Dear Writers and Would-be Writers:
Please stop using $CONVENIENT_MENTAL_ILLNESS for the following purposes:
- To explain your character's seemingly (or actually) irrational actions.
- To substitute for character development; a personality disorder is not the same thing as a personality.
- To give your character an excuse to be "locked up" for a good long time, which in most modern settings is highly unlikely anyway.
- To create a character who is violent towards other people; seriously, can we get OVER that stereotype already? (FYI: people with any mental illness other than perhaps Antisocial Personality Disorder are more likely to be victims of violence than instigators. Just sayin'...)
- To be a false "diagnosis" of your Special Snowflake character who knows or feels or experiences things most Mere Mortals cannot, in order for you to go on a thinly veiled anti-psychiatry rant.
- To show off how understanding you are about "invisible handicaps" that other less enlightened people Just Don't Want To Understand.
Just...STOP.
No love,
The spouse of a person who lives with, but is not defined by, bipolar disorder (aka the most convenient mental illness of all for would-be angsty writer types).
- To explain your character's seemingly (or actually) irrational actions.
- To substitute for character development; a personality disorder is not the same thing as a personality.
- To give your character an excuse to be "locked up" for a good long time, which in most modern settings is highly unlikely anyway.
- To create a character who is violent towards other people; seriously, can we get OVER that stereotype already? (FYI: people with any mental illness other than perhaps Antisocial Personality Disorder are more likely to be victims of violence than instigators. Just sayin'...)
- To be a false "diagnosis" of your Special Snowflake character who knows or feels or experiences things most Mere Mortals cannot, in order for you to go on a thinly veiled anti-psychiatry rant.
- To show off how understanding you are about "invisible handicaps" that other less enlightened people Just Don't Want To Understand.
Just...STOP.
No love,
The spouse of a person who lives with, but is not defined by, bipolar disorder (aka the most convenient mental illness of all for would-be angsty writer types).