How To Make A Compelling Character With Depression [Mindset Guide]

HOW TO WRITE COMPELLING CHARACTER WITH DEPRESSION

I should start this off by saying all of this is my own subjective opinion. There is no one way to write and you have to figure out what bits and pieces of this advice will be worthwhile to you and your style of writing. I can only speak on what has worked with me as this is something I have experience with.

Respect The Writing

This goes for any mental state, but respect the material you are writing. Don't go writing a depressive character just to get sympathy, feel good about RPing an edgy character or to fulfill some sick fantasy about what depression is or isn't. You need to go in with a matured state of mind and the intention of creating a whole person. Not just focusing on the depression itself, but the character and person behind it. Otherwise, it will be rubbish in my opinion.

Who Are They?

If you are going to write a compelling character with depression, you have to understand who they are outside of it. No one wants to read about some character who's every waking thought is filled with a downpour of negative dialogue. That isn't engaging writing and it doesn't feel real.

Just think about it for a moment: even if you have depression in real life, are you HONESTLY sitting around wanting to slit your wrist every passing moment? No. No you aren't. I sincerely believe you are not. You have moments where you laugh, you have things that comfort you, you have things that irritate you, you have people you care for and things that make you human.

Thus, your job as a writer is to convey that same sense of wholeness within your character in terms of crafting a believable personality and executing it in a thread when the time comes.

History

There is usually a reason or chain of events that make a person depressed. It doesn't just come out of the blue one day and you suddenly feel like death. Even if it is chemical or brain injury related, there is an event that triggered it and caused that mindset to take over your characters point of view. So, your job as a writer is to create various events in your characters past that otherwise helps support the positive and negative traits that your character has.

So, again: think about your own life. What are events that made you the way you are? If you are deathly afraid of water, then chances are you had some type of traumatic event in your past that nearly caused you to drown which instilled that fear. Or, perhaps, maybe you watched someone else drown and die. Either way, it goes, something happened in your past that gave you that fear. The same must be done to otherwise give a sense of investment with your characters depression.

Were they isolated as a kid? Did they suffer some kind of abuse? Perhaps they underwent a nasty war of some kind? Or maybe they just realized how rigged the world is? There has to be something rooted i n their past that gave them this impression of what life is.

If you really want to nail it in, make sure they had some type of goal in the past, but somehow failed to realize it either one time or multiple times. Make sure it was a high goal as well and connect it into something with their early development.

I.E. You could potentially have a character join up with the Shadow Fall army to try and give their family a better life, but that same army could have found that characters army to be traitors and forced your character to kill them. The reason why this event would happen is that your character could be too fearful to give up his own life for his family.

Thus, this would put them in a deep depression for having their whole purpose of joining Shadow Fall be moot and losing everyone they cared for. This guilt would then carry on for the rest of their life and give them a hard depression.

How They Deal With It

Ok. So we know who your characters is and what made them this way: so how do they deal with it? Do they keep it to themselves, or do they act in ways that seem off? Some people prefer to recluse when they feel depressed, while others just try to keep it inside. Based on the type of person your character is, you can do a lot. However, I'll give you a bullet list of things you can do

- They can try to ignore the depressive thoughts that come in, only to have it all crashing down depending on the type of character they meet and the plot/event they are a part of it

- They can cope with having some type of addiction to a substance

- Maybe they cope by doing goodwill onto others in order to forget about their own sorrows

- Perhaps they commit themselves to a significant other in a dependent relationship to fill the void depression leaves

- Maybe they try and turn to religion to pray away the depression and negative thoughts they have

- The character could also outright hate themselves and find ways to sabotage to otherwise "punish" themselves for feeling that way

You see where I'm going with this, correct? Characters can have good or bad coping mechanism with how they deal with their depression. That's the overall message to take away from this passage.

Overcome

While many people like to fetishize how tormented their character is, what makes a depressed character truly golden is how they try to react to the adversity they feel and are undergoing. Even if they end up failing, most people feel more compelled by characters who try as opposed to those who don't.

As, with Saiko, she is a heavily depressed character of mine to the point where her embodiment of her powers is related to depression. However, she still tries her best to make a life for herself as she doesn't want to remain depressed. So she struggles and tries to change herself, despite how her mind tells her otherwise and the track record of her history into what made her the woman she is today.

You have to have some type of struggle for your character to go through in order for anyone or yourself to find value in them. You can't just play the tormented character and have nothing of substance to back them up. No one in real life wants to be depressed forever, so show how your character may try and fail or succeed at beating their depression.

Other Effects Of Depression

These are just different types of effects your character may feel from their depression that you can add into their profile or post.

- Fatigue/exhaustion
- Excessive hunger
- Lack of energy
- Insomnia
- A sense of restlessness
- Impaired concentration, indecisiveness
- Feelings of worthlessness or guilt almost every day
- Loss of appetite
- Slowness in activity
- Agitation
- Thoughts of suicide [not necessarily acting on them]
- Random physical pains
- Decreased interest in sex
- Increased aches and pains
- Oversleeping

Other Notes

If you know someone with depression, you should reach out to them, interview them and ask questions about what it was like for them in order to gauge a better idea of how this illness works. Don't be afraid to also look up people on youtube if you feel too shy to ask people directly. Just look up, research and access what it is like for other people and try to convey that whole person in your writing.