Mental sickness and breakdown

[DiferentFromTheAI]

hi there,
I wanted to know if there was a style which could help an author describe more vividly, or realistically a mental breakdown of a character. In this case i'm trying to describe how a person believes himself to be crazy, and this comes to such a point where he starts becoming crazy. a little more detail would be that he hears someone talking to him but he thinks that its just an hallucination.
thanks

 

[Penpilot]

From my understanding, crazy people don't think they're crazy. They have their own sort of illogical logic, if that makes any sense. Maybe do some research on some of the various types of mental illness. Find the one that fits what you're looking for and then try finding some first hand accounts of what it's like, eg autobiographies or research papers, etc. There's nothing more vivid than the truth.

 

[Sinitar]

He can't actually descend further into madness, since his ideas make sense to him. However, if you want to point out his worsening condition, a good idea is to make him pursue his goals with renewed zeal. Also, integrate each element of madness carefully. If he becomes skeptical of his surroundings, then you got an inconsistency on your hands. The reason I'm saying this is because the voice he hears must be considered to come from God or something that has a logical explanation to him.

 

[TGNewman]

Another useful form to show and highlight madness, is to have said character work and interact with the sane. This way you can show the character acting from a sane POV, and see how your mad character views these people who are sane. would he consider them so in regards to his own mental health?

 

[unwittytitle]

You might want to check out Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. Ellis uses a 1st person stream-of-consciousness style that becomes quite believable in that (just like the main character) it becomes hard for the the reader to decipher what’s real. Ellis spends a lot of time in the beginning describe the “normal” day to day life and routine of the character, and then slowly begins to introduce thoughts that seem odd and out of place. Eventaully he goes all out and starts to throw in surrealist elements as well, like talking ATMs.

 

[Ankari]

hi there,
I wanted to know if there was a style which could help an author describe more vividly, or realistically a mental breakdown of a character. In this case i'm trying to describe how a person believes himself to be crazy, and this comes to such a point where he starts becoming crazy. a little more detail would be that he hears someone talking to him but he thinks that its just an hallucination.
thanks

Do you mean like Rand Al Thor in the Wheel of Time? And like someone else said, a crazy person doesn't think he is crazy. If someone is aware that something is wrong he is still sane. In your example I would think that you would want to make it more of a struggle than a mental breakdown. He may not think he is crazy but he knows something is wrong and has to investigate/overcome/deal with it. As unwittytitle pointed out a crazy person will not differentiate between a sane thought and insane thought.

 

[Ralph Fg]

Well, sometimes people CAN suspect that they have mental disorders, and the anxiety that come with it MAY indeed end up causing such disorders.

Anyway, you could try depicting the conflict between himself and other characters. Say, while other characters seem to consider him perfectly normal, he doesn't think so, and begin doing something to "heal" himself or otherwise fighting the madness... and end up doing crazy things.

 

[Caged Maiden]

Hmm.. From my personal experiences with people bordering on crazy..... I think you might want to talk to some people who would open up honestly. I used to date a guy whose dad was a paranoid schizophrenic, and man he had some stories from growing up. The dad was so afraid things would happen to his family, he used to lock them in the house, etc. But to him, he really thought stuff was going got happen. His fear was more worrisome to himself than the fact he was locking his family up. That sort of thing might be helpful, that your character could ignore his behavior because of his thoughts.

On another note, I can't tell from your description what effect you are really going for. It sort of sounds to me like you are beginning with a sane but disturbed person who suddenly starts hearing voices and want to take a reader through his mental breakdown. This I feel somewhat qualified to talk about. I have been manic-depressive for 17 years, and several times in my life I have had real breakdowns (mostly when I was young and had no coping mechanisms). I don't know what it's like for other people with similar conditions, but for me, the mania is ten times as destructive as the depression. It sounds like your character might be experiencing something similar to that. If he's a normally alright guy and then starting to think he's nuts, and eventually drives himself nuts.... well that's sort of what a manic episode is like. Manic episodes can be very destructive: self-medicating with pills or alcohol to try to feel normal again, racing heartbeat, racing thoughts, shortness of breath, shaking, self-destructive behavior like cutting, suicidal thoughts, and other dangerous behavior without thought of self-preservation. Man all those things can really flesh-out a mental breakdown.

For more about mental illness portrayed very authentically, watch girl,interrupted with Winona Ryder. It isn't the greatest story I've ever seen, but the illnesses are portrayed very accurately, and that might give you some insight if you can't find someone to talk to directly. I don't know what cuses mental illness, but I think narrowing down what he's suffering from might give you insight as to how to best handle his decline.

 

[ThinkerX]

As with 'anihow', I have a relative who is a 'borderline paranoid schizophrenic with suicidal tendencies'.

Way back when - decades ago - he was merely 'bipolar'. Not too bad, actually - mood swing type deals being the most dramatic. But...he was also in college, with a heavy classload. Literally not enough waking hours for him to do everything. So, at first during the press of exam season, but then with more regularity, he began going without sleep. He discovered he could attend classes during the day, do the work associated with those classes clear through the night, and (to his mind anyhow) still do passably well in class the next day - essentially 36+ hours without sleep. Then he graduated and got a job as an editor at a magazine - a job that involved *lots* of reading. Again, there were not enough waking hours in the day, so he kept right on skipping sleep, and kept convincing himself he was fully functional afterwards - but he wasn't convincing other people. I, along with others, started to notice he was having increasingly severe memory lapses - and not little 'slip-up' type stuff, either, but not remembering *anything* from the previous day, or how certain situations had come about, even though he'd *made* them come about. He also developed 'days of paranioa' where 'they' (usually some government agency) was always watching, always about ready to swoop in and cart him away. I, along with others, kept pointing out that his lack of sleep was likely a major contributer here; his response was 'Sleep is a waste of time'. We also told him he should cut back on the caffine (he was into the early wave of high caffine drinks big time) but he merely laughed at that - literally.

From there, matters worked their way downhill. It finally dawned on him that he was having problems of some sort, but he refused to seek professional help, let alone proper medication. Increasingly, he became the 'hermit in the back of the office' because he couldn't really keep track of things very well. His logical reasoning became more and more suspect, and he started lying more and more to cover increasingly serious lapses in his memory and flaws in his reasoning. When the tech bubble of a dozen years ago blew up...his job, and his mind sort of blew up right along with it, redulting in the first of half a dozen suicide attempts, and about as many stints in this or that psychiatric institution, ranging from a few days to several weeks.

For a long while, he detested the psychiatrists assigned to him. When institutionalized, rather than work to control his behaviour, his goal was to 'get out now', so he'd tell the people what he thought they wanted to know. So they'd cut him loose, he'd figure everything was going great again (when in the manic phase of his cycle), stop taking whatever meds he was given, and would soon be back in a world of paraniod delusions.

Ultimately, he ended up living alone in a tiny apartment, with no job or real prospect of one, venturing forth only when he absolutely had to.

A few specifics about some of his hallucinations :

'Sal' - A successful businesswoman living in Seattle. He saw her as something of a busybody. (For a long while I thought she was actually an ex GF of his, because he got in the habit of refering to her in an offhand manner - 'Sal thinks I should do this. Sal won't like that, ect'

'Mr Hyde' - A brutal angry brawler of a person. My relative 'liked' this character (which might explain a couple of early run-ins with law enforcement).

'The Leprechaun' - This one meant bad news, apparently. My relative absoletely loathed this one, but didn't talk about him much.

'Voice of God' - strictly an auditory hallucination, a voice he *had* to obey, which pretty much told him he was worthless scum and had to kill himself *now*.

 

[Caged Maiden]

Actually, sleep-depravation is very serious. In high school I used to do it, my record is 83 hours without sleep if you can believe it. Man I've had some WICKED hallucinations, and done some CRAZY things. That was about the time I started having problems though, and I guess it's when most teens start to show signs of personality disorders, so I'm not sure of the cause, but yeah not sleeping will make you nuts in a matter of days. I heard voices, I saw seriously scary things (once I watched myself age into an old woman and decay in the mirror) all because of not sleeping. It's scary shit people, go to bed! HAHA.

 

[ThinkerX]

Actually, sleep-depravation is very serious. In high school I used to do it, my record is 83 hours without sleep if you can believe it.

Two or three days - 40 to 60 hours, give or take - was the norm for my relative, after which he'd have a series of fitful naps. It got to the point where I could tell just about how long he'd gone without sleep just from talking to him about ordinary stuff for a minute or three and paying attention to memory and reasoning issues - this while on the phone, no less. It used to baffle him how I was able to deduce that.

His memory issues, though, were particularly annoying, mostly because of the transparent lies he would tell to cover the lapse. Worse, he eventually decided that pretty much everybody had similiar memory issues, which really made things difficult for a while. For a while he kept a journal of sorts (part of which he sent me for safekeeping). It was revealing for what it did not say, things like 'Nothing happened today. Nothing.' He stopped keeping the journal when even that limited record began contradicting what he thought he remembered.

 

[DiferentFromTheAI]

Hmm.. From my personal experiences with people bordering on crazy..... I think you might want to talk to some people who would open up honestly. I used to date a guy whose dad was a paranoid schizophrenic, and man he had some stories from growing up. The dad was so afraid things would happen to his family, he used to lock them in the house, etc. But to him, he really thought stuff was going got happen. His fear was more worrisome to himself than the fact he was locking his family up. That sort of thing might be helpful, that your character could ignore his behavior because of his thoughts.

On another note, I can't tell from your description what effect you are really going for. It sort of sounds to me like you are beginning with a sane but disturbed person who suddenly starts hearing voices and want to take a reader through his mental breakdown. This I feel somewhat qualified to talk about. I have been manic-depressive for 17 years, and several times in my life I have had real breakdowns (mostly when I was young and had no coping mechanisms). I don't know what it's like for other people with similar conditions, but for me, the mania is ten times as destructive as the depression. It sounds like your character might be experiencing something similar to that. If he's a normally alright guy and then starting to think he's nuts, and eventually drives himself nuts.... well that's sort of what a manic episode is like. Manic episodes can be very destructive: self-medicating with pills or alcohol to try to feel normal again, racing heartbeat, racing thoughts, shortness of breath, shaking, self-destructive behavior like cutting, suicidal thoughts, and other dangerous behavior without thought of self-preservation. Man all those things can really flesh-out a mental breakdown.

-content-

He can't actually descend further into madness, since his ideas make sense to him. However, if you want to point out his worsening condition, a good idea is to make him pursue his goals with renewed zeal. Also, integrate each element of madness carefully. If he becomes skeptical of his surroundings, then you got an inconsistency on your hands. The reason I'm saying this is because the voice he hears must be considered to come from God or something that has a logical explanation to him.

yeah i really get your point. I've included sleep deprivation and the personification of God in my very first rough-draft, im am kind of proud of it as it is the first time I wrote for the pleasure of it.

I have some doubts on how society will influence a believed-to-be crazy person. will it drive him further down? will it make him angry or even proud?

I understand the idea of understanding and making sense to one self, but knowing that it cant/wont make sense to other people. like Nietzsche, I believe the man to be a genius, because I went through a existentialist crisis myself and his thoughts complete mine. but most people dont undestand him because he develops his conclussion without a clear background to this conclusion.

I am considering the inclusion of a Medic in my story, due to the fact that I try to remodel the concept of vampirism in my story, similar to Guillermo del Toro, to explain how it changes your body. do you think it is a good idea to have him explain some psychiatric descriptions of my character?

physical effects of ansiety, yeah I can see this taking shape, ill definitely stick this to my wall

Thanks to everyone

 

[Caged Maiden]

I know it is unrelated, but I remember reading this: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And it struck me as very compelling. It's a difficult think to portray people whose thought process is different. I have always wanted to write a psychological sort of story, but I'm afraid to even begin. It is very daunting.

 

[unwittytitle]

I know it is unrelated, but I remember reading this: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And it struck me as very compelling. It's a difficult think to portray people whose thought process is different. I have always wanted to write a psychological sort of story, but I'm afraid to even begin. It is very daunting.

Excellent book. Had to read it for a course of alterity , and the author really does an amazing job getting inside the characte’rs head and showing how a young boy with autism might think.

 

[DiferentFromTheAI]

Yeah I believe I have read it, I think its called "Who Killed the Dog", I have no idea if it really really changes in the Spanish translation. I have the sudden urge to finish it now haha.