Personality Disorders You Can Inflict On Your Characters: Part One
Personality disorders are perfect for villains, but they can also be useful for protagonists if they are written right.
Characters cannot be bland. Even if they are good people, they must still have quirks, problems that they’ve caused, more issues than Vogue, and traits that are going to make life difficult for them. These can be either personality traits, or personality disorders.
When you are creating characters with which to populate your novels, the traits you give them will affect or even create circumstances, misunderstandings, and drama that will drive your character’s journey through the plot. Not only will your character have to deal with these, but he or she will need to change throughout the plot for good or bad as well.
Does This Only Apply To Main Characters?
Absolutely not! Every character should be fully fleshed out in the author’s mind. Like research, the more you know, the more convincing your world-building and character-building will be. You don’t tell your reader every piece of research, but it will inform your writing. We discover your character’s personality not because you tell us he has a personality disorder, but because we see his behaviour.
Personality is unique to every individual.
A blend attitudes, thoughts and behaviours, and how these are revealed in interactions with others and with the world in general, is personality. It’s formed by your genes and the environment in which you grow up. While you have no control over your genes, you can unlearn bad thought patterns and behaviours and learn good new ones.
For example, just because you grow up in a family whose pride and self-importance are taken to extraordinary heights — entitled is the word that springs to mind, and in terms of fiction, probably titled as well (Lady Catherine De Bourgh springs to mind), but that doesn’t mean you have to adopt their way of thinking.
Just like Darcy in Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen, you can change your mind.
Personality Disorder is a mental health condition.
Someone with a personality disorder will likely have a distorted sense of reality in one way or another. They may have abnormal behaviours and find parts of life, work and especially relationships and social interaction hard. Some of these can be the result of severe trauma, such as war or concentration camps, or horrific childhood abuse. Counselling and medication can help.
Sometimes it’s the way that person’s brain is wired. Medication may help and the person can sometimes learn better behaviours, these may never become a natural part of their personality because the person doesn’t see their behaviour as a disorder nor the effect on other people. They can’t change their minds.
A good example is Pat Solitano from Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick.
Personality Disorders You Can Inflict On Your Characters
To be fair, there are so many personality disorders that it does make one think what is normal anyway because the entire world is, clearly, insane. (On some days, this is a truth. But that’s a discussion for another day.) While there are three over-arching groups of personality disorders — Suspicious, Emotional And Impulsive, and Anxious.
Today, we’re only going to look at one of the personality disorders that falls under the Suspicious group.
But What Is A Suspicious Personality Disorder?
With this range of personality disorders, people have a consistently dysfunctional pattern when it comes to their unusual and eccentric thoughts and behaviours. It’s a pattern that reflects suspicion or a lack of interest in others.
The (Suspicious) Paranoid Personality Disorder
There are 3 different types of Paranoid Personality Disorders: Paranoid -the mildest type, Delusional Paranoid, and Paranoid Schizophrenia. We’re easing our way into the wild, mad world of Personality Disorders today and only looking at the mildest form — Paranoid.
- A paranoid person is never at ease and is uncomfortable to be around. Their lack of trust and suspicion of others makes them believe that other people are out to use, abuse, or take advantage of them.
- They doubt others will be loyal so find it difficult to be in relationships.
- If they are in a relationship, they will never fully trust their partner. They will often suspect their partner is being unfaithful with no evidence to support this belief.
- Is reluctant to confide in others, even family and friends, in case the information is used against them.
- Their fear of being taken advantage of can escalate into becoming convinced that others are trying to harm them or other people. But as before they will have no evidence to support this belief.
- Because they believe others want to use or abuse them, they read threats and danger at innocent remarks, casual glances, or into situations as if they are personal insults or attacks, when in fact they are not.
- A lack of trust and a belief in potential harm causes the suspicion-driven person to build a bank of memory of past, real or imagined hurts as evidence. They struggle to let go. They feel safer behind the grudges they hold.
A great example of this Lieutenant Commander Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk’s 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The character of Queeg, who is a strict disciplinarian, is reminiscent of the real-life Captain Bligh of the ship The Bounty.
In The Caine Mutiny, Queeg, falls from strictness into psychopathology. His actions bring the ship and its crew close to destruction. During the resulting shipboard arrest and court-martial Queeg’s disintegrates from perfectionist into paranoia.
In the film version, Humphrey Bogart played him as blustering and secretive by turns. A hollow, driven, tyrannical, and invidious character. A man of sternness and decision with the apparent characteristics of a sane officer. But as events unfold, we discover he’s a man who never meets another person’s eyes and in whom there is a dangerous bottled-up pressure. He is unaware of the mounting hysteria within himself. It’s the stress and tension of the court martial that is his final undoing. It tips him into self-realisation. Is knowing you’re mad worse than actually being mad?
Perhaps ‘mad’ isn’t the word a psychiatrist would use, but to outsiders looking in, neither Queeg nor Bligh are what others would call completely sane.
The Take-Away
Personality disorders are perfect for villains, but they can also be useful for protagonists if they are written right. It will take a lot of research if you don’t have first-hand experience of the disorder. But that’s what makes writing such fun.
