Acute Mental Illness Brought On By A Traumatic Event

[kingdmforahorse]

I have a character, I'll call her Elena for now, who I need to develop an acute mental break after witnessing one of her good friends being abducted for the slave trade and nearly being taken herself. The story roughly takes place in 16th century Poland and she's about 18 years old

Comments

[syntinen_laulu]

I'm having a bit of trouble with the whole notion of a reasonably normal healthy girl in 16th-century Poland being so traumatised by a friend's abduction that it topples her into a breakdown. Anywhere in 16th-century Europe was an immeasurably scarier, more violent, more knife-edge place to live in than an 21st-century English-speaking country. 'Law and order' was a hugely different animal from what we know - if you were the nearest person found to a crime site, and you weren't important or didn't have an important patron to protect you, you could be accused, found guilty and strung up within a week. You could go on a week's trip and come back to find that your entire family had died of plague, been arrested for heresy or massacred by Turks. Even plain ordinary nature was randomly dangerous - an infected scratch or insect bite could cause septicaemia and kill you within days, with no known medicine to help. People were necessarily much more hardened to sudden ghastly disasters and gruesome experiences; unless your character is already unstable and unable to cope with ordinary life, I just don't see it.

Another thing I just don't see is anyone in 16th-century Poland believing in nonviolence; that would be like believing in non-food or non-day-and-night. Yes, some temperate people agreed that it was better to convince people than coerce them, and even - radical, this - that heretics and Jews could be left alone rather than just shunned; but in that period, when push came to shove there was ultimately no alternative to fighting, if only in self-defence.

[kingdmforahorse]

Thanks for the feedback. She is going to be living a fairly sheltered life, though I think I've decided that she'll have some sort of predisposition towards mental illness going forward. I realize it was a different time, but I think it would still be terrifying to have your good friend violently abducted and narrowly miss having the same thing happen to you in a place you felt safe. She is more sensitive than most and extremely empathetic so perhaps that's what makes it worse for her.

That's my bad, I should have described this attribute in a different way. She would certainly believe in self defense when necessary, but she wouldn't agree with the idea of something like revenge or torture. If that makes more sense?

[syntinen_laulu]

She is more sensitive than most and extremely empathetic

Mmmh. Unless you mean 'empathetic' in a psychic sense - that she literally picks up and has to deal with vibes that ordinary people don't - I just can't find this believable. Only strong, resilient people can manifest empathy that's worth a damn; what you seem to be describing is a weak, egotistic person whose 'sensitivity' amounts to 'Nasty things upset me more than other people because I'm just so much more SENSITIVE than all you ordinary clods'.

If you want a really cogent reason for her breakdown, how about guilt? Suppose that in this sudden emergency she panicked, pushed her friend off the horse/out of the boat/whatever, and made her escape leaving her friend behind to be captured? That's something that anybody might do and that would be truly shattering; we all like to think we'd behave heroically and stand by our friends in a crisis, and to have been a complete rat is something that she might well just be unable to cope with. (Especially as 16th-century folk placed a much higher value on honour and courage than we do, and had far fewer psychological formulas for forgiving themselves for lacking them.)

She would certainly believe in self defense when necessary, but she wouldn't agree with the idea of something like revenge or torture. If that makes more sense?

Mmmh again. There's nothing that kills the credibility of a historical character faster than giving them 'enlightened' modern attitudes that no normal person in their environment would have had ('Clodius felt it was cruel to make gladiators fight to the death'; 'Hannah felt that blacks were people too, and couldn't see how slavery could be right'). And the fact is that in continental Europe in the 16th century (and for centuries later) torture was an integral part of civilised justice; the Roman law system which formed its basis not merely permitted judicial torture but actually insisted on it. If this teenager has all by herself taken up an opposing viewpoint, she is simply not credible as a member of her society.