Bad Psychology

Psychology is the science of human thought, emotion, and learning, including interpersonal relationships. Bad psychology is what happens when a writer attempts to use psychological concepts in fan fiction... and fails. Badly.
It is common in bad Hurt/Comfort fics, in stories involving rape, incest, abuse, and angst. It almost always involves pulling the canons OOC, because bad psychology inevitably involves unrealistic human behavior.
Bad biology is a similar offence.
==Signs of Bad Psychology==
===Unrealistic Relationships===
Unrealistic depictions of love and human relationships. Overlaps with OOC and poorly written slash.
*Stockholm syndrome, badly done: Depicting someone falling in love with a captor or abuser as a perfectly rational and beautiful thing, rather than a combination of brainwashing and determination to survive.
*An incest fic in which, somehow, incest is present without a seriously messed-up family life (or at least a childhood spent apart).
*Depicting an abusive relationship, or one involving stalking, as perfectly healthy.
*Having True Love make a relationship automatically perfect. (I.e., the idea that people who are in love will never fight, never annoy each other, and never disagree.)
===Misused Mental Illness===
*Magically curing mental illness just because the character who had one fell in love. Actually, magically curing mental illness, period.
*Melodramatic depictions of self-injury, which use self injury mostly to accent how sad someone is (usually about how their true love has rejected them), without actually researching what self-injury is and why people use it as a coping strategy. Even worse: Using it as a symbol that a character is "emo".
*Causing characters who have a mental illness to become randomly and severely violent, even though it is completely out of character for the person in question.
*Giving a character a mental illness and failing to do even the most basic research. Schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder? NOT the same thing.
*Using mental illness as a way to bash a character.
*Using mental illness as a joke.
===Badly Depicted Trauma/Angst===
*Most examples of wangst.
*Depicting a particularly resilient character as ridiculously traumatized by a minor event that, given his personality, shouldn't faze him much.
*Conversely, having characters react nonchalantly to something that should by rights give them serious PTSD.
*Healing sex: A character traumatized by rape suddenly being cured of their trauma... because someone else has sex with them.
*Trivialisation, especially trivialised rape.
*Randomly having characters commit suicide when they wouldn't logically do so. (Let's see... Character X, a resilient, mentally stable sort of fellow, has lived through the end of the world, lost his family, and gotten through the grief with his sanity mostly in one piece. After making a new life for himself as part of a close-knit ragtag crew of survivors, he meets Mary Sue, falls in love with her after two minutes, and sees her die after two days. He promptly commits suicide because he can't live without her. Uhh....)
===Being Clueless About Psychology In General===
*Giving a character a ridiculously high or low IQ score. If your fanfic writer quotes an IQ score over 200 for a character, assume they don't know squat about IQ tests. Even if it's just over 150, assume Mary Sue.
*Having therapy or medication be a magical cure for mental illness - or else a sign of weakness. (OK if a character has these opinions; not OK if the story assumes that this is actually true in a Real World-like continuum.)
*Having characters who usually think logically react emotionally to something that isn't out of the ordinary for them (or vice versa).
*Having a character act in a way he is not accustomed to acting, without giving justification for why he is acting that way. People do things for a reason. (See also: OOC.)
==However, beware:==
South Park does not have the same rules for psychology as the Real World. Some psychology, mental illness, or human behavior is depicted in unrealistic ways. Bad psychology can be excused if it is used in a similarly fashion as the canon, as the fanwriter cannot be blamed for it.
==See Also==
===Other Bad Things:===
*Bad Biology
*Bad Physics
*Bad Characterization
*Bad Geography
Category:Flaws