Lately I’ve been watching a lot of Dr. Alok Kanojia’s YouTube channel, or as he is better known online, Dr. K. He’s a mental health professional who makes videos covering topics in psychology, from self help methods to deep dives into mental disorders. I have this weird fascination with the disorders he covers because they generate a lot of conflict both internally and externally, and I’m always on the lookout for conflict to generate ideas for my stories. The symptoms of those disorders often give me a way to introduce strife between or within characters, and the nice thing about understanding the disorder beforehand is that I don’t get stuck trying to find a way out. There’s a huge medical field with millions of professionals like Dr. K all dedicated to treating those disorders which makes it easy for me introduce problems that have largely already been solved. If I write a story where the main conflict is a character’s depression, then there are solutions I can introduce that help the character move to a better place when I want to resolve the story. Or I can introduce problems that are particularly nasty for someone with depression, heightening the stakes. Its a useful tool to have in the box, and many writers recognize the story potential of mental disorders. Today I want to go over the most common disorder I see in media, and maybe tomorrow I’ll do another one of my favorites if it goes well.
Many of my villains show symptoms of antisocial personality disorder, and I’m sure that’s true of a lot of villains whether the author does it intentionally or not, seeing as everybody has seen or heard of at least one psycho killer movie.
Or maybe more than one …
I found that picture from a quiz game site by the way. I’m not sure all of those really count. Can It really be classified as a serial killer? It’s not even human right?
Anyway, while killers may be interesting to cover, I think narrowing the field down to just murderers limits the thematic potential of antisocial personality disorder. The big reason why I think that is, is because it doesn’t necessarily involve killing anybody. Here’s the mayo clinic’s definition:
Not everybody with these issues goes around murdering people for no good reason. Some of them would rather write stories about demented AI torturing people instead.
I’m just kidding of course. Though I do wonder if it would even be possible to come up with this story if you didn’t hate everyone around you. Harlan Ellison is certainly not the only ‘normal’ person I’ve ever suspected to have ASPD, but he is the only one that wrote a story that makes shivers go down my spine.
There are plenty of real life examples of functioning people with ASPD, and those are the most interesting to me because they often end up very successful people. For example, I’m pretty sure you’d have to qualify as a sociopath to lie about your whole career and ruin seven years of competition in the sport you chose to do professionally, like Lance Armstrong did. Or how about the company that thought it would be a grand idea to aggressively market heroin in pill form to a wide user base, leading to a massive opioid epidemic. And I can’t forget about the cult leaders across the world either, many of whom get away with blatant lies every single day, defrauding millions of people. Here’s my personal favorite.
There’s a special on Netflix about every single one of the people mentioned above, and we’ve all seen the constant serial killer media, so there’s no doubt this disorder sells the most content. I often wonder why people (including myself) like to see the darkest side of humanity on display like this, rather than some other mental disorder. Somehow, I suspect a large part of it is just to feel better about ourselves, which is kind of messed up in its own way when you think about it. Not judging, just being realistic. I may not do any volunteer work to help others, but hey, at least I’ve never eaten anybody!
Thank you for reading,
Benjamin Hawley
Dangerous Day Job 