How to Use Psychology in Writing
The internet and sites like Webmd have allowed ordinary, non-professional people to become informed about medicine in an unprecedented way. Patients can now bring printouts to their doctors, confident that they know what they’ve got and how to resolve it. This has become even more true lately with the rise of television shows and books that de-stigmatize and show the details of various mental disorders. Thanks to shows like “Obsessed”, “Addicted”, or “Hoarders”, we know the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, for example, and what methods are used to treat it. And one odd effect of this newfound knowledge is that medicine and psychology has been creeping into our fiction.
Many people write about characters with some sort of mental problem. In the past we would just wing it, and let the symptoms shape themselves according to the character we were creating. Now, though, there’s a temptation to check behaviors off an acceptable medical list. Washing hands excessively? Check. Inability to make decisions? Check. Lying to loved ones to hide an addiction? Check. All the guesswork of unstable behavior has been taken out of the equation — and sometimes I worry that it will make our characters seem more like case studies than with people.
After the jump: reasons to resist a clinical character.
Don’t diagnose your character
The problem with this approach toward character psychology is that you will end up diagnosing your character rather than exploring him or her as an individual. It’s important for doctors to systematize symptoms and see people as a little less than individuals. After all, the only way we know how to treat people is by seeing how their symptoms are similar to others’ symptoms. But that’s not the job of the writer! You’ve got to look beyond the clinical assessment of your character and give him his own life.
Imbue your characters with human problems.
If you are writing about a character with mental problems, consider the example of a very humane doctor, Oliver Sacks. In his books, Sacks considers his patients’ stories not just as the story of the disorder, but also the story of the person’s life before and after the disorder. He discovers what they love and value in life and tries to help the person return to those things and people. Often forces like music or art can restore a person’s sense of self. It’s this very humane treatment of patients that you can emulate in your writing. Your character deserves to be an individual with his own loves, desires, and disappointments that aren’t entirely dictated by the confines of the disorder.
I’ve been writing a lot recently about characters with psychological disorders, because I find it extremely interesting. When I read books about them, though, I often have the problem that it hasn’t really been written realistically. For instance, I don’t watch TV so I don’t know what those shows are telling you about OCD (Hoarders sounds like it’s about obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, which is an entirely different thing), but I’ve noticed that almost any mention of OCD in the media focuses almost entirely on handwashing rituals with a bit of checking and organizing as well, making us think that everyone with OCD is obsessed with germs, and sometimes even that avoiding germs and making sure the door is locked are only things any of them have a problem with. It’s not true. A lot of people with OCD don’t care about cleanliness. A lot don’t care about having their room in a perfect order. They have other obsessions and other compulsions — sometimes not even any compulsions at all, which is referred to as Pure-O. This is why, if your character has a problem like this, you should be looking for forums and websites for people who have this problem and seeing what they say about themselves. If you look far enough, you’ll be surprised. I was surprised to learn that many people with multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder have developed communication between all the different personalities and don’t consider their situation to be a disorder at all — except that they have to hide it from the world because the media and most psychologists disagree with them. I’ll also put a point in here about selective mutism, because I’m an advocate for awareness, the book I’m working on is about S.M., and it’s S.M. Awareness Month at the time I’m writing this. Occasionally, someone stops speaking because of trauma, but this usually goes away after not-too-long, and it’s not very common. More commonly, some people talk in some situations and not others. This is because they have an anxiety disorder that makes them afraid to communicate in certain situations. It’s almost never because they chose when to be silent and when to speak. Books, movies, etc. are a major reason many people don’t believe that this is true even when they’re told so. Parents are still accused of child abuse and children are still told to stop choosing not to speak or else, because what other reasons have you ever heard of in a book or movie for someone without a speech disorder to not speak? If you go online and see what people with S.M. are saying, you’ll find out what’s really going on. Also, if you’re writing about someone with autism (which I would NEVER do, considering how explosive that topic is), take the time to read what people with high-functioning autism and Asperger’s syndrome are saying about their lives, even if that turns out not to be what you’re writing about. Reading like this will get you inside your character’s head, help you find out all the possible symptoms, and understand what their life is like outside of the disorder.
I find that learning my character’s hopes and needs that are not related to their mental illness is difficult, but I don’t want my book to be entirely about selective mutism or whatever disorder I’ve given them. There has to be another, probably external, obstacle to happiness. There has to be another theme in the book besides overcoming a disorder. If I wanted to write a book about mental illness, I’d be a psychologist. I need to write about a person who’s trying to become who they want to be.
By the way, in case anyone actually read this and is interested, I wrote about the misconceptions about mental illnesses I mentioned here as well as a lot more on Listverse:
http://listverse.com/2011/03/12/top-10-mental-illnesses-and-their-myths/
http://listverse.com/2011/05/20/another-10-mental-illnesses-and-their-myths/
Now, get ready to laugh at me: I wrote a longer comment than the post itself. That’s so typical of me.
A bit of misunderstanding here. Normal psychologists don’t diagnose, that’s clinical psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ job. Psychologists explore and help their clients find what they’re looking for.
I can recommend a very nice blog on Psychology Today site:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psychology-writers
It could be interesting for many writers.
Excellent essay, BLH! As Tolstoy said, happy people are all alike, but each depressed mental case is unhappy in his or her own special way. I’m paraphrasing, of course.
Seriously, EACH individual sees life a different way. Whether we are labeled ‘normal’ or ‘otherwise,’ we have a unique set of experiences, & memories of those experiences, that result in who we are this minute, this ‘now.’ (That’s my opinion.) And if this is so, characters in our stories become who they are the same way.
I often think about the fact that we ‘see’ as a result of photons hitting objects & reflecting light to our eyes at different wave lengths. Think how much variation there must be in the way each one of us perceives the world! My vision of a ‘car’ may not be as close to yours as we assume.
My boyfriend is green/red color blind. I found a picture in Scientific American that showed the same photo twice of a bright green frog on a bright orange-pink flower. One had full color, the other showed what a bird (or a human) lacking the ‘green-red’ color cone would see.
To me, the second photo was awful, all dull & gray, with some blue & yellow here & there. I showed my boyfriend & he said the photos were the same. Then I showed him the caption. (He was SO excited to finally be able to show family & friends how he saw Life that he photocopied & laminated 10 sets of the picture.He keeps one in his wallet.)
So, just color-blindness is a radical view changer of life. Mental distinctions are probably much more numerous. Possibly, the DSM would be laughable if we knew just how much mental variation really existed among us all.
To base a character on even a professional clinical diagnosis, much less our usual ‘short-hand, cocktail knowledge’ of mental states–’good’ or ‘bad’–would result in a very limited, narrowly developed character. I would find it hard to care about such a one-dimensional creation. (And I verged on having multiple personalities at one time!)
L&K, MaryB