending that refuses to resolve the questions the story asked.
*(This is me speaking casually as a layperson, not as a professional in the field. However, I will say that there's a movement in psychology to reconceptualize mental disorders along this kind of spectrum model, and you can see some influence of this in how the DSM links different "families" of mental illness together.)
If you can apply this to people, you can apply this to characters. Which can lead in some interesting directions.
Via email,
shaenie and I have been discussing John Sheppard. If you take the canonical character at face value (instead of writing some things off as unfortunate actor or writer choice), it's hard to avoid the awareness that there's something off about him. As she put it: he has moments of impressive tactical cognition, and then moments where you honestly just go: what the hell, John? What the fucking hell? [...] Anyone who behaves as erratically as he does sometimes is pretty obviously a little bit fucked in the head. This conversation got me thinking about which spectrum John's quirks fall on (please bear in mind that I am not a psychological researcher or practitioner, just someone with background in the field):
When you talk about symptoms related to schizophrenia/psychosis/etc., "positive symptoms" are things that are "loud" or "present" -- delusions, hallucinations, really unusual speech patterns or behavior. By contrast, "negative symptoms" are "quiet" or "absence" -- displaying little emotional reaction, limited speech (where statements are extremely short/minimal), and lack of desire/motivation/persistence.
Thinking about John in this context, he's got a touch of these negative symptoms. I'm not saying he'd qualify for a diagnosis of schizophrenia-related mental illness, but if you go with the idea that all of us have quirks that tend to lean along a certain axis, I think someone who wanted to could make a good case that this is John's. For a good laugh, here's the Wikipedia definition for schizotypal personality disorder: "a personality disorder that is characterized by a need for social isolation, odd behaviour and thinking, and often unconventional beliefs such as being convinced of having extra sensory abilities." Really, put yourself in an uncharitable frame of mind and then dial up his characterization to 20% (or just take at face value the eps where the writers and Flanigan had a mutual off-day), and that's kind of Sheppard all over.
You can see this idea played with in both canon and fandom: that the line between mental health and mental illness isn't a line but a gradient, and that your frame of reference changes where you position someone else on it. In canon, you see it most often when characters take actions that look irrational, even crazy, to other characters or to the viewer: SGA does this in "The Real World" and "Tabula Rasa," among other times. In fandom, I've seen it tackled more directly: think about John's psychological profile in
cesperanza's MVP, or the organic twists seperis makes in her WIP Crimes Against Humanity.This is the kind of thought-game I like to play, because my favorite stories (to read, and often to write) are the ones where neither the reader nor the viewpoint character has a stable understanding of what's going on: what's real or not, who's right or not, what's happening and what's mis-perceived, etc. These questions make an appearance in just about everything I've written for SGA, and a lot of my earlier stuff: West, for me, was always about watching the characters walk the border of sanity, Calibrate about revealing the hidden mechanisms of power and consent, and To the Dead about how hard it can be to tell the things people do to you from the things you do to yourself. It's a pretty rich vein to tap into as a writer, and you can pay it off equally well in a big reveal or an ending that refuses to resolve the questions the story asked.
*(This is me speaking casually as a layperson, not as a professional in the field. However, I will say that there's a movement in psychology to reconceptualize mental disorders along this kind of spectrum model, and you can see some influence of this in how the DSM links different "families" of mental illness together.)