† everything i hate about creepypasta †

do clinical diagnoses have a place of importance in horror? (spoiler: no)

I think I've tackled the perpetuation of stigma against mental illness (whether it be in the form of fetishization, glorification, or demonization) within the Creepypasta fandom before, but each time I felt I'd just done so improperly in one way or another, so each of these chapters were relatively shortlived. 

And I have touched grass for long enough now to realize that no amount of trying to educate people of what these diagnoses actually mean is going to solve this issue, especially not when still learning the exact facts yourself. But even if I were a professional, and I had all my facts right, people would still misconstrue my words. The average person is still grappling with basic psych terms like "gaslighting" or "hypervigilance" - they will never be able to understand the abstractness of psychotic delusion or the identity disturbance of dissociative identity disorder that I do as a person who lived through these symptoms. They will not even understand bits of them. This is no offense to my reader - I know that enough of those who actually follow me have gone to psych ward themselves or enjoy reading textbooks on psychology in their free time, but this is not true for the average person. 

And though the Creepypasta community is only a very small portion of the entire world population, this one phenomenon of persistent ableism still gets under my skin to this day. Maybe it's because my mental illness is so impactful on my everyday life, and maybe it's just because it's a symptom of discrimination and the way people like me are socially ostracized just for being sick.

But rather than sitting down and explain how to do it right, I am going to say this: diagnoses of mental illness are not relevant in the context of a horror story. They are not a good tool for character creation. If you want to create a freak who grows extremely obsessive with people, and then not, and then again, that's great. If you want a character with extreme moodswings that's fine. They experience any form of hallucination or delusion? Sure - so long it's necessary for the story at hand. Your character is an apathetic coldblooded killer? Wonderful. But by seeking out a mental disorder to be the reason as to why your character is a murderer you are going to do harm. It doesn't even matter which mental disorder you pick. Even the literal clinical "psychopathy" (antisocial personality disorder) may be best not to touch at all - and I'm not even saying this to protect those with a diagnosis of this disorder, but simply because unless the story takes place in a psychiatric setting, it likely adds nothing to the narrative whatsoever.

It's good to instead write the character just however they need to behave. At times, this means they will exhibit textbook symptoms of a certain disorder. Sometimes, they just end up being weird. Either way, it's more useful to try to create a character and their personality just as it must be, rather than to try to use diagnoses as guidelines. A diagnosis is coined based on the behavior of real people and provides little to no explanation as to why said real people exhibit this behavior. It's not a way of categorizing archetypes or general personalities.

I think that when horror becomes an element of a character's life, the depiction of mental illness becomes close to unavoidable, especially once we start dealing with things such as murder and serial killers. Serial killing isn't functional or healthy behavior, meaning that no matter what, a realistically written serial killer is always going to have textbook ASPD (antisocial personality disorder). It's not helpful to use the diagnosis to shape this killer, though. It's helpful to analyze how real murderers behave, yes, or to study the general archetype you want to bring to life - but to look at it from a medical angle (for that's what clinical psychology is) isn't a necessity. 

These clinical diagnoses are for people in treatment. They were coined to help people. They're not for writers - and unless you are writing about a clinical setting, it's just so pointless to figure out what the exact diagnoses they would have are. It's a way of categorizing behavior, and it's incredibly fun to learn about, but it's not a good tool for writing. I have found that general empathy and imagination are more helpful when figuring out characters that behave abnormally or oddly in any way - you're better off without the clinical terms.