Creating a Fictional Mental Illness

Depending on your story, you may find yourself needing to create a fictional mental illness. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as simply slapping a new label on a real one, and doing that may make you seem more ignorant to your readers. Hence, creating your own.

When it comes to making a fictional mental illness, there are a few key questions that you should ask yourself.

What is it?

This is where you want to determine the most important or universal aspects of it and make a basic definition for future reference. This is pretty much a simple overview of what you have in mind.

What are the risk factors for it?

Typically, if you do your research there are a couple of risk factors you will commonly come across. The most important ones are a) genetics, meaning that if you have relatives with mental illness you're more likely to it, too. And b) circumstances, which means that the right situations have to happen in order for the genes to kick into action.

In a sci-fi world you could definitely do more extensive research and broaden upon this. In a fantasy setting, there could be other factors as well, like magic. It all depends on your genre and where exactly you want to go with it.

What are the symptoms?

Here you probably want to research real mental illnesses similar to your fictional one. There are a large amount of them out there besides anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia. It's a good idea to make sure that you consider your plot as you plan this, though, because you don't want to accidentally have to rework everything planned after chapter 5. It's up to you to make it believable.

Is there a cure?

Real mental illnesses don't have a true "cure," but if your scientists have figured out a way to fix it in future, or if it only requires the removal of a dark magic spell, then go for it!

How is it diagnosed and treated?

Usually if you suspect that you have mental illness, you can just go to your general practitioner and they can screen you before referring you to a mental health professional. However, not all characters will have access to that. If they do, then you can use information on the mental health system as is. If they don't, then you might not need to answer this question, but you should still consider it, just in case.

Different illnesses are treated different ways, so again, researching treatments for what your fictional illness is based off of can give you a pretty good idea of what your character would need.

Does it get better with age?

Yet another question that depends on what your basing it off of. In short, some people learn to cope with it, and others don't. It can really go either way. This is yet another area in which research is handy.

If you look at websites specializing in mental health, and the illnesses you're basing your fictional one off of, you should peek at the FAQ section. Questions that people have asked again and again are a great way to help you establish the facts, myths, and biases that surround your mental illness.