Things I Hate About Warriors Fanfiction

Mental illness II

Tw for mental health in general: eating disorders, self harm, trauma mentions. Nothing in detail!

Grab a snack and buckle up, because this chapter is going to be a long ride. Today we're talking about mental illness, romanticisation, stigma, and inaccuracies. I'd originally planned on making multiple chapters about this, but I'd rather keep it all in one big mega-chapter.

As a side note, please don't use this as a tool for self-diagnosis! On the original version of this chapter, there was a lot of comments of people saying "oh I have x symptom and y symptom that you mentioned, does that mean I have z disorder??" Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. If you're concerned you have a mental illness, start researching. Don't self diagnose if you have the opportunity to actually talk to someone, because mental illnesses are complex! Many overlap and it's very easy to misdiagnose - autism is often misdiagnosed as bpd or depression in women, adhd and autism have similar traits. And a lot of media around mental illness completely pathologise normal behaviours. Just because you have low self-esteem, doesn't mean you are depressed. Sometimes you just have low self-esteem. If you really feel like something's wrong though, you absolutely should talk to someone! It's better to get help when you're struggling even if you don't have a disorder than to deal with it alone and for it to get worse.

First off, this is a massive topic with SO MUCH NUANCE. This isn't a guide to how to write mental illness, because that would take all day, but dissecting some of the harmful tropes I see in this fandom regarding mental illness. This issue is much deeper than I'll be discussing here, because it could be a book all on its own. There are so many facets and elements to writing mental illness, and everyone has different opinions, so I'd recommend doing some reading up! I can only cover half of what I want to say, and this is 4000+ words already.

I promise you I'm not some know-it-all with a superiority complex trying to tell you all how to write with no experience myself. I'm mentally ill. If you've read earlier chapters, you know this already. I can't speak on behalf of people with personality disorders or psychosis, or every single disorder in the dsm, but I've been diagnosed with major depression, social and generalised anxiety, multiple eating disorders, and have struggled with self harm and suicide attempts. What can I say, I'm a collector. I'm doing a lot better now. Hey, remember in the first chapter about mental illness when I said I hadn't experienced depression? That aged like milk. Let's hope me doing well ages better. I'm also a psych major, so while I'm far from an expert, I know a lot more than I did in the first chapter. I've also written about mental illness many times, and I've made all the mistakes in the book.

So let's talk about romanticing mental illness, because in my opinion it's probably the worst issue we have in this fandom. Romanticising mental illness is essentially highlighting the positive elements of mental illness while downplaying the negative aspects, or fetishising it to make a character seem tragic or interesting so readers like them more. That doesn't mean that writing mentally ill characters needs to be doom and gloom all the time, but not treating mental illness like it's some beautifully tragic thing to have, that it makes someone any more interesting than someone without mental illness. How many times have you read about some poor anxious uwu softboi warrior, or some tragic depressed cat who's gone through tragedy after tragedy? How many fics have you read with the broken protagonist? How many times have you read a fic like that and thought "aww, that poor character?"

So many mentally ill characters are written for pity points. Authors want to write a compelling and likable character, and the easiest way is to make them depressed and traumatised. I went over this in my chapter on suicide - our experiences are used as trauma/tragedy porn. And this is 100% romanticism. Romanticising mental illness doesn't only mean believing that mental illnesses are a good thing, a large part of it is using mental illness to make a character interesting.