THG fic: "Spin Control" [21/24]

[trovia]

Title: Spin Control
Pairings: Finnick/Haymitch, Kat/Peeta
Characters: Finnick, Haymitch, Chaff, Peeta, Gale, Kat; plus appearances by Mags, Johanna, Caesar Flickerman, President Snow, Effie, Claudius Templesmith, Beetee, Prim, Thresh, Rue, District Twelve ensemble and various OC
Rating: adult
Warnings: forced prostitution & non-con; people dealing

Comments

[trovia]

I think until relatively recently the BPD diagnosis was given to people deemed to have intractable problems, people that were almost untreatable.

Oooh, right, now I remember this. When I first was diagnosed with it and read up on it - I was sixteen - it said everywhere that BPD was considered, not untreatable, but incurable. I still found it all calming at the time. Here I was told that there was something wrong with me, so I could close that chapter of constantly wondering what was wrong with me and how I could change it. Probably not how most people react, but it worked for me in this fatalistic way.

It used to be that it was just the psychologists who had prejudice about BPD but none that I know of about depression - the plebs wouldn't ever have heard of it fifteen years ago. But everybody knows the word depression, of course. It was just that nobody believed it was a real disease. If you told people you're depressed and that's, for example, why you can't do something, what they would hear is, "I'm self-involved. I hyper-focus on myself in an unattractive way. I make up a ridiculous disease to cover up that I'm lazy and don't care about other people and then I have the guts of defending that as watching out for myself." It's still a problem now. My therapist told me she wouldn't advise anybody to admit to depression in a professional environment because the risk of career damage is too high.

(I'm feeling grumpy about this today. Earlier I saw a reblog on Tumblr saying, "If your friends don't take your mental health problems seriously, they aren't your real friends." And I thought geez, this just made it on the dash of a fourteen-year-old from a country without mental health support, who was just told that she has no real friends, and will never have friends. Great.)

In general, saying someone has a personality disorder is saying that someone's overall personality/character has developed in such a way that said personality is actually causing their problems.

It's such a weird idea, if you think about it. I have trouble wrapping my mind around that concept. I mean you could say the same thing about depression or PTSD or eating disorders as well. Or heck, untreated ADD. There are people whose personalities help them compensate for ADD, after all. You could as well call it a personality issue if they've not been able to come up with sufficient coping strategies on their own.

There are people with intractable PDs that seem to just get stuck and are unable to develop insight into the root of their problems and change things. But I think that there are plenty of other people that don't.

Yeah. That's definitely not an issue exclusive to people with mental health problems. Just look at issues like racism. Racists have that problem.

I look at human personality structure as existing on a spectrum and there can be a very fine line between those that could be categorized as having a PD and those that couldn't.

I like this. I just read a novel - just a light romantic novel, incidentally written by a psychologist - that walked this really fine line between "geez that character has issues" and "let's diagnose something". I think it's also a useful thing to keep in mind if you write. You don't have to make a thing pathological to give a character real struggles and issues on a psychological level.

Thank you for the little overview. :) I hope you'll like the next chapter! (right now, it looks like everybody is ignoring the agonizing cliffhanger in favor of talking about Peeta's badassery :p) And that you recover from that cold quickly.