DISCUSSION: Writing Mentally Ill Characters

[Ereshkigal]

How does your fanfic world sees "mentally ill" people? Or rather, does your fanfic world has such a comprehensive healthcare system as thorough (yet controversial) as the American one? Some of these questions should be consider before further discussing the portrayal of mentally ill character.

I'm answering this question as separate from my previous post because I considered how much I should put into it.

Pretty much, there are two systems in just about every society: The one that covers nearly everybody, and the one for Trainers.

Trainers have, in effect, their own society that is separate from the rest of the world, and they have a strong distrust of external systems of authority. In large part, they're outsiders; they operate around, but not within, the societies that house them.

And, there are a number of other problems:

1. Most Trainers don't even have a high school education; they were sent out on their Journeys at 11.
2. Trainers face greater danger on the daily basis than the average civilian, including sometimes having had to fight wars alongside trained military. The average person doesn't have to fight the nightmares a Gengar can unleash, for example.
3. Things have been getting more dangerous. Mewtwo slaughtered hundreds of people before finally leaving Kanto, there was the Plasma War that devastated Unova, Team Flare tried to commit genocide on their own nation... Trainers have been facing some increasingly-heavy stuff in the past three decades.
4. Until very recently, the typical Journey involved spending long periods of time alone, or with just another person, in the wilderness. Sometimes, it could effectively be years with a Trainer only making contact with civilization for medical treatment and supplies.
5. Trainers without a family history of catching pokemon often come from families that are not in the best of shape to begin with, or had problems that prevented them from integrating into normal society.

You see the results of this with the characters. Red is mute because of trauma he suffered, Shirona has untreatable PTSD-induced borderline personality disorder, no one knows how to classify or treat what Kotone is dealing with...

On the other hand, the separate nature of Trainers produces a different stable mindset than the average civilian faces; even without mental illnesses, Trainers think differently than the average civilian because their lives demand different viewpoints. For example, they usually tend to respond more calmly to dangerous situations and disasters. The wilderness survival mindset many Trainers are raised with leads them to having more stable relationships just due to the inherent dangers of drama in the wild; this translates even to marriage, where they tend to have a much lower divorce rate and much higher fidelity rate than the population around them. Discrimination also is along different lines; "African American" and "lesbian" matter massively less than "will your pokemon try to kill me" and "do you have a skill that will aid survival, or are you at least willing to learn such a skill" as far as discrimination.

Anyway, while they do have comprehensive mental health systems (depending on the nation), those systems generally don't apply to Trainers. Trainers require a lot of specialized care as a result of the dangers they face, but due to their longstanding separation from general society very little is known about the mental health problems they face or how to treat even the ones that can be identified. And the Trainers, not trusting psychiatric science due to its rather horrific history and their lack of education about where it stands now, are not cooperating with efforts to find out.