The Big List of Bad Mental Illness and Neurodivergence Tropes
Surreal/magical realism/horror stories where it was all in the imagination of a mentally ill person in the end.
Villains with scary/stigmatized 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 traumatized, just ambiguously “crazy.”
Neurodivergent qualities (stimming, echolalia, and so on) being used to code a character as offputting. 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 misdiagnosed as mental illness (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 psychoanalysis and Rorschach ink blots being all that therapy is. Therapists analyzing 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. (Example: the scene in Endgame where Rocket smacks Thor in the face.) 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 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...ever.
^Either of these things being supposedly comedic because they happen to a male character and are thus emasculating. Men have trauma. Men have anxiety disorders. They just do.
Mental illness in men being emasculating ever, at all.
Mental illness always 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 hinting at a character flaw. (For example, a character going on anxiety meds because the author wants to denote that they’re excessively uptight. I can’t remember specifically where I read this but I’m so sure I have.)
Characters for some reason being super opposed to being on meds.
Characters entirely recovering from their mental illness 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 relationship. 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 character 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 it’s not most of us)
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 background character whose ADHD diagnosis is clearly just his mom making excuses for his terrible behavior.
Any kind of anti-psychiatry sentiment from people who know nothing about it. Your opinions about how antidepressants are overprescribed are as irrelevant as they can possibly be if you neither have a mental illness nor have ever studied it outside of a gen-ed psych class. Don’t slip shit like that into fiction.
If you are not mentally ill/ND: Your opinions about mental illness or neurodivergence, how people should cope with it, what it reveals about society or 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 group(s) you’re writing about.
Insane asylums as settings for horror because mentally ill people scarey.
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 life 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 their character growth.
ND characters acting more like everyone else as part of their character growth.
Aesthetic Eating Disorders.
Normalizing disordered eating, unhealthy dieting. Disillusioned middle aged woman characters or teenage girls who keep starving themselves and taking dangerous detoxes as a throwaway quirk.
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