Hurt/comfort bingo

[osprey_archer]

hc_bingo is open again! I'm so tempted to sign up; it's always been my favorite bingo, and it's also been a while since I wrote any fanfic, so maybe it would get me going again...

But I've also been thinking that I need to focus on my own original writing, and hurt/comfort bingo is such a tempting distraction, perhaps I should resist it's siren song.

On the other hand, I have an almost polished first draft of Sage, and once I've finished that I really ought to take a brief break before jumping into another big project. (My current plan for my next novella - possibly novel? I feel like this one could grow alarmingly - is The Depressed Civil War Nurse and the Doctor with the Permanent Limp from His War Wounds Find Love Even Though They Believed Their Infirmities Made That Impossible. It will have a better title once I've actually written it.)

And what is better for a brief break than writing a short story about Stockholm syndrome or survivor's guilt or scars?

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I love that plot forever.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Do you happen to know any good books about the history of psychiatry in America in the mid to late nineteenth century? I'm not sure how much will make it into the story, but it's always good to have background.

There maaaay be a doctor character who is all "Gosh, isn't it sad that it's 1868 and we know almost nothing about mental health problems! IF ONLY IT WERE THE FUTURE AND WE KNEW MORE," just so the readers don't get confused about whether prayer and going to Arizona are the state of the art depression treatments these days.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

No, unfortunately. I might be able to answer specific questions, though. The problem with a lot of medical history is that typically stuff was known about but not widely, or not actually practiced, so knowing when something was invented won't tell you if people were actually using it or aware of it.

In general, however, that is before psychiatry became a thing - like, Freud was in college around then.

This might be helpful, for search terms if nothing else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Costa%27s_syndrome

So, PTSD was sort of known but thought to be more physical. However (I have an essay on this I can link you to) people may have also had the general concept of "bad experiences can change people" but not a name for it.

Lincoln had what we would call depression and what would most commonly be known as melancholia: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/10/lincolns-great-depression/304247/

prayer and going to Arizona are the state of the art depression treatments these days.

Still are in some circles. In general, yeah, actually, prayer, maybe some weird cure-all medicines, and sometimes a better climate were state of the art for most things back then.

You might also enjoy the (hilarious and gross) podcast Sawbones, about medical history and how awful most early medicine was.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

If the story were set just a few years later, I would use the term neurasthenia, but unfortunately it wasn't popularized until the 1870s so that's right out. Probably melancholia will work just as well - actually it might be more accessible to a general reader, now that I think about it.

I've also thought about having the characters discuss it in terms of a loss of faith, because that seems to be the other big language that people in the nineteenth century used to discuss mental/spiritual crisis. But I'm a bit chary of having a romance novel suddenly get bogged down in "Well I was brought up a Unitarian but then the war happened and I realized Jonathan Edwards was right, we are sinners in the hand of an angry God and there is no reason on earth why he shouldn't let all our worthless souls burn, and then I fell into the slough of despond."

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

You can also have them say they keep remembering the soldiers who died and it still makes them sad. Or if it started earlier, maybe they had several relatives who also had it and their family thinks it runs in the family, like red hair or such. That's ahead of its time as a general concept, but people did notice genetic tendencies way before we had actual genetics. Like, "That family has a lo of wild boys," or "She's smart like her mother."