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

[damagedmemoires]

this is just from partial personal understanding, and partially from what people have told me or described to me in past. i am no textbook, though, i have gotten alot of my understanding from people, so i am only slightly concerned with official titles. however,here is what i can offer. a number of things can develop as far as mental illness is concerned from shock or tauma, or even grief. the term 'mental illness' to a certain extent is broad. i think hallucinations may be taking it a bit far without delving into some specifics on triggering one of the mental illnesses such s schizophrenia. schizophrenia is being *really* sick, unfortunately, and less heal-able as far as i know, if that is something you want to consider. i know less about that than i do about how an individual can subsequently cope or fall apart after trauma. it also depends what the variables are, as some have mentioned-drugs,alcohol,etc. those can be triggering factors to a certain extent, or abetting in worsening a condition. obsession can do this to a certain

[kingdmforahorse]

Thank you for the info! It's not in my plan to have her recover from the ordeal or mental illness. I thought it would be interesting if there was a disorder or mental illness that would still let her remember her family/friends or her mind would let her go back to happier times once in a while. Either way, her parents and husband will be taking care of her for the rest of her life. I had not considered everything that might appear as side effects, such as the possible development of eating disorders or addictions, so I appreciate the high level of detail! She is indeed highly sensitive and empathetic and I was thinking it would make everything especially hard on her, so it's good to know that I'm not too far off in my thinking.

[de_ruh]

I haven't read the responses above me, so please forgive me if I don't have anything new to add.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can occur after a single traumatic event, such as the one you have described, as long as the event involved actual or perceived risk/threat of injury or death to self or others. (In some cases, PTSD can also be developed by hearing about the traumatic death of a loved one.) PTSD would also fit your required symptoms quite well

[kingdmforahorse]

Thanks for the response! I haven't entirely planned out how the event is going to go down, but I know it's going to be very sudden and violent, so there would be multiple very real threats to her friend and herself. I wasn't aware of the specific timeline of ASD and PTSD and how they're labeled, so that's very helpful! Knowledge about how some sort of predisposition could play into an event is what I was after as well, so it's good to know that genetics can play a role. I haven't looked into borderline personality disorder either, so I'll check that out as well.

[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

[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