I’m surprised no-one’s brought up Detective Bobby Goran yet. Unless we’re having an anti-law and order bent 
My WAG is that he’s autistic in some fashion, possibly a shade around Asperger’s. Or he’s just a complete and utter sociopath 
Shel Silversteins The Giving Tree is a story about a co-dependant martyr syndrome tree and her greedy co-dependant son. I loathe this story greatly.
Master Shake from “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” appears to be the textbook definition of a sociopath.
::crickets::
Oh, er…and Batman? The reason he doesn’t kill isn’t because of morality or respect for the law…it’s because he’s defined his whole identity and existence on fighting evil. Killing villains could put all that at risk. In short, subconsciously, he doesn’t want to win, he just wants to keep fighting.
In the same vein, I submit that the reason he’s never found his parents’ killer, despite all his skills, is that part of him doesn’t want to. It’s his ultimate failsafe—there’ll always be his original motivator, the “one who got away.” The one thing, if nothing else, that he can use to keep himself going.
There. How 'bout THEM apples?
I’m fairly certain that Oedipus guy has some sort of complex.
How would you diagnose Mycroft Holmes? Sherlock painted him as physically lazy, but the circumscribed life he led, home and his club (where he didn’t talk to anyone), seems indicative of some kind of disorder.
What about Randall Patrick McMurphy?
That Alien critter is rather antisocial. “Does not play well with others” indeed!
Got to hand it to the Victorians, they really relished their pathology.
Lucy Snowe from C Bronte’s Villette is a depressive (she calls it Hypochondria) and the way in which she tends to externalise certain abstracts suggest that there is something of the paranoid schizophrenic about here. The hero, Paul Emanuel, is pretty much a masochist, as is Jane Eyre.
Lots of Dickens’ characters seem to be depressive – especially Pip (who also has a massively extended guilt complex), and Lizzie Hexam from Our Mutual Friend. I’m not quite sure what’s wrong with Mr Dick and his obsession with Charles I’s head – possibly he is slightly retarded, or it’s Asperger’s again. Many of Hardy’s characters were depressed too, such as Tess D’Urberville or the guy in Return of the Native. Mariana in the Moated Grange, from the poem by Tennyson, may suffer from agoraphobia. Lizzie and Laura from Rossetti’s Goblin Market are probably nymphomaniacs. The narrator of Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ is almost certainly a sociopath.
How about Shakespeare?
Along the same lines – Nero Wolfe seemed to have a bit of agoraphobia.
In the film Spanglish, was it ever mentioned what mental illness Tea Leoni’s character had? I thought she might be bipolar. Her family was in deep denial and kind of swept her illness under the rug.
Anybody see The Upside of Anger ? Joan Allen’s character was in a deep depression due to her husband’s disappearance.
Completely sane. Just a fun-lovin’ guy.
That Nurse Ratched, on the other hand…phew! She had problems!
Stranger
Remember the Tim Burton movie entitled Beetlejuice, and the late 80s cartoon of the same name? Well, I visit the still updated fanpages about the series. One of the hosts has this to say:
YAY!
Threadspotting!
Thank you Twickster!
:d
And what would you call an inability to properly communicate one’s feelings with the appropriate use of emoticons?
Flat screen affect.
I’d also tag Holmes as Manic-Depressive. When he was on a case, he was on a manic high and could go for days without eating or sleeping. When not on a case, he went right into a depressed low, and crashed hard.
Yeah, but a true Manic-Depressive will have the mood swings regardless of external stimulus, so “manic while busy, depressed while not” doesn’t really match the textbook symptomology of this.
I recently read Catcher in the Rye (I’m going through all the ‘classics’ I should have read years ago and reading them now) and that kid is a huge bundle of ADD. I kept hoping someone would pop up and feed him some freaking Prozac already.
Quite true. Then again, speaking as someone who has depression, I can tell you that depression can sometimes be triggered by external stimuli. So the fact that Holmes is normally manic, yet can fall into depression because of boredom, makes sense to me.