Star Wars teaches us about mental health conditions
By Iqra B
Photo Credit: Lucasfilm
Whether you work in a tiny office on a corner of the street or battling intergalactic aliens in the darkest corners of space, as long as you have a brain, it’s safe to say anyone can be affected by mental health issues. This includes those from the Star Wars Saga.
Mental health deficits affect approximately 1 in 4 people. That’s a lot, and it’s important for those conditions to get the representation they deserve in the media. Example: Star Wars.
Was Vader really that evil, or was it a personality disorder? A large handful of these iconic characters have certain traits to them that take them out of the ‘neuro-typical box’. If some of them do have some sort of mental health condition, maybe their real war was with themselves.
Anakin Skywalker (Vader) has PTSD and BPD
If this seems a little far-fetched, let me explain.
Symptoms include ‘disassociating’ yourself from others or vivid flashbacks of what caused the person’s trauma. Let’s not forget the fact that Anakin was a slave as a child, which is the biggest trauma that could have triggered PTSD for him.
Sources like The Daily Mail state that psychiatrists say the way Vader can behave is all too strange to just classify it as something just ‘psychotic’. So they’ve pretty much confirmed his deficits to be real:
"“Darth Vader’s ‘classic coping mechanisms’, such as ‘splitting’ – all-or-nothing thinking – and the way he ‘projects’, or attributes his own negative feelings to others, puts him in the frame for Borderline Personality Disorder, they suggest. His background as a child-slave appears to have left him with a legacy of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as well, with repeated episodes of ‘dissociation’ occurring throughout the films, they said. ” – The Daily Mail on Star Wars and Mental Health"
Kinda makes you think twice about him, huh?