Category: insanity

Writing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an unusual condition in that almost everyone has it to a greater or lesser degree, but few realise the impact that it has had on their lives. As the name implies, the condition describes when a person’s stress levels or reactions don’t go back to normal after a major traumatic experience. This article looks at how to write believable characters and situations involving PTSD.

PTSD is caused by exposure to a traumatic event, usually one in which a person thinks they are going to die. The classic examples are exposure to warfare, traffic accidents, sexual assault or physical assault. Experiences like these cause the brain to flood with fear, which can form long-term associations with the other stimuli present. This means that future exposure to those stimuli can trigger that deep fear again.

The classic symptom of PTSD is becoming full of adrenaline and going into combat mode when exposed to a loud noise or a touch to the head. In the former case, the loud noise might remind a character of the explosions of grenades and shellfire in combat; in the latter case, the touch to the head might remind of early childhood abuse at the hands of a parent. In either case, powerful memories of immense fear can quickly come flooding back.

The effects of PTSD are what could be expected from a close brush with gruesome physical death: adrenaline and cortisol prime the character for either combat or running. A character with the condition might easily become stirred into fight-or-flight mode as a response to the trauma. Here it can be seen that PTSD has considerable overlap with other psychiatric disorders, in particular Panic Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder and Generalised Anxiety Disorder.

Other effects are an increased propensity for self-harm. After all, one of the natural consequences of having a massively traumatic experience is that a person comes to realise that the world is much nastier or more dangerous than they thought it was. Some people with PTSD might decide that this world is actually pretty shit and not worth living in, given the horrors it contains.

In the case of violent crime or rape, a person might also come to lose all trust in a major societal demographic, which entails everyday difficulties. If a woman comes to distrust all men or a robbery victim comes to distrust all blacks, their life might become a lot harder and quickly, for no real fault of their own. Like children who have had bad experiences with dogs, a person with PTSD might come to dislike anything associated with their initial trauma.

Because PTSD is frequently portrayed in dramatic fiction, care must be taken not to write in cliches. The example of a nightmare leading to someone waking up in the middle of the night screaming, only to realise that the object of their terror is no longer present, is a striking one but also very heavily used. So too is the man staring into the distance, reliving a traumatic experience, not hearing someone calling to them.

A protagonist who suffers from PTSD might be aware of their condition or unaware.

If they are aware that they have PTSD, they might be a deep and sensitive character. They could be directly aware that a particular early life event has damaged them irreparably. This might be the reason for their unusual levels of compassion – the character knows what it feels like to be scared to death and commiserates with others who also do.

A story featuring such a character might be one about how they overcame their psychic damage and managed to find a way to engage joyfully with life. Often this involves healing oneself, the shamanic path. An extremely wise character may have attained their insight through having overcome an equally extreme trauma earlier in their life. Perhaps this experience caused them to understand what another character is going through.

It’s common to have PTSD and to be unaware of it. This is especially plausible on account of that people who incur severe psychological trauma might not show signs of it until many years later. A person might grow into early adulthood with a particularly surly or nasty character because of some heavy trauma incurred while a child. They might also show other signs of being strongly emotional, reckless or impulsive.

Just because a character with PTSD is not aware that they have PTSD, doesn’t mean that other characters will not be aware. In some cases it will be very obvious, because they will observe the first character go into kill mode for what seems like an insufficiently grave provocation. The character with PTSD might soon find that their condition is part of their reputation – they seem “damaged” in the eyes of others.

A combination of the two can also tell a story, such as the case of a protagonist who gradually becomes aware that they have PTSD or something like it. Perhaps they are perceptive enough to realise that a prior event has damaged their psyche – for example, they observe that they feel intense anxiety when presented with a stimulus that reminds them of a particular traumatic event.

If your protagonist encounters a character with PTSD, how that protagonist behaves might depend on their naivety and openness. A naive character might think that simply by being nice to someone with PTSD they can get them to behave normally. Although this is sometimes true up to a point, the reality is that PTSD often carries with it sinister undertones of bitterness and resentment.

It’s common for people who have PTSD for similar reasons to bond strongly over the fact. This is especially true in the case of soldiers, emergency personnel and survivors of abusive relationships. For one thing, misery loves company, but for another, severe trauma is often the kind of experience that deeply shapes a person and their conception of life and reality, so people who share the trauma often share an entire worldview that’s based on it.

C-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) isn’t actually in the DSM-V, but it’s worth covering here for the sake of completeness. Essentially it’s a similar condition, only brought about by repeated exposure to a traumatic person or stimulus, as opposed to one single, horrifying event as is usually the case with regular PTSD.

The major difference with C-PTSD is the loss of a sense of self. One’s boundaries are violated with such consistency that it becomes hard to say where one ends and the outside world begins. This can be related to Depersonalisation Disorder and frequently coincides with a deep sense of distrust about other people.

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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.

A Great Secret That You’re Not Privy To

If you’ve moved in conspiracy circles for long enough you will have heard the name of Albert Pike, and his prophecy of three future great wars, one which would see the old empires of Europe mutually annihilate each other, another that would see extreme nationalism and extreme communism mutually annihilate each other, and a third that would see Judaism and Islam mutually annihilate each other. This essay reveals a few truths about these prophecies.

In Pike’s time, freethinkers faced the problem of not being allowed to discuss intellectual subjects freely because of the paranoia of the ruling classes. This necessitated that free thinkers met behind closed doors, and that those who sought entry were heavily vetted. Recognising that these efforts to suppress the truth were grossly immoral, some schemers got together and hatched a scheme that would destroy all opposition to free inquiry and free speech.

Their plan was to use the principle of coincidentia oppositorum to destroy all of the corrupt institutional forces that made it impossible to honestly study and discuss the natural world and the things in it. This involved setting those institutional forces against each other in a series of wars, in blocs of equal power that would bleed each other dry. The kings would be first to go, then the dictators and finally the priests.

All of this is a great work of alchemy. As followers of this newspaper are aware, there are three masculine elements of iron, silver and gold, and each of them has a corrupted form that must be dissolved for the truth to shine through.

The corrupt form of iron was destroyed in World War One when the great European Empires that had developed from the military caste (i.e. the men of iron) destroyed each other. The corrupt form of silver was destroyed in World War Two when the great political falsehoods (i.e. the products of silver) in the form of national socialism and communism destroyed each other. The corrupt form of gold is destined to be destroyed in World War Three, when the great religious falsehoods (Judaism and Islam) destroy each other.

This is the great secret that you’re not privy to. Once you are privy to it, the rest of it all makes sense.

This is the reason why the Western world, whose politicians are beholden to the schemes of the great schemers, moved so certainly after the conclusion of World War Two to secure the position of Israel. The relentless pushing of the Holocaust religion ties into this as well – it has come to be considered extremely immoral to oppose a Jewish homeland in the Middle East.

The ceaseless propagandising on behalf of Israel serves two purposes.

First, it flushes out Jews from among Western populations and induces them to emigrate to Israel. Concentrating all of the world’s remaining Jews in one spot is an important precursor to exterminating Judaism – after all, if they were all in Israel it could be done with a handful of nuclear missiles.

Second, it primes the Western World for the massive retaliation against the Muslim World that we are intended to engage in once Israel is destroyed. The Illuminati scheme calls for the West, insane with rage and fear after Israel’s annihilation, to itself annihilate the Muslim world in revenge for their unthinkable crime against Israel. To this end, we are artificially being induced, by ceaseless media bombardment, to pay attention to the impending Middle Eastern cataclysm.

On the surface of it, allowing mass Muslim immigration to the West seems like absolute insanity. It has long been known that those who live among Muslims come to hate them, and for good reason, since Islam is an ideology of hate. Too many Muslims genuinely believe, as Christians once did, that their superstition is destined to rule over the whole world by the Will of God, and that violent acts that hasten this end are justified.

But stoking this hate is part of the plan. The people of the West have to be conditioned to despise Muslims so that we are motivated to provide the righteous flames of revenge to them after they destroy Israel. We become conditioned to despise them as a result of their presence and behaviour in the West. Therefore, opening the borders to them now causes Westerners to become ready to play their role in the third part of this great scheme.

Male infant genital mutilation is another part of it. Abrahamists would have you believe that the practice of male infant genital mutilation is not harmful and does not cause any trauma to the infant boy. To the contrary, it causes a massive amount of trauma, proportionate to having one’s earlobes sliced off, but this is desired and is intentional, because of the psychological malleability it produces.

This trauma makes the victim exceptionally receptive to certain suggestions, in particular suggestions to do violence against others. This is why the vast majority of the world’s terrorists, mass murderers and serial killers are mutilated. Revenge-fuelled outbursts of violence are natural for innocent beings who have been forced to undergo such a severe trauma for no good reason.

The three most notable areas of male infant genital mutilation are the Muslim world, America and Israel. The reasons for this are simple: these are the people who have been selected to play the starring roles in World War Three. Therefore, they have to be mutilated so that they’re submissive and malicious enough to follow the orders to destroy huge numbers of people when they are given them.

How this will come about has long been foreshadowed: Israel has been claiming for over two decades that Iran is close to developing nuclear weapons. Iran might be, Iran might not be, but the point is that it is part of the plan for them to develop nuclear weapons, and it’s part of the plan for them to use those weapons on Israel.

When this happens, the world will be so shocked, horrified and traumatised that we will be in a prime state to accept the introduction of a New World Order that promises to keep humanity permanently free from the great corruptions. This will involve the introduction of a world religion based on the perennial philosophy, and a world political system based on what we have learned scientifically from psychology and evolutionary biology about how the human species actually functions.

When this day comes, borders (iron) politics (silver) and religion (gold) will all be obsolete, because all humans will have been reunited with their birthright to know the truth. This will signify the end of the Kali Yuga and the start of a new Golden Age.

Of course, none of this really is a secret – you can find all these plans on the Internet if you have the patience to collate them. The real secret is whether or not what I’m saying is true. Is it truth, or it is bullshit dreamed up by some schizophrenic cannabis addict larping as a publisher while living at his mother’s house? You don’t know, you can’t know, unless and until you do the research, and in any case there’s nothing you can do about it. So enjoy the ride.

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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 Conduct Disorder

Unlike most of the conditions in this book, Conduct Disorder (CD) is only diagnosed in children and adolescents. As the name implies, people who get diagnosed with it conduct themselves in ways that the clinician considers disorderly, in particular when it comes to respecting the rights of other people. This article looks at how to write believable and interesting characters with the condition.

The most important thing is to distinguish CD from Antisocial Personality Disorder. CD is the developmental precursor to Antisocial Personality Disorder – it can only be diagnosed in those too young to have a diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder (i.e. 18 years of age). It is therefore a developmental condition.

One of the key symptoms of CD is a lower level of fear. This will express itself in a wide variety of ways.

The most notable way that a lower level of fear expresses itself in young people is when it comes to transgressions. A young person has not yet had time to internalise knowledge about the effects that their actions have on other people. They therefore have to learn to be afraid of punishment. This corresponds to Level 1 of Kohlberg’s Scale of Moral Reasoning.

A young person with CD will have a hard time internalising rules about those transgressions, in part because they don’t feel much fear, and so don’t have as much inhibition when primitive impulses towards violence and destruction start playing up on them. Because of this, they regularly violate boundaries relating to other people’s personal space and property.

Another way low levels of fear find expression is in transgressions against one’s own health. Young people already play fast and loose with their health when it comes to having a good time; young people with Conduct Disorder are nihilistically reckless. If the protagonist of your story has Conduct Disorder, chances are that they will be into the booze, weed and pills from their early teenage years.

A character with CD will likely be something of a daredevil. If they are male, they might find themselves drawn to racing motor vehicles or street fighting; if female, to shoplifting and starting trouble between men.

A story with a protagonist who has Conduct Disorder might read like J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Care must be taken here, therefore, not to sound cliched. Anti-hero stories mostly appeal to the same young audience, because they will most readily identify with the spirit of rebellion expressed by such a character. People with Conduct Disorder push the boundaries, for good or ill.

Punk stories, in particular cyberpunk, often feature protagonists who would appear (at least from the authorities’ perspective) to have Conduct Disorder. Young men like John Case of Neuromancer or Jonty Gillespie of The Verity Key are unrepentant criminals, usually because they have to be in order to make a living in the cracks of the edifice of respectable society.

After all, one man’s Conduct Disorder is another man’s righteous rebellion against a tyrannical oppressor. So a character with the condition might be the perfect choice of protagonist if your story involves going up against a large, faceless, totalitarian entity. After all, most of us have a point which, if pushed beyond, we will no longer behave in a co-operative manner.

If a character with CD is pitted against a malicious, evil entity (corporation or government), much of the difficulty in writing your story will come from making that entity unsympathetic enough that the reader readily comes to identify with that character. The more credibly this can be done, the less that character will look like a CD sufferer and more like a righteous hardarse.

Unsurprisingly, Conduct Disorder is highly correlated with all forms of early childhood abuse. A character with the condition might have learned by way of mimicry of their parents that violence and cruelty are perfectly acceptable ways to advance one’s interests, and that fear is for the weak and an invitation to be destroyed.

So if you are writing a character with CD they might not necessarily be a cool, daring and adventurous antihero. Realistically they are more likely to be somewhat brutal. If your protagonist encounters such a character, they might find them intimidating – the class bully, or local street thug.

If your protagonist encounters a character with CD, they could respond in a wide variety of ways, depending on how they themselves are (and their decision will be very revealing to the reader). They might consider that character a cool rebel to be befriended, they might consider them a danger to be avoided, or they might consider them a little brat to be corrected.

Conduct Disorder often occurs at the same time as Attention Deficit Disorder. It’s likely, therefore, that any character with it will have extreme difficulty at school, at work, or with either friends of family. Their life will probably be very chaotic, and will considerable Police or social worker involvement.

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