The Do's and Don'ts of Writing a Story

HOW TO: Bad mental illness tropes

The big list of bad mental illness and neuro-divergence tropes:

 - Surreal/magical realism/horror stories where it was all in the imagination of a mentally ill person instead.

 - Villains with scary/stigmatised mental illness, especially to explain their 'evil' or to make them scarier.

 - Psychosis causing people to murder others.

 - Really equating mental illness with violence at all. 

 - A character being 'crazy'. Not schizophrenic, not traumatised, just ambiguously 'crazy'.  

 - Neurodivergent qualities (stimming, echolalia, and so on) being used to code a character as off-putting. How often have you seen a character rocking or talking to themselves shown in an attempt to make you scared of them? 

 - Therapists being cold, unfeeling, clinical in their treatment of patients. that's just called a bad therapist. you can have a bad therapist character, but a therapist treating you like a laboratory animal isn't normal. 

 - Therapists not seeming to have or follow ethics at all.

 - Therapists being unhelpful because the protagonist is not actually mentally ill and there's something fantastical or supernatural going on. 

 - The supernatural is misdiagnosed as mentally ill (not bad necessarily but overused).

 - Characters always hating and resenting being in therapy (yes, you can have a character who hates therapy but therapy does help people and many people look forward to their appointments a lot). 

 - Weird, Freudian psychoanalysts and Rorschach ink blots being all that therapy is. Therapists analysing dreams and deducing deeply buried childhood traumas from random habits a character has.

 - OCD as a character quirk or as comedy.

 - OCD just meaning neat freak.

 - Any mental illness as a character quirk or as comedy.

 - Mental illness always being extremely severe and life altering instead of being something that people can learn to live/cope with. For example depressed people are perfectly fine if they aren't actively suicidal. 

 - 'Tough love' approach to panic attacks or severe phobias. Even worse: this actually working. 

 - A character recovering from mental illness because another character tells them to get over themselves/yells at them/shows them how stupid they are. 

 - PTSD where there are no other symptoms besides flashbacks and nightmares. 

 - Trauma being used to make a character edgy and not really being honestly handled.

 - Trauma being used to excuse all evil acts a character does.

 - Characters having to forgive their abusers as part of their character growth.

 - Someone getting triggered for comedy.

 - Panic attacks being used for comedy.

 - ^ Either of these things being supposedly comedic because they happen to male characters and are thus emasculating. Men have trauma. Men have anxiety disorder. They just do. 

 - Mental illness in men being emasculating ever, at all.

 - Mental illness being caused by some kind of trauma or past tragedy.

 - There's a big reveal of what happened to a character and that precipitates their recovery. recovery is more complex than that. 

 - a character being on any kind of medication for mental illness symptoms. For example, a character going on anxiety meds because they're excessively uptight. 

 - A character being for some reason being super opposed to being on meds. 

 - Characters entirely recovering from their mental illnesses as part of their character arc. recovery is a complex process and it's almost never that smooth. You can show recovery of course but this is oversimplified. 

 - Characters recovering from their mental illness in the same way they might overcome a character flaw. 

 - Mental illness cured by getting with the right partner. a supportive partner can help, but the mental illness is still going to be there. 

 - Specifically trauma being cured by romantic relationships. There's a kernel of truth to this in that social relationships aid in healing trauma, but being loved by the right person isn't just going to make trauma disappear.

 - Autistic kid who is a genius asshole; really the whole trope of 'super smart and eccentric but no empathy or any attempt to show regard for others.'

 - Autistic character who has one super specific savant skill, i mean that happens but not to most.

 - The autistic younger sibling or endearing kid that does nothing in the story.

 - Autistics who are there for inspiration porn.

 - Autism being portrayed just as a person having the mind of a child forever. Autistics being super innocent about sexual things or unintentionally doing something sexually inappropriate.

 - That hyperactive little boy in the background character whose ADHD diagnosis is clearly just his mom making terrible excuses for his behaviour. 

 - Any kind of anti-psychiatry sentiment from people who know nothing about it. Your opinions about how antidepressants are overprescribed are irrelevant as they can possibly be if you neither have a mental illness nor have studied it outside of gen-ed psych class. Don't slip shit like that into fiction. 

 - If you are not mentally ill/ND: your opinions about metal illness or neuro-divergence, how people should cope with it, what it reveals about society and the world, or what secret superpower it confers, put into the mouth of a mentally ill or ND character. Basically don't use your characters as mouthpieces for your opinions or insights about mental illness if you don't belong to the groups you're writing about. 

 - Insane asylums as setting for horror because mentally ill people scary. 

 - Tortured artist, the idea that having a mental illness, specifically an unmedicated mental illness, gives you this deep artistic insight others don't have. 

 - Aesthetic depression. Depression being this deep, poetic darkness.

 - Suicide being poetic and romantic.

 - Depression gets better when your lie does, automatically.

 - Disabled people being assumed unable to survive in a post apocalyptic setting. 

 - Gendering of mental illness: anorexia only happens to teenage girls, PTSD is for men who have served in the military. 

 - Characters dropping the 'mentally ill' label as part of character growth.

 - ND characters acting more like everyone else as part of their character growth.

 - Aesthetic eating disorders.

 - Normalising disordered eating, unhealthy dieting. Disillusioned middle aged women characters or teenaged girls who keep staring themselves or are taking dangerous detoxes as a throwaway quirk