#my beans on it as someone who is self dx'd wants to study psych and likes creating fucked up guys

[fruitsofhell]

So like about my last reblog: Personally I think it's usually a bad idea to write a character with the intention of making them fit into something like a mental disorder. I have plenty of characters who straight up have mental disorders I can list, but I didn't make them to be like that. I make a guy first, and flesh them and their personality and psychology out a lot, and then often I'm like, "hey they kinda fit into this", and then I use that to inform what other parts of their character might be like.

Because mental disorders are just a label of dysfunctional behavior that often clusters together, a mental disorder doesn't make you the way you are, it might predict other issues you have, but doesn't endow you with them. It's first and foremost a description of how someone's behaves in a dysfunctional way that gives people an idea of what the hell is wrong.

A lot of people I feel also forget that with most disorders, you don't need every symptom listed to be diagnosed with it, and even if you don't reach the criteria for an explicitly listed on there's usually a catch-all generic disorder, because this shit is a very tricky science. People are tricky, people's minds are even trickier, and psychpathology isn't some sort of precise measuring tool.

Because of that if you're just gonna look up a disorder and say "ok I'm gonna make a character who's all that" you're... you're gonna make a gijinka of dsm criteria. You're going to literally make a stereotype, no one is that simple, even people who meet all the criteria meet it in wildly different ways. In ways that would change based on opinion from psychiatrist to psychiatrist lmao.

Oh yeah and then also that book (and all official info understandably based on it) can be so fucking wrong too.