#and this person made a big list of common intrusive thoughts in this category

[fingertipsmp3]

About to bawl my fucking eyes out over this OCD blog I just found

[scripttorture]

Hey! My character is made into an experiment by the government due to him having a supernatural ability. The one who handed him over was his partner, who has been a part of that organization all along. He is usually a very confident person, powerful and extroverted. I'm not sure how his mental state is supposed to change? I don't feel like the whole loosing their will to live and becoming incredibly depressed thing would fit him as a person. How could I still show that the torture effects him?

There isn’t a sure fire answer to how any one person will change when they’re tortured. We know the possible symptoms, but most people won’t experience every possible symptom and we don’t have a way to predict who gets what.

 There’s a post that talks about the possible symptoms over here.

 Here’s the thing though: there is a lot of variety in survivors, in the symptoms they get and the way they personally express those symptoms. Some people do become suicidal. Some people do become depressed. And some people do lose their faith in humanity.

 But there is not one universal survivor experience.

 This means that there’s a big range in realistic responses. It also means that as a writer you actually have a lot of options. You should be picking 3-5 symptoms from the list of possible options, but the list has 14 things on it and some of those things can manifest in multiple ways.

 I think that, since we can’t predict symptoms, the best thing you can do as a writer is pick symptoms based on what you feel fits your character and story best.

 Depression and suicidal thoughts don’t do that, so let’s have a look at some of the others.

 Memory problems are incredibly common in real survivors and are almost never portrayed accurately in fiction. You can read about the four basic types here.

 I’d really encourage you to use one of these if you feel it fits your story. They create a lot of interesting narrative challenges for the character and they can make for really good emotional/introspective moments. If for instance you want to explore self-doubt giving the character memories he later finds out are inaccurate could feed into that, leading to him questioning whether he ‘really’ was betrayed.

 General forgetfulness (ie low level difficulty forming memories) can give the character a lasting disadvantage in everyday life, creating a much more traditional injury-recovery arc as he tries to find adaptions to this new normal.

 Intrusive memories, when handled well, can help create a deeper connection between the reader and the character. Because it lets you create situations where the character’s mood flips in an instant, the other characters don’t understand why but the readers do.

 Memory loss can be trickier, mostly because it’s rarely handled well in fiction. It doesn’t effect older memories, such as childhood memories, the person’s name etc. It almost never effects memories of torture itself. But it does effect other aspects of the time they’re held, the period prior to capture and sometimes a few weeks after release. It’s a distressing and disorientating experience and it’s a good pick if there’s any sort of investigation or prosecution.

 Because memory problems (especially memory loss and inaccurate memories) are a big part of why torture trials are really hard to conduct. Having the character find that he doesn’t actually remember the crucial details and watching the process of people trying and failing to help him, that can be a really powerful addition. It’s also a good way to form a rift between him and his friends without depression or having him lose faith in others. It gives a reason for any distance between them, even if it’s an emotional rather then logical reason.

 Read through the masterpost and really think about whether any of these memory problems could fit your story.

 Narratively speaking memory problems don’t link the character’s personality but they do have a strong impact on plots and sub-plots. Memory loss, inaccurate memories and intrusive memories will all effect the character’s emotional arc and sense of self. They can also throw up barriers for the character.

 He might be missing a couple of crucial details about his life before he was snatched. He might have some key details about how and where he was snatched wrong. Think about how those sorts of problems could feed into your plot, because they can add interesting conflicts and challenges.

 Chronic pain is also incredibly common in torture survivors and it often doesn’t have a single cause. Back, muscular and joint pain are particularly common.

 It can lead to a character seeming angry, unapproachable, anti-social or like they have a hair-trigger temper. It can also make it seem as though they have really bad mood swings or a short temper.

 This can lead to interesting character moments as non-survivors struggle to empathise with an ‘asshole’ while the survivor is struggling to express the fact they’re in physical pain. It can also lead in to discussions of disability and the way we treat invisible disabilities in society.

 It can also often be improved by, again, life style adjustments and sometime medication.

 If you wanted to use addiction as a symptom then chronic pain is a common reason behind addiction in survivors. Essentially they start taking more and more powerful pain medications in order to try and feel ‘normal’.

 Chronic pain doesn’t always lead to addiction though. Making good, consistent life style adjustments (using a mobility aid, being able to sit instead of having to stand for long periods and so on) can help keep pain at manageable levels allowing a healthy relationship with pain medication.

 Insomnia is another really common symptom in survivors. This basically means the character is always at least slightly sleep deprived. Which has knock on effects on absolutely every part of a person’s life.

 You can read about the effects of sleep deprivation here.

 I’d suggest thinking carefully about what you need the character to do before using this one. It might sound counter intuitive but a character with disabling chronic pain is probably more capable of the occasional bout of superheroics then a chronically sleep deprived character is.

 Insomnia caused by mental illness is also notoriously difficult to treat. Medication for the mental health problems survivors tend to have makes it harder to sleep and reduces the quality of sleep. Medication to ‘make’ people sleep often decreases the quality of sleep, when it works. It does not work for everyone.

 Essentially don’t treat insomnia as an ‘easy’ option with less impact on the character. It impacts every part of a person’s life, making them more likely to get sick, slower to react, more emotionally volatile and less able to learn/remember everything.

 There are so many things that insomnia effects that- well I find it easiest to think of it as a permanent lowering of ability across all categories. This does not mean that a character automatically becomes incapable of things; it means they are worse at them then they were before.

 If they were already really good at something then other people might not notice the difference. But the character himself will. Which can have a knock on effect on self esteem.

 Any of the things I’ve mentioned can result in social isolation. Because survivors can come across as aggressive, volatile and inconsiderate which can lead to people… avoiding them. Especially when other characters don’t have a good understanding of mental illness or experience dealing with trauma survivors. (Having said that, remember that a pretty significant proportion of the population experiences mental health problems at some point in their life. Think about how likely experience vs ignorance is, rather then assuming one or the other.)

 Isolation exacerbates pre-existing mental health problems.

 And any combination of the above symptoms make up the frame work of any long term personality change. For instance you describe this character as confident and capable: if he gets multiple forms of memory problems does that impact his confidence in certain areas? And if it does how does he cope with that? It could be by expressing his self-doubt but it could also be by taking a more passive role within a group, letting others take the lead instead of stepping in.

 I have an old ask over here that goes through how I pick symptoms for a character and how I vary them depending on the sort of plot I have in mind.

 Wrapping up, I think that we make these symptoms individual when we consider how the symptoms interact and what that means for the character.

 Depression does not have to mean someone looks overtly miserable. It can look like nausea, like struggling to eat and sleep, like being quieter in social situations. It can feel like going through life disconnected from the world, not so much the presence of misery as the absence of joy.

 You’ve listed these characteristics; confidence, power, extroverted and survivors can hold on to all those things. As always the central point is nuance. Because that confidence probably won’t be completely unshaken anymore, that extroversion might not be effortless anymore, his relationship with that power could change.

 The character might have developed a lot of self doubt and, though it’s a struggle, continue to make firm ‘confident’ decisions because he feels that’s important either to himself or to everyone else. It could be a way of him showing that he’s still ‘strong’, that he survived, that he can still support the other characters.

 The character could still be extroverted and depending on the symptoms you pick socialising might be harder, it could take up more energy. He might be hiding the cost from his friends. Or, another common way it plays out, is that he could just come across as… a lot more inappropriate: making dark ‘jokes’ that non-survivors don’t find funny, having obvious mood swings that make others uncomfortable. You get the idea.

 Torture does change people. But those changes are unpredictable and they often don’t look like we expect.

 Our fiction often tries to use depression and suicidal ideation as an excuse to turn survivors into passive objects. They are not.

 One of the things that stood out to me the more I looked at prominent survivors was anger. Because yes, despair is possible, common even. But so is spite and vitriol and rage. So is determination.

 There is more then one way to be powerful. Confidence does not need to be unshakable to be real.

 In essence: you are aiming for an understandable change in what is already there, not an excision of the characteristics you’ve already established.

 As a final note you might want to take a look at the masterposts I have on medical experiments (which you can find here and also here.) It’s worth deciding whether you want to show unethical but genuine experiments, or torture. You can have a look through the tags on unethical experimentation and pseudo-scientific torture for more information.

 I hope that helps. :)

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[ontheavalanche]

As someone with BPD, I struggle a lot with headcanons of Kent Parson with BPD.

Bc on the one hand, I really enjoy people taking the time to research BPD and crafting versions of Kent Parson that are complicated yet respectful and highlighting a disorder that imho isn’t spoken about nearly enough + a lot of thought and effort goes into taking mentally ill characters and fleshing them out with words. Plus I’ve seen some well composed stuff from people who do have BPD and get what it’s like and make wonderfully relatable versions of BPD!Parse and I don’t want to downplay those at all.

But at the same time, I noticed a lot of what happens is that people paint Kent Parson as this guy that’s been really manipulative and can say and do things that are emotionally abusive or just make him all impulsive but then be all like oh he’s like that because he has BPD so it’s okay.

And that’s bad for multiple reasons—the first one being ofc that you can’t excuse manipulative, emotionally abusive, or any other kind of shitty behaviors just bc the person acting that way is mentally ill. The second is that people with Borderline Personality Disorder are generally not like that???? That’s a really harmful stereotype of what people with BPD are like and it’s been perpetuated a lot in various types of media and even within medical and mental health communities.

Anyways, I’m p sure I personally won’t be able to read any fics with BPD!Parson unless they’re personally recommend to me, but I will throw a few things out there that I haven’t seen in BPD!Parse fics but that are common amongst people with BPD. (Please keep in mind that these are based on my own experiences and experiences of other people I know who have BPD—as with any mental health issue, it can manifest very differently depending on the person and not everyone with have experienced all of these):

Manic episodes!!!!! (I feel it’s important to note that often times you won’t realize you’re Manic until you’re peeking. And tbh a lot of times you don’t realize it at all, especially if you don’t have experience recognizing those feelings. Also I’ve noticed that with people with BPD that are more on the consistently manic side will not notice their mania because while manic episodes are intense, if you’re used to them it feels totally normal to feel that way all the time. You might not notice it’s a thing until it gets pointed out by an outsider or unless you get a really really bad one or end up hospitalized)

After a manic episode, you might Crash—a sort of Mania Hangover, if you will. Sometimes it can be a full blow depressive episode, sometimes it’s just a need for sleep or maybe releasing a few hard earned tears. (Or if you’re one of those people that’s kind of Perpetually Manic or going through a manic phase, maybe you won’t even Crash, you’ll just slide into another episode like whatislife amiright??)

If not full blown mania, then mood swings!!!! So many mood swings!!!!! They’re intense and sometimes they last a few hours and sometimes they last a few days. People with BPD have intense emotions, highs and lows and you can on occasion get several in the span of an hour or two.

A chronic feeling of emptiness (I’m thinking of Parse feeling empty n wow that hurts so bad doesn’t it?)

Reckless, impulsive, or dangerous behaviors, often thought of as a result of trying to fill that emptiness or during feelings of mania or anger or mood swings. (This can manifest as shopping sprees, sex, substance abuse, binge eating, etc).

Viewing things in black and white—often times things and feelings are perceived as either totally Good or totally Bad, with little to nothing in between. It’s easy to distort your point of view to make it so that everything fits in those categories. This is a defense mechanism and is often referred to as “Splitting” or all-or-nothing thinking.

The Good/Bad POV//defense mechanism also and especially applies toward people and while logically you might know people are multifaceted and want to recognize that people can be both good and bad, sometimes it can be really hard not to look at people and subconsciously be like “okay are you a hero or a villain, a protagonist or an antagonist, do I love you or hate you” (idealization vs devaluation)

In the BPD community, many people have something called an FP (a Favorite Person)—this is a person you’ve formed an emotional dependency on that can quite literally make or break your day with the slightest provocation. Frankly, this is kind of difficult to talk about so I recommend skimming this article. Basically, you devolve intense feelings for a person (be it romantic or platonic) and when they give you attention or when you view their actions as positive, it’s like you’re happier than you’ve ever been but if you view something they did or said as a negative towards you (even if it wasn’t their intention), suddently your mood plummets so badly that you might feel physically pained or enter a major depressive episode or feel suicidal. (Not everyone has or has had an FP, but if you have one and they reject you and the relationship between the two of you is over, it can feel kind of like a soulmate au gone bad in which you gotta break this Profound Bond and it feels like you’re shattering. Not impossible to get over but you’ll be kind of broken for a while, or maybe just a little cracked forever.) ((Was Jack Zimmermann Kent’s FP???? Who knows, just don’t think about it))

While obviously relationships with people can often be intense and sometimes unstable, it doesn’t mean everyone is regarded with the same level of intensity and it doesn’t mean people with BPD don’t also have normal and healthy relationships and friendships. It truthfully depends on the person. Sometimes all relationships are affected, and sometimes it’s just one.

Disassociation—this can range from depersonalization (feeling disconnected from your body), derealization (feeling disconnected from reality), amnesia (lost time), and identity confusion (losing self).

Speaking of identity—people with BPD struggle with their self-image, and yes sometimes they will distort how they view themselves to fit their mood. I often see this brought up in fics in regards to Kent Parson as either having extreme narcissism or with an extremely low self worth. While those two things aren’t generally out of the realm of possibility, most of the time when it comes to people with BPD and their identity it’s more like they’re lost???? Idk how to describe it but amongst people with BPD, it’s common to feel like you don’t know who the real you is, or like there is no real you and you’re just made up of other people. It’s because sometimes we latch onto the habits and obsessions of others, of our friends and loved ones, and they become our habits and our obsessions, and sometimes realizing this can push you into a bit of an identity crisis????? (Does anyone have a way to put this into English that makes sense bc I’m doing my best here but I Suck soooo) EDIT: the word for it is “Identity Disturbance” and it’s A Big Thing

Seemingly unprovoked bursts of anger and irritability are not uncommon

A lot of people with BPD have abandonment issues. Be it real or imagined abandonment, many of us try to avoid feeling that kind (or any kind) of rejection, even if it means we’re the ones doing the rejecting first. I see this well represented in fics but it’s very dragged out. (Truthfully, imho people with BPD can kinda suck at rejecting people, like we’ll wanna do it so that you don’t do it to us but we can’t quite execute it all that well and when we do we try not to dwell on it.)

I have noticed in BPD!Parse fics, most of the time he has a healthy sense of distrust towards people and their intentions and that’s pretty accurate although sometimes it’s the exact opposite—you might trust too much or too quickly if you consider them Good.

Major depressive episodes are not at all uncommon. (I apologize bc I don’t think I’m going to be able to put in as much detail about this rn bc tbh I’m running on the Manic side lately and when I’m more manic I tend to forget what it’s like to feel depressed or just how those feelings come about until I get hit with a wave of them and then I just wallow.)

Self-harm and suicidal thoughts are not uncommon either, even if you aren’t going through a depressive episode or feeling sad. (An unfortunate percentage of people with BPD die from suicide.)

Some people experience intrusive thoughts or some form of psychosis (if I’m not mistaken the term “borderline” actually comes from an antiquated thought that people with BPD are “borderline psychotic” and so some places no longer use the term “borderline personality disorder” and rather call it an emotional intensity disorder or an “emotionally unstable personality disorder”—bc the latter is totally much better)

Looooots of anxiety, I don’t think in the same way you see in an anxiety disorder??? (I have both so it’s hard for me to describe and separate the two but from what I’ve heard, for people that don’t have an anxiety disorder but do have BPD, it can come in bouts, kind of like manic and depressive episodes but just anxiety and none of the high or low feelings????)

Trouble sleeping is common with people with BPD

Paranoia

A majority of the time, people with BPD also have other disorders such a depression, anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorders, or other personality disorders that coexist with your BPD.

And the last thing: if you’re reading this list and thinking “huh this sounds more like what I’ve read about bipolar disorder rather than borderline personality disorder” then the reason for it is bc the way bipolar disorder is presented in media is often similar to the reality of what it’s like to have BPD (and similarly there is so much more to bipolar disorder that is not presented in media accurately). The two can be very similar from an outsider’s point of view but to put it in oversimplified terms—people with BPD have more persistent day-to-day symptoms that impact them 24/7 whereas someone with bipolar disorder can go through periods of symptom-free wellness for days, weeks, or even years before falling into say a major manic episode. Our mood swings and episodes are also shorter and tend to run on patterns or are a direct reaction to life’s typical stressors—we can have multiple mood swings and episodes within a single day, whereas folks with bipolar disorder have seemingly no warning before an episode that can last months. Also while any form of mental illness (particularly ones that have to do with mania or delusions or hallucinations) can impact your relationship with people, typically people with bipolar disorder don’t have the same problems with interpersonal relationships like people with BPD do. (I hope I don’t sound like I’m “down selling” bipolar disorder or anything, truthfully I’m just not knowledgeable enough to feel comfortable speaking on it but I do know that these are some of the differences between the two and that BPD and bipolar disorder are often misdiagnosed as each other.)

Anyways y’all, BPD is a really serious disorder. Most of the time we’re people that are considered high functioning because it’s a disorder that affects emotions and relationships and sometimes that only seemingly affects our personal and social lives and not our professional or academic lives.

We’re typecast as dramatic and manipulative and attention seekers. I’d personally argue that we aren’t (for the most part) but our behavior can get really poor and we can feel desperate and enslaved by our emotions. We can’t really help it but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold us accountable if we act horribly. The point of this is just that if you want to write about this disorder or cast a character with it, try to understand beyond what you’ve seen or heard portrayed by people who don’t have to live with it.

BPD is usually treated with cognitive behavioral therapy but it’s not at all uncommon to have medication as treatment of some of your symptoms or to be hospitalized for it. Personally I used to be on antipsychotics to help stabilize my moods and it was good but not a cure-all, of course. There is no cure for BPD.

This post is also known as: stop writing Kent Parson as an angsty piece of shit 2k18. I might accept BPD!Parse fics if he’s super excited and manic and forms intense bonds with people and doesn’t want to let them go but also BPD sucks so don’t romanticize it too much but also hello I love Kent Parson

[burnslaura]

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[psychotherapyconsultants]

Is It Anxiety or OCD?

Anxiety can mean many different things to many different people. When handled in the correct way, a little bit of anxiety is usually helpful. It warns us to be careful if we sense danger. It can remind us of consequences we once had to live with. By maintaining some anxiety around these issues, we are able to avoid unwanted outcomes.

Obsessive compulsive disorder stems from a healthy type of anxiety and morphs into something all-consuming. OCD is a psychiatric disorder that involves repeated and unwanted intrusive thoughts, feelings, ideas, and behaviors that must be done over and over again. While checking to make sure the stove has been turned off is an important task for safety, repeatedly checking it several times before any other task can be accomplished, is not.

People with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) also worry to extreme. They may become preoccupied with dread and a feeling of impending doom when thinking about the future. Unlike people with OCD, they do not typically engage in ritualistic behavior to deal with their fears.

Another difference between OCD and GAD lies in the worries themselves. GAD usually involves worries that are strongly based in real-life concerns. While the worries may be extreme, the topics a person with generalized anxiety festers over, are appropriate. These topics concern issues such as: health, personal relationships, finances, work, etc.  

OCD worries can involve the prevention of something catastrophic from happening. For instance, a common popular concern from OCD patients includes chronic hand-washing. Some people may feel they must wash their hands a certain number of times in order to prevent something from happening.   Six Common Categories of Compulsions Include:

Contamination. A person may become preoccupied with body fluids, germs, or environmental contaminants.

Losing Control. Anxiety about harming oneself or others is a popular concern as well as violent images in one’s own mind or blurting out obscenities.

Unwanted Sexual Thoughts. Forbidden sexual thoughts or impulses may become intrusive.  

Religious Obsessions. Offending God or excessive concern about right vs. wrong can also be obsessive.

Harm. Harm thoughts include the fear of being responsible for something terrible happening such as, a fire or burglary.

Perfectionism. This can manifest in the concern of exactness or the fear of losing something.

The Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale check list can be found here.  Common symptoms of GAD includes:

Frequent panic attacks. This may include feeling faint, sweaty palms, racing heart rate, AND feeling dizzy when very afraid or fearful.

Persistent worry. Whether the worries are about small things or big events, if they are intrusive and unrelenting, there may be a problem.

Inability to relax. If it is hard to calm down while on vacation or away from the worry, this can have lasting effects physically as well as psychologically.

Difficulty concentrating. Can you read a chapter in a book without worrying?

Extreme difficulty handling uncertainty.

If you suspect you may have GAD or OCD, cognitive behavioral therapy is the gold standard for treatment. There are also many helpful medications that work best when in congruence with therapy.

To receive the best treatment, find a therapist as soon as possible. The tendency to analyze symptoms and “think your way out” of a psychiatric disorder may only make things worse. Once you have found a doctor suitable to your liking, be sure to describe all of your symptoms. Even if you feel they are embarrassing, each worry has a reason. When a patient understands that resisting all discomfort will prolong treatment, the therapy may work much more effectively with less time spent on each problem.

If a doctor is not working or results are not made within six months, consider switching doctors until you find someone that does. Not all doctors work for every patient. Persistence in seeking help is key.

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2017/07/23/is-it-anxiety-or-ocd/