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An irritated thread (that no one requested) about the misrepresentation of mental illness in Legacies:
Lizzie is the only character whose mental illness is fully integrated into her personality, and that’s because it’s caricatured/treated like it IS her personality (i.e., they are portraying a personality disorder and calling it bipolar disorder for absolutely no reason)
On Raf’s psych assessment, his clinical diagnosis was a “possible personality disorder”. The assessment supports this by claiming that he has “two identities fighting for control”. If that were true it would be a dissociative disorder, not a personality disorder.
But Raf’s symptoms don't reflect a personality disorder OR a dissociative disorder. His wolf is triggered as a fight response when he believes he's in danger, which is way more like classical PTSD. (His psych assessment says nothing about PTSD)
Some diagnoses on the psych assessments are completely made up. Hope is clinically diagnosed with “daddy issues”. No therapist has ever written “daddy issues” as a clinical diagnosis. Landon is diagnosed with “path of least resistance”.
Some characters are labelled with a disorder but are never shown to struggle with it – for example, MG is labelled with ADHD but he never shows symptoms/symptoms don't negatively impact his life. This trivializes/minimizes the disorder.
Mental health symptoms are treated as plot devices - selectively turned on when convenient for the writers. Hope has CPTSD from abandonment trauma, but they put it on the back burner most of the time instead of considering how that colors her reaction to relationship issues
Healing seems to be treated like it is simple – ever since Hope “let herself cry” in the Mystic Falls episode, she hasn’t had a flashback even with abandonment triggers (Jandon, all of Malivore). The writers act like crying that one time cured her, and it ain't that easy.
In summary, someone get this show a psych consultant bc throwing these terms around when you have such a large audience is not just irresponsible, it has the potential to do damage
