I remember you doing a good job of writing an autistic character in Prelude and Fugue (is this a world record for very late feedback?).
I read a discussion on LJ once where someone who seemed to have a psychiatric background was assessing the verisimilitude of different mad characters on BtVS and AtS. I think they decided that Wesley could reasonably be diagnosed as suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome but Dru’s madness owed more to literary portrayals of insanity like Ophelia. I’m not so sure that such portrayals should be completely dismissed. They may not give an accurate picture of any specific syndrome but could yet contain insights into how it feels to be mad that we analytical types would overlook. Still I’m not a psychologist and God knows pretty much any treatment of genetics in literature that I’ve ever read has been a fingernails scraping on blackboard experience for me.
About Joss and the crazy: I think you’re right about the fascination with sight-power-responsibility-insanity. Which is not so much about madness per se. I could also see that as a writer who’s main interest (he says) is in how people work emotionally, he might also want to write about how they don’t work. As a counterpoint. Alternatively there may be a personal interest. The idea that there’s a connection between various forms of insanity and creativity has been around for a long time. Is seeing stories/being possessed by them, like seeing things/being possessed at some level? Joss does seem to have a particular facility with dream sequences and mad scenes.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2005-03-28 10:59 pm (UTC)I read a discussion on LJ once where someone who seemed to have a psychiatric background was assessing the verisimilitude of different mad characters on BtVS and AtS. I think they decided that Wesley could reasonably be diagnosed as suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome but Dru’s madness owed more to literary portrayals of insanity like Ophelia. I’m not so sure that such portrayals should be completely dismissed. They may not give an accurate picture of any specific syndrome but could yet contain insights into how it feels to be mad that we analytical types would overlook. Still I’m not a psychologist and God knows pretty much any treatment of genetics in literature that I’ve ever read has been a fingernails scraping on blackboard experience for me.
About Joss and the crazy: I think you’re right about the fascination with sight-power-responsibility-insanity. Which is not so much about madness per se. I could also see that as a writer who’s main interest (he says) is in how people work emotionally, he might also want to write about how they don’t work. As a counterpoint. Alternatively there may be a personal interest. The idea that there’s a connection between various forms of insanity and creativity has been around for a long time. Is seeing stories/being possessed by them, like seeing things/being possessed at some level? Joss does seem to have a particular facility with dream sequences and mad scenes.