I truly believe that writing characters with mental disorders is one of the most difficult challenges as a writer, mostly due to the fact that their thoughts seem alien and strange to anyone who doesn't suffer the same disorder as them.

Currently I am attempting to write a sociopathic character as a hero, and it is proving very difficult since their complete disregard for everything but themselves is unavoidable, it is very hard to develop a character who doesn't care enough for there to a catalyst for their development. If a sociopathic character has a single morality pet then they no longer fit the label, and the complete lack of any morality makes it hair-pulling to make them sympathetic.

I myself am a recipient (sufferer sounds wrong with such a mild disorder) of Aspurger's syndrome, and as such, I worry that my characters don't think like normal people, more like how I do.

But enough about me, what are your opinions?

Interested to hear some thoughts on this, as a fellow Aspie I often feel like I have the same problem with trying to make 'normal' characters seem normal rather than just being like...me XD

Part of making a character easy to identify with is making the reader understand why they are the way they are. If a character is just selfish, no one will like them. But if they're selfish because of a betrayal, Because they lost everything they cared about, because they had a rough childhood, the character becomes more human.

Also, I flat out don't write inner monologues for characters if I feel being exposed to their thoughts will alienate readers from them. I'll give hints, like a coy smile or a flick of the brow, but I never let them inside the head of those types of characters. If I need an inner monologue, I'll have another character try to assess the actions of my "mental" one.

A mental character could also care about characters if they make their life easier. Again, their thoughts wouldn't be very romantic, but it would at least look like they have some humanity.

I am one who likes to try expanding my character psychologies; their flaws, their weaknesses, and mental attributes. Though on the subject of mental disorders I am always a bit stand offish. Not only for myself but when I see someone submit a character that they classify their mental status with particular disorders. (Sociopath being one I tend to turn down 9 times out of 10, and the 1 I left through I put through the ringer to ensure they can Rp it.)

Mental issues are a tough subject. I have personally suffered from clinical depression in my life. I know those with other issues, and have one person whom is very dear to me who is Autistic. If I am to portray a character with any "disorder" I want to ensure that I do it justice. Not only the character but for people who truly do have to deal with the inner workings of whatever characteristic I chose. Certain terms get thrown around too easily, such as Crazy or Sociopath and I find people don't really stick to it.

I wouldn't even know where to begin on how to Rp some of them myself. With my personal characters I always try to put a facet of myself, my life experience, or a trait of my own to start - then build up the differences from there. That way I have a default I can go to and slowly do more as time progresses. I try to do a lot of research on new traits I am testing out and most of the time will 1x1 a character with a close confidant if I can before I go group with it - help to work out the kinks and make adjustments if I can.

One possible way of going about it would be to read up. Get books both about the subject (like this), and fiction books written from the perspective of antisocial characters (like this)

Education would be the best course of action, yes. But if you, personally, have a difficult time interpreting emotion/intent of others, than I believe having discussions with others might be most beneficial. Developing a sense of empathy could be your strongest tool.

But I'd like to clarify that Sociopaths have a strong sense of morality and empathy. However, their moral compass is so different from the "norm" that they are considered to have an Antisocial Personality. Psychopaths are the ones that lack empathy, emotion, and a sense of morality.

Sociopaths tend to be very passionate about their causes. An example would be Sherlock Holmes. He doesn't care what he has to do or who might get hurt as long as justice is achieved. He has a sense of morality, justice, and fairness, but will enforce it at the expense of the few. So a sociopath will be the first to sacrifice the few for the many. However, they will also sacrifice the many for the few should the few prove to be better/more beneficial/"better."

Psychopaths lack any sense of morality and seek to only further their own position of power or influence. They will act more calm and reserved while Sociopaths tend to be rash and passionate in their actions. Psychopaths are all about manipulation and control. Sociopaths care more about enacting/enforcing their own sense of morality. Psychopaths lack the capacity for this since they lack empathy and morality.

I know it seems like semantics, but the difference between the two are quite stark. Consider using proper terms or simply researching the terms in which you wish to classify your characters. Like any writer, research is your best friend.

I also am not claiming to be a psychologist of any sort. I just remember a lecture in a course I took in college that discussed the difference. I tried to do a quick google search that would support this, but I didn't find anything as clear as the above right away, so I just gave up. xP

I hope this helps. ^^

As for myself, I have a strong sense of empathy, so emotions aren't necessarily difficult for me to interpret. However, I'm of the belief that there is a reason for people to behave/feel/emote the way in which they do. So when I'm writing about an emotionally unstable person (even if they're intended to be "normal" but are experiencing a string of unfortunate circumstance), I think of what that character has experienced in the past or how they've dealt with anything remotely similar and take inspiration from that. That's why I advocate developing a character's history/background enough to where you would be able to answer these questions and play out these scenarios when necessary.

@Phoenix odd, i read the exact opposite

The Book "Blindsight" does a really good job of having someone who had brain surgery which inhibited their ability to have emotions.

“I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.

To this day, I still don't know what went wrong.”

Basic idea: Just list the traits of the disorder and roll with it. Having a character be sympathetic isn't always possible, there's a reason people are horrified by psychopathic personality types.

@bluetommy2 Been thinking on this some and please slap me if I am stepping over a line with this but... You have stated you have Aspurger's syndrome. What tips would give to someone trying to write a character with that syndrome? Interested in how one might go about that.

@Lady Amalthea i don't have the time to write a response right now, but I'll get to you as soon as i can.

@bluetommy2 Thank you and no rush of course. Just curious is all because of the topic and such. Always interested in learning more.

For me, I tend to not focus on labels when it comes to writing characters with mental disorders. I find that picking a label is perhaps the opposite thing to do, and instead, it feels much more natural to pick out traits and just write them. The more you try to stick to a label of a certain disorder, I think it takes away the potential for character depth, and the character begins to be characterized more by their disorder than by who they are. For example, I've got three characters currently with some form of mental disorder -- now, I could label each of them like this:
Jade - Major depressive disorder, PTSD
Édouard - Narcissistic personality disorder
Jaina - Mild Psychosis, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Histrionic personality disorder, Mild Dissassociative Disorder

However, I find that it's much more rich and intriguing to define my characters by their traits, rather than their illness. They then get profiles instead that sound like this: (I put them in hiders since I just pulled the descriptions from my CS tab):



Sure, I do mention some of their mental diagnoses in these descriptions, but the descriptions don't revolve around those various disorders. Myself, for example, I suffer from major depressive disorder and general anxiety disorder, and I'm a recovering self harm addict. I can draw on these experiences a lot, especially now that I'm recovering from all of that trauma. But I don't let myself be defined by them, even if depression and anxiety can color my thoughts and actions. At the end of the day, I'm defined by how I act and who I am--and that's more than just my mental disorders.

I think if you do things that way, you've more room for character development. Any character can develop, some will just take more time than others. No person is going to be a textbook sociopath or a textbook psychopath--those aren't real. No psychopath or sociopath is going to tick off each and every little box. I usually add to that by having some sort of event that caused my characters to be the way they are. Jade, for example, was sexually abused by a genius father. Édouard was neglected by his family and could only enjoy material things growing up. Jaina was essentially given electroshock therapy from her brother. Everyone is the way they are for a reason, and I think with that in mind, any character can get development. :)

That's my two cents on this matter. ;)

@Lady Amalthea No worries! :)

Asperger's is a disorder that is kinda hard to describe as a recipient of it myself. I didn't even know I had it until I was twelve, Aspies usually suffer from a small list of symptoms, at least from what I've seen.

Firstly, it's a difficulty in expressing emotions, I always find it difficult to truly show what I feel through facial expressions. Most of the time I show a neutral expression except for when I'm laughing or crying or something of the sort. Unfortunately, my neutral face has been described as a sad bitch-pout, so it's fun to know that people think I'm sad all the time. This also extends to my body language; I really, really suck at body language. This doesn't mean we don't feel, and some studies suggest we feel more strongly than others.

Aspies also have a very logical thought process, which means we use reasoning consistently to solve a problem, Hans Asperger himself called the children he was researching "Little Professors", due to this logical thought process. If you've ever watched Star Trek, Spock is a great example.

Aspies often don't like physical contact, not that I myself have ever had that problem. They often have difficulty forming relationships. We do form relationships and we do care, we just have difficulty being able to do so, and to express that we do, respectively.

Aspies often demonstrate a single-minded obsession with one topic, which they will study continuously or move towards. In my case, I have an obsession with history, though it's not uniformly an academic topic.

The last thing that is often said of aspies is that we difficulty with humor, though I've never had such a problem, to the point where some are thought to have no sense of humor. Most aspies share a dry sense of humor however, we are often snarkers and users of wordplay.

That's all I have basically, I hope it's enough, I don't mind questions though. :D

@bluetommy2 Thank you so much for the insight! It is very interesting to hear it from someone with the distinction instead of reading what medical professionals have written on the topic. It gives so much more to hear it from personal experience than observance. Again, thank you. ^^

I'm actually someone whose been diagnosed (mostly incorrectly) with a wide variety of mental disorders throughout my life, so this topic actually ended up hitting a little too close to home for me, particularly because of my knowledge on psychology and personal experience with it. I pretty much had doctors diagnose me with one thing after another throughout the vast majority of my childhood and adolescence, mostly just because my peers and family and schools didn't understand me, and the medications they put me on ended up severely screwing me up, as did the social stigma I got.

Honestly, the first 25+ years of my life for all intents and purposes got stolen from me by the mental health industry, or specifically its labelling and incapability to see outside their box, and even now, almost 8 years later, I still have to recover from and deal with the damage they did to me. I'm quite confident most people would've gone completely insane, especially since I endured it almost entirely on my own, but I managed to survive mostly due to sheer force of willpower and thanks to a deep understanding of the human mind and its psychology. I've been told that children with unusual mind states are treated a lot more fairly by the medical industry now than they were when I was young, but let me assure you, being diagnosed with something like this in my time could be a recipe to have your life ruined. I'm a walking example.

Regardless, I'm going into rant territory, so I'll post up a response here.

I also try to avoid labelling when working on a character with mental disorders, partly because I have vastly more respect for psychology than I do for psychiatry, but I would say some of the characters in my project would definitely be, from a reality perspective, classified as sociopaths, psychopaths, or narcissists. Some of the other disorders mentioned by above posts apply to certain characters too. I don't openly think about these disorders when I write the characters though; I create the character first and then observe them and determine if they would get diagnosed in reality.

In a very real sense, my story is also based on my own life and experiences as much as it is my philosophy, so the main character is essentially my avatar, and he takes all of the bad in me as well as all of the good, and since I myself have been diagnosed with Asperger's (the only diagnosis of me that, to this day, is still considered to stand as true, since the rest of them were eventually dropped and I am no longer on any medications due to me pretty much refusing them from now on, which is probably one of the things that saved my life), it can appropriately be said that when I write my main character, I'm writing someone with personal experience of the disorder. Whether or not I agree I have it is up for argument, since I don't like labels, but I do acknowledge that a lot of it fits me. Depression is another one that I've had people claiming I have, but I don't think my circumstances justify calling what I have clinical depression. I also have an extremely unhealthy amount of stress, but that's probably not tied to a particularly mental disorder.

When medical professionals attempt to understand a mental disorder, they are always looking at it from outside the window. They are not experiencing what that person goes through, nor do they see the world from that person's perspective. Though science is supposed to be an "objective" study, for all intents and purposes, psychiatry is subjective; the psychiatrist only sees their interpretation of the subject, no matter how objective they claim to be. This is why people who don't have a firm understanding of human psychology will struggle to write a mental disorder they personally have no experience with, and even then they might struggle if they have the knowledge because knowing does not equal understanding. I would suggest asking more people who actually have experience with such disorders, if you can find people who are willing to talk about it, to help gain a greater understanding of their experiences. Learning about psychology helps as well, but only to an extent.

I also have a very strong ability to empathize with other people, though people might not realize it from how I act (like a previous poster said, I also experience emotions on a stronger level than most people but I am not that good at expressing them in a way that others will understand; same with most things I want to express depending on the person), and I'm somewhat infamous with people who know me, both in person and online, for being able to get into people's heads or read them; things just don't get passed me, so I would honestly say that being able to understand people on that level is far more important to writing such disorders successfully then merely understanding them on a professional or educational level, hence why I suggested getting insight by asking others if you struggle to understand them personally.

I've actually provided more help to some people I know who suffer with mental disorders than any paid professional has ever been able to give them, or give me for that matter; in the 32 years, almost 33 years, I've been alive, a professional has never been able to help me with my troubles and has usually either left me feeling empty with their superficial "understanding" of my situation, or they managed to make things much worse. The extremely rare times someone said anything remotely helpful, it was because of they had a decent empathy and showed they genuinely cared, or they could relate to my problem personally, and these qualities are not something you learn by becoming a professional; any person can do these things. Doing things by the book, per se, very often fails, especially when it comes to the human mind. My whole life, and what the medical industry has done to it, are just another example of that. Similarly, professionals often fail to help people who struggle when they try to be counsellors, because their education does not actually properly qualify them to support others; all they have is paperwork. Just having a person who can relate to how you feel, and who actually cares, means more and can help more than anyone who supposedly helps people as a career but lacks these things can ever achieve.

A personal understanding into the more complex nuances of the human mind is vastly more important and offers much more than any level of professional or educational study into mental disorders could ever give you, whether it be helping others, reading people in everyday life, or writing a mental disorder. This is also why people with certain psychological conditions also often make the best psychologists, counsellors, and criminal investigators; they are the most qualified because they have a personal understanding of the matter, not just an educational one. To be completely honest, people who lack a personal understanding of the human mind (and the complex difficulties people can go through) through insight and personal experience, are unable to truly grasp those things. This is why people who do not suffer from deep emotional wounds or psychological burdens are unequipped to help those who do, even if they try to educate themselves, because they fail to relate to and understand that world entirely. The only way they can ever come close to understanding without that experience is if they open their minds to the perspective those people live in.

If you're going to read up about a mental disorder, or look into a piece of writing from the perspective of someone with a mental disorder, I strongly recommend you prioritize cases where the authors themselves have experience with the condition, since they will be able to give you far more reliable insight than someone looking at them from outside of that world, which is what any professional is doing unless they have personal experience or have truly come to understand someone who has that experience. So long as the person is honest about how their condition effects their life, at any rate, you will learn more than any book on the subject from another source will teach you. Unfortunately, some of the mental disorders that have been mentioned in this topic, particularly those I noted earlier with the exception of Asperger's (so, basically, Sociopaths, Psychopaths, and Narcissists), are people who are more often than not known for being consummate liars, so finding reliable testimony from them could be difficult.

Edit: @BrokenPromise
I had planned on responding to your post, but never ended up doing it since I wanted to avoid putting quotes from several people since it would make my post longer than it already is, so I was going to wait til someone else posted, but it's taking too long and I don't want to double post.

It's interesting when you mentioned avoiding making characters who don't have a reason for what they're doing since it would make them unlikeable, since sometimes being unlikeable is the point of a character, but I agree with what you're saying since I usually go into great lengths explaining the mentality for why my antagonists, even some of my worst ones, behave the way they do. As for not posting inner monologues of a character if you want to avoid them losing the audience, I do this too, including the hints and having other characters try getting into the subject's head, but once a character has been revealed to not be someone the audience should be rooting for, that's when you'll start seeing their true colours in the internal as well as external.

Gee, lurking around has landed me in a strange spot. Alrighty, my turn for academically unqualified opinions.

@bluetommy2. Making a sociopath/psychopath into a developing character that is relatable is difficult if you're going down the route of raw sympathy. With people closer to average, you can have people like them because they're nice or because they have a morality you agree with. You have to diversify a bit more when the character doesn't have these things. Here's a couple of routes you can do down, though they are not the only routes by any stretch of the imagination.

To make things easy, I'm going to make the assumption that your character isn't a complete nihilist. This means that the detail you provide about them disregarding everything may not be completely true. If you ARE going down the route of a complete nihilist, you have more challenges with your character than their clinical diagnoses.

So, with them not being a complete nihilist, that means that they have something to lose. Probably. Just because they might go forward at other people's expense, it doesn't mean that they aren't allowed to value something. Put that valued thing under threat and they might have to learn some lessons protecting it.

As opposed to protecting something they already have, another starting point might lie in achieving something they don't have. This could be anything, but they still have to value it. If you make the path to that goal laid with obstacles to overcome that might cause some lessons to be learnt, you might just have some character development there as well.

In both cases, you can't change the fact that they think and act differently to most people. The thing is, even if others might find a socio/psycho abhorrent, it brings them down to a human level to still value certain things, whatever they might be. Phoenix cited Sherlock Holmes, he's got mystery solving and justice to value. Vilage linked American Psycho and the main character there, Patrick Bateman, has his status and pride to lose. I'm oversimplifying those examples, but you get the idea.

Take heed of what everyone's said, do some experimenting and practice, do a little research perhaps, and then look back over what you've done later. My word isn't gospel and you might find a completely different way of doing what you want.

P.S. Consider having a different character there to reel in the more boundary-crossing behaviours of your character. Even if it's just a foil, it helps you as the author keep the socio/psycho down to earth.

In other matters:

@Lady Amalthea. I can back up the opinions expressed by others with regards to Asperger Syndrome. I've had a few friends with that condition. I also highly recommend this story. It's a decent novel and great reading for getting in the head of someone on the autism spectrum. They don't specify Asperger Syndrome, but it has a lot of similarities. Granted, take Morose's grain of salt; they're still unique humans and the main character in the above novel is only one person.

@Muttonhawk Thank you for the suggestion. I have worked with many in the past and present that have Autism, my son being one of them; just no one specifically with Asperger's. So all insight in always welcome.

Let me begin by saying that even having a degree in psychology, writing about a character's mental disorder convincingly is extremely difficult. With that being said let us consider the idea of malingering, which is essetially what we will all be doing as we compose these expositions. Some of the most restraint I have noticed with younger or more novice writers is the lack of research. Research in this case is paramount. If you want your reader to believe that your character truly is afflicted by some level of mental disorder you need to deeply understand what that means and attempt to harness - if only for a short time - how it might actually influence your day to day life having Disassociative Identity Disorder, being Schizophrenic or even having something as common as ADHD. It might be more important to ensure that you get the information correct for the current time frame that you are writing for. Something like schizophrenia would not be responded to in the same manner during the 15th century as it would be in the current century. On that same note, it would be a wise idea to do your research into treatment or medication if that is necessary for your story. More importantly make sure you grasp the side effects of those treatments. The truth is in the details. If you want your character's affliction to be believeable you need to make sure you understand what is going on with your character's mind and be specific.

The only way you get better at writing a certain idea realistically or with a sense of authenticity is to write it and keep trying to write it. Don't be turned away from writing a character out of fear of another person's opinion for that is limiting to the creative faculties and serves no use to anyone. Read about them, learn about them, and practice the skill of writing.

On the subject everyone was discussing earlier about how to write a Psychopath in a way that can make them sympathetic, it's really not something that works unless you more or less don't play them completely straight. By definition these people are not supposed to seem "human" (it's like their soul was taken from them, or at least locked away inside) or even appear afflicted by their condition, which is why so many of them usually end up falling under the trope of "Complete Monster". However, if you really want to find a way to portray something akin to the "Heroic Sociopath" trope and do it sympathetically (I've been considering an example of this for my project that simply isn't official yet), I suggest you consider watching an anime called Naoki Urasawa's Monster. There's a particular character in it (I won't name them, for the sake of spoilers, so PM me if you want the name) who does a really convincing job portraying a person who has lost the ability to feel proper human emotions yet still manages to be sympathetic because of how they are aware of the fact and bothered by it. I'd highly recommend this show to people regardless, but it's probably the best example I've seen of this concept done well.

As the original poster said, I too wonder if my characters are written like normal people or like myself, but I'm fairly good at writing the perspective of a more normal (whatever "normal" means; mostly another word to describe "majority") person, and many of my characters are meant to carry some facet of myself anyway, so this isn't something I'm too worried about.

Alongside the whole research recommendation (which I've also pointed out on my end), @ELGainsborough made a good point about taking into account the time period. For those who saw my last post, they should understand that I have a personal understanding of how relevant this fact is.

As I mentioned earlier, I've been diagnosed with Asperger's and while I was incorrectly labelled with many different disorders throughout my life it is the only one that is still considered official. The time period I was born in is important to that. Doctors have more understanding of Asperger's now, and even 5-10 years ago, than they did when I was a child, and schools are also more accepting and actually attempt to find ways to assist people with the disorder, while back when I was younger schools pretty much did nothing about it. I was basically blackmailed by my high school principle to leave so they didn't have to pay to help me, because getting assistance was rather difficult back then. The lack of understanding from doctors, counsellors, family, peers, schools, and even just society in general, resulted in them taking numerous actions that severely ruined a large portion of my life and still carry weight on it now.

I don't know how old the original poster of this topic is, but, at least in my personal experience, Asperger's is definitely something that would bring suffering to your life if you were a child with it in my time, not because there was inherently anything wrong with you, but because of how other people would react to you. I won't go into a big explanation about the social problems it caused, but I'll at least mention medications. I spent a good majority of my younger years on a drug called Ritalin (among other things), and if you know what that is in any detail then you should know it severely screws with people's heads and their hormones. They usually give it to people with ADD, which I was misdiagnosed with, and even with them it's not always a good option, but for people who don't actually have ADD the results can actually be devastating. Asperger's is generally something that should be cultivated and worked with, not medicated. Side effects are also a very important factor to consider, since medications always carry them and the ones for mental disorders often carry invasive or damaging consequences regardless of how much professionals will tell you otherwise.

This sort of ignorance in the medical field of various time periods, even the time of my childhood, applies to disorders outside of strictly mental ones too. For example, I quite likely suffer from a nasty piece of work called fibromyalgia, a condition which can only be reliably treated or even helped with at all when you're young, but when I was young doctors didn't even believe it existed, and this fact has had an unprecedented impact on the rest of my life just like how they handled Asperger's.

Back on topic, however, another example of how timeline effects things like this is the way several mental disorders would have been believed to be the result of possession in older days, rather than a mental disorder. This is why it's actually common now for people who would be considered exorcists to consult a psychologist about a patient and have them do an examination on them first, before the exorcist does anything, in order to confirm the ailments can't be explained through non-paranormal means first. Due to that, writing a character with a mental disorder in a historical piece of writing can also be trickier than writing one set in our time period. On a similar note, it can be difficult to write these disorders in a futuristic setting since there is no way to know how they will be handled by that society, and this obviously applies to any fictional setting as well unless the author/GM takes the time to explain it.

Like they just said in their post, details are essential, so researching is very important, not only into the conditions but also the treatments. This is why in my previous post I recommended that you try to get opinions from people who actually suffer from these ailments, or read books that were penned by someone who was writing from personal experience, since they will provide the most wisdom on the subject. No amount of professional education on a mental disorder will actually help you understand it on a personal level unless you're very good at getting into other people's heads, and even then without empathy it will be difficult. That's why it's a good idea to learn from people who actually go through it. Of course, like I also mentioned before, people with certain disorders (Sociopaths, Psychopaths, and Narcissists, for example) are usually consummate liars, so this suggested probably won't be helpful with understand them since they are more likely to give a testimony that is self-serving in some way.

While a psychology degree can help a person learn about psychology on paper, a deeper and more personal understanding of human psychology will be far more helpful. Insight into psychology is where I specialize in this field, rather than the "on paper" stuff. That's one of the reasons I'm able to read and understand and empathize with others in ways that a medical profession is unable to, and it subsequently aids me significantly with writing characters.

Definitely in agreement with @Dark Wind as well. You never want to let other people's opinions dictate what you do or don't pursue as the topic of your writing. I stopped caring what other people thought about me a long time ago, and it's had an exceptionally positive effect on my work and what I can take and give from it.