the human condition – Page 55

Writing Schizotypal Personality Disorder

Frequently confused with schizophrenia, Schizotypal Personality Disorder (STPD) is a schizophrenia spectrum disorder that manifests as an extremely odd or eccentric personality type, with strong social anxiety and unpopular beliefs. The characteristic feature of it is an unwillingness or inability to engage in close social bonds such as friendships. This article looks at how to write engaging and believable characters with STPD.

The concept of a “schizophrenia spectrum” is relatively new and the precise boundaries between the various stages on this spectrum are not yet perfectly clear. One way of thinking of STPD is as a less debilitating and destructive form of schizophrenia. STPD is a Cluster A personality disorder, which means that people with the condition broadly come across as odd or eccentric, but not particularly dangerous or anxious.

Despite affecting around 3% of the population (and a higher percentage in males), so that almost everyone will have met someone with it, STPD is not a well-known condition. A character with STPD might be conspicuous on account of odd habits when it comes to speech or dress. They might mumble and speak vaguely and imprecisely, and they might wear highly unfashionable clothing or styles of clothing without thinking it amiss.

Some theories consider that there are two different forms of schizotypal personality disorder, one which is passive and one which is active. These are called insipid and timorous schizotypy.

If the protagonist of your story encounters an insipid schizotypal person, they might have difficulty with that person’s strange and absent way of being. Sometimes this sort of schizotypy can come across as vacant, as if the person inside was without emotion. If your protagonist is not a worldly type they might mistake a character with STPD for being on heavy drugs.

The protagonist of your story might want to make friends with a character who has a condition like this, only to be constantly frustrated. The other character might have decided as a general rule that other people don’t like them and so it’s not really worth trying to be friends with them, and so they are not interested in a friendship with your protagonist. Your protagonist might try several ways to overcome this social reticence, and may or may not succeed.

People who are timorous schizotypal are likely to create a different set of problems. This version of schizotypy is more active, which means that it is more likely to present as hostility and paranoia. Although a character with this condition is not likely to become aggressive, they are still likely to exhibit much of the suspicion, wariness and hostility that other people often mistake for aggression.

If the protagonist of your story has schizotypal personality disorder, they might find that other people can’t tell the difference between them and a schizophrenic. It is possible that a person with schizotypal personality disorder is not much different from the characters around them, but that this difference is still enough to cause their ostracisation.

As might be guessed from the above descriptions, people who have STPD often have related conditions, such as Paranoid Personality Disorder, Depression or Avoidant Personality Disorder. People with STPD are often genuinely afraid of other people and what those other people might think of them, and this can lead to them becoming paranoid about what other people are saying about them.

A person with STPD might then choose to just stay away from other people so as to not give them a reason to dislike them. A character developing this condition might find themselves discovering more and more reasons for avoiding social contact until they end up becoming a shut in.

Also very common are what are called delusions of reference. This is when a person encounters an event that they interpret as having special meaning just for them. For instance, a character with STPD might hear some advertisement on television and think it’s referring to them specifically, or they might meet a person twice on the same day by total coincidence, and mistake this for being stalked or similar.

Like many of the conditions in this book, schizotypal personality disorder is heavily correlated with early childhood abuse and neglect. There are some theories that suggest that the schizophrenia spectrum, rather than being simply a form of damage, is an adaptation, in which the person afflicted falls into chaos in the hope of reforming in a healthy way, instead of staying hard and risking becoming vicious.

For this reason, the schizotypal personality, like the schizophrenic, often feels hard done by and misunderstood. They might be aware that the usual course of action for a person who has been damaged as badly as them is to become cruel, perhaps vicious, and that their condition has in some sense prevented this. A profound sense of injustice can arise from the reality that their condition will afford a low social status.

This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM-V (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

Writing Bulimia Nervosa

Bulimia nervosa (usually known as bulimia) is a psychiatric condition characterised by intense bouts of over-eating, followed by a “purge” of some kind. The condition is about nine times more common in women than in men, and is believed to affect 1% of young women at any given time. This article looks at how to write engaging and believable characters with bulimia.

The classic example of bulimic behaviour is to consume an abnormally large amount of food, and then go to the toilet to vomit it all up. It’s worth noting that simply throwing up a lot, even after eating, is not sufficient for a bulimia diagnosis. The throwing up is not the main factor, as the condition is psychological and not physical.

It’s also worth noting that bulimia is very different to anorexia, despite that both conditions are eating disorders caused by a nervous complaint. Bulimics and anorexics share many symptoms, in particular the obsession with food and body image, but there are major differences. Bulimics are often at or near a healthy weight (despite the unhealthiness of much of their activity), and anorexics do not binge eat as a general rule.

If the protagonist of your story encounters another character with bulimia, it might be a matter of slowly coming to the realisation. The character with bulimia might show signs of having thrown up a lot or recently, such as bloodshot, puffy eyes or burst blood vessels in the face. Other physical tell-tale signs are low energy and evidence of self-harm.

Another character might give away signs that they are falling into a pattern of bulimia. An obsession with dietary rules is a common early sign. A character developing bulimia might also develop a set of strict dietary rules that they expect themselves to abide by. These rules might seem obsessional to a second character, but the bulimic character is unlikely to appreciate this sentiment.

These rules are key to understanding the condition. Because consuming fewer calories than one needs to survive is not sustainable in the long-term, the strict dietary rules will inevitably be broken. This doesn’t come with a sense of relief but a sense of horror and shame – feelings so intense that they have to be purged. In this state, vomiting often brings the desired relief.

If the protagonist of your story has bulimia, they are likely to live a very difficult life with a considerable amount of confusion. Thoughts of suicide are common, a symptom of both the condition itself and the difficult life circumstances caused by the condition. Also common are depressive and obsessive-compulsive thoughts, especially self-recrimination and rituals relating to food.

A protagonist with bulimia will probably experience a great deal of anxiety in their everyday life. This is not just because of the condition itself, with the neverending worry and guilt relating to food and body shape. It is also because of the social anxiety that comes with trying to keep their condition a secret. Your protagonist might find themselves telling lies to keep other characters from realising they are bulimic.

A character who develops bulimia may do so on account of exposure to media images that create an idea about what a human body ought to look like. It’s common for teenage girls – especially those who have never previously thought about their bodies as things that sexually attract men – to develop an obsession with what their bodies ought to look like. Bodily self-hate is an inevitable consequence of this for some people.

Some societies that have not yet been exposed to sophisticated and manipulative Western advertising culture find it a shock when they finally are. Many people have been unaware of the possibility of hating their own body on account of it being the “wrong shape”. Some cultures are naive when it comes to lies and lying, and are more easily affected by them. These cultures can see sudden spikes of bulimia rates when this advertising does come.

Like many other psychiatric conditions, bulimia carries an increased risk of depression, anxiety and self-harm. Thoughts like this form an unpleasant positive feedback loop, where the low self-regard puts a person at risk for bulimia and the bulimia causes low self-regard. A character with the condition may not realise that their thoughts are circular. On the other hand, they might be all too aware, and start losing sanity.

Also like other psychiatric conditions, there is a body of literature that suggests a strong correlation between having bulimia and early childhood abuse, in this case sexual. It’s possible that the trauma of sexual abuse leads to some difficulty in handling thoughts and feelings related to one’s own sexual attractiveness.

Bulimia is, along with anorexia and schizophrenia, one of the psychiatric conditions most likely to end in suicide. It is easily possible that such a fate will await a bulimic character in your story – after all, the average woman can no easier look like a photomodel than the average man can look like Schwarzenegger. However, like most mental illnesses, the majority of people with bulimia find some way to accommodate it in their lives.

This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM-V (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

The Ethnonationalism Spectrum

Despite being an accurate description of the way that human societies organised themselves for ten thousand years, the word ‘ethnostate’ has become taboo recently. Although the debate is usually dominated by arguments between insane Nazis and insane Marxists, there is a fascinating variety of opinions on the question of how wide and/or porous the group borders should be. This essay attempts to put them on a spectrum.

The two poles of the ethnonationalism spectrum are ethnosupremacism and ethnomasochism.

Ethnosupremacism found its apogee in the racial supremacist doctrines of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in the 1940s, under which the Eastern Europeans were declared subhuman and therefore less worthy of existing in the lands of Poland and Ukraine than the German soldiers to who the land was promised. This pole of the spectrum fell out of favour, understandably, when the German “Drang nach Osten” ended up causing the deaths of over 25 million people.

There are two aspects to ethnosupremacism (see: The Three Definitions of Racism) and one is much more dangerous than the other. The first can be considered a sort of pride in the achievements of one’s kin and is little different to individual self-esteem raised to the group level, whereas the second is the belief that other ethnicities are categorically lesser and perhaps even ought to be exterminated.

The first step from ethnosupremacism towards sanity could be called ethnoconservatism. This is the “fuck you, I’ve got mine” of the ethnonationalist spectrum. This position is similar to regular conservatism on the class spectrum. Essentially it says that, because one’s own kind are doing well from the way that society is structured, there is nothing wrong with the way society is structured and it should therefore stay the same.

This is different to ethnosupremacism in the sense that the ethnosupremacist doesn’t believe that any amount of money can help the lesser races overcome their inherently base nature, whereas the ethnoconservative doesn’t care, they just don’t want to pay for it. Likewise, the ethnoconservative doesn’t despise other races, they just don’t think it’s right to mix with them, for whatever reasons.

This is a common position in the New World, on account of that the remnants of the native population are often much poorer than the descendants of the settlers. If an individual feels that the Government shouldn’t charge them taxes in order to fund social programs etc. intended to reduce income inequality, they are likely to take this position.

Ethnomasochism has found its apogee today, in the anti-white SJW culture that represents the furthest swing of the Great Pendulum away from the ethnosupremacism of the Nazis. Ethnomasochism is discussed at length here but could be summarised as a belief that one’s own kind were worthy of particular disgrace on account of some past political misdeeds. Very often, ethnomasochism is the result of a low self-esteem, whereby the individual’s self-hatred is projected onto the race as a defence mechanism.

The first step from ethnomasochism towards sanity is a realisation that individuals do not inherit sin from their forefathers, and that even if they did, it would be impossible to determine how much blame one’s forefathers had caused one to inherit. However, if one is more intelligent than the average person one might come to perceive that gross pride in one’s race is considered vulgar by most cultured people and that a modicum of racial humility ought to be adopted, on occasion, for the sake of politeness.

A white person here might not possess any self-hatred but might make a joke about how a high proportion of child sex offenders are white people. An Asian might make a joke about how he’s shit at driving, and a black person might make a joke about how he feels tempted to steal something. This is not genuine self-hatred but a kind of self-deprecation for the sake of social utility. Indeed, a person needs to have genuine self-esteem before they can joke about themselves in this manner.

This is the position most commonly associated with sanguine cosmopolitanism and could be described as ethnocurious. Many people who are university educated or who identify with the left-libertarian quadrant (of the common political model) are here, especially if they are the sort of person who does a lot of international travel. Ethnocurious people often have foreign girlfriends or boyfriends, and can prefer other races on account of that interactions with their own kind lack novelty.

In the middle of the spectrum is a point of reason. Here it is acknowledged that each person is an individual, and therefore neither responsible for the crimes of their race nor able to take credit for its accomplishments, and yet that each person has genetic characteristics that have shaped the way that their environment has treated them, and which have thereby shaped their life story.

Here one believes that the most logical thing to do, therefore, is to treat everyone else as equal partners in a grand human project to minimise the amount of suffering endured by conscious beings in this world. Other people are to be understood but their resentments are not to be encouraged.

Unfortunately for us, this point of reason conflicts with all the other positions. Ethnosupremacists will shun you for being a weakling who is unwilling to stand up for his own kind. Ethnoconservatives will shun you for being a suspected Marxist. The ethnocurious feel like this position wilfully misses out of much of the flavour that life has to offer, and ethnomasochists will despise you for not adopting their quasi-religious narrative that their particular race is guilty.

Even more unfortunately, this point of reason conflicts with neoliberal ideology (the prevailing ideology of our age), and so a combination of state and corporate power has colluded to obscure the truth about it. Neoliberal ideology demands that any desire on the part of big business for cheap labour can be met by simply opening the borders to mass Third World immigration, and so any problems that might be caused on account of mixing together people of genotypes that never previously mixed can be dismissed as racism.

The dumber a person is, the more likely they are to pick an unsophisticated position at either pole of the ethnonationalist spectrum. If they are sadistic they will choose ethnosupremacism where everyone else is subhuman, if they are masochistic they will choose ethnomasochism where everyone else is an immoral oppressor. If they are intelligent they will have a nuanced position somewhere centrist.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

Writing Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar Disorder is an extremely taxing mental disorder that is believed to affect about 1% of the population at any given time. Most commonly affecting people in their mid to late 20s, the condition affects men and women in roughly equal numbers. This article looks at how to write believable and realistic characters with Bipolar Disorder.

As the name suggests, bipolar disorder refers to two distinct poles, one corresponding to ‘up’, the other ‘down’. These relate to mood and behaviour; Bipolar Disorder was once known as “manic depression”. The stereotypical course of Bipolar Disorder is for someone to feel extremely low and depressed, and then suddenly feel high-energy and manic, only to fall back into depression, in a cycle that never ends (important to note here that the cycle is not predictable, like a pendulum, but chaotic).

Although the idea of mania can sound appealing to those with no experience of the condition, and although it is generally much less unpleasant than depression, Bipolar Disorder causes problems at either pole. It contrasts with healthy, natural changes in mood in the sense that people with the condition are seldom in an average, moderate state inbetween the two poles, as mentally healthy people are.

When a person in this condition is in a depressed phase, they are at risk for all of the suicidal behaviours that accompany Major Depressive Disorder. Self-harm is common among people with Bipolar Disorder, a function of the deep self-hatred that occurs in depressive phases. However, when a person is in a manic phase, they are also at risk of harming themselves.

Manic periods have to last for at least a week to really count, as an elevated mood could occur for any number of reasons. The manic phase of Bipolar Disorder can, at its most extreme, present much like a methamphetamine bender. A character undergoing one will tend to talk fast, sometimes stammering, and will have difficulty following a conversation, being easily distracted. Also like a methamphetamine bender, manic episodes tend to result in very little sleep. At worst, they can cause a person to become psychotic.

The combination of these factors can result in some extremely risky behaviour, which could be dynamite for your creative fiction. Hypersexuality, gambling, drug-taking and speeding in motor vehicles are all common behaviours for a person with Bipolar Disorder while they are in their manic phase. Someone behaving like this might seem like they’ve been given a week to live and want to make the most of it.

A character with Bipolar Disorder might not be easy for other characters to deal with. The erratic moods of bipolar sufferers means that other characters seldom feel comfortable around them. People with bipolar can be unpredictable. They are also very high suicide risks, because of the combination of impulsiveness arising from the mania and the self-hatred arising from the depression.

Sometimes a character with Bipolar Disorder will come across as full of energy and life and enthusiasm, making them seem very charismatic to another character. Other times they were be low in energy and miserable, which makes them seem very different. Someone who meets a Bipolar character while they are at one pole, and then meets them again while they are at the other, might have difficulty believing they’re the same person.

If the protagonist of your story has Bipolar Disorder, they might find themselves facing a considerable degree of social stigma. As mentioned above, their condition might make other characters feel uncomfortable. The protagonist might find themselves getting overlooked for parties and for social occasions on account of that other characters are afraid they will be in too crazy of a mood.

If the protagonist encounters another character with Bipolar Disorder, things might not be much easier. It’s common to meet a person with Bipolar Disorder during one of their manic phases, because this tends to cause them to become more extraverted. During this time, they might strike others as dynamic, engaging and enthusiastic. However, if a friendship is formed, it may not survive the depressive phase.

There are two kinds of Bipolar Disorder, known as Bipolar I and Bipolar II. The essential difference lies in the severity of the manic symptoms. The more powerful the manic symptoms, the more likely the sufferer will get a diagnosis of Bipolar I. This is not to downplay the difficulty of living with Bipolar II, but some of the hypomanic episodes in the latter case can actually be useful for getting things done.

Bipolar Disorder is distinct from Borderline Personality Disorder, although the behaviour of people with the condition can appear similar. For instance, people with either condition are capable of changing their attitude towards another person very quickly, but the Bipolar sufferer tends to have more self-awareness than the Borderline and maybe aware that their change in perception is not fully rational.

This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM-V (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.