Referring back to Veil, I think he might be Bryony's Favourite Person/Creature. She refuses to acknowledge he could possibly do anything wrong and acts like the world's ending when he gets into trouble, and in general doesn't have an appropriate adoptive-parent relationship with him at all.
A different anxiety disorder headcanon: Connie. The poor kid pretty clearly has some form of social anxiety, IMO, and Stevonnie's panic attack at the rave definitely seemed to be coming more from Connie's end, I think.
I was writing up a bunch of TFP headcanons the other week and I realised I have a bunch of these for the Autobots (my precious metal children...) Arcee - PTSD and depression. I think the PTSD isn't even really a headcanon at this point; I've read a few posts on tumblr praising how well TFP addressed her mental issues. Bumblebee - PTSD. I'd go out on a limb and suggest something like Developmental Trauma Disorder, given that he's canonically more or less grown up with the war. A friend of mine RPs him with major depressive tendencies as well, and that's influenced my thoughts a fair amount - not sure you can really see it that well in canon, however, given Bumblebee's lack of character exploration. Smokescreen - ADHD. Boy is so hyperactive-type I can't even. Wheeljack - PTSD. Sometimes I wonder about BPD or ASPD? Traits of either or both, probably, but idk if the full diagnostic criteria stands. Ratchet - PTSD. Also pretty major depression. He hides it under grumping and groaning but it's pretty obviously driven by despair and not knowing how to handle the depth of his emotions. Anxiety too - of all the Autobots, I think it's Ratchet who is hit the hardest by their lack of stable ground, so to speak, the uncertainty of their position. Optimus - PTSD, yet again. Probably depression. I also think he has alexithymia (though that's not exactly a disorder so much as a personality trait). Used to think he could be robot-autistic, too, but I don't think so anymore: I think his social issues are mostly the result of PTSD and the Primacy (god I have so many headcanons about what carrying the Matrix does to people). The end result is maybe something more like schizoid personality disorder. I also write him with a lot of sorta ADHD traits, notably hyperfocus, distractability and very busy thoughts, but I'm not sure there's much in canon to support this interpretation XD Also I'm pretty convinced that TFP Megatron has ASPD. I was going through the diagnostic criteria at one point, and... failure to conform to social norms, impulsivity, aggression and irritability, deception, reckless disregard for safety of others or self, lack of remorse of any kind. I also feel like growing up in slavery (inasmuch as bots constructed adult 'grow up' and then the gladiatorial arena probably encouraged the development of most of these traits, and then others would be an inevitable side effect.
So Wrench has a file in the FBI mission where they speculate that he has "social shyness" and discuss reasons for his mask. His behavior sans mask (reduced movements, quieter talking, absolutely none of the personality his shows with it on) tends to hold that up, but I'd say that in combination with his fear of animals and laughing-but-real offhand references to being concerned by small spaces and people in uniform (+ very real and held out concerns about facial recognition) leads me to think he's got more general anxiety issues? He's got impulse control problems too, and in a lot of ways I'm pretty positive that his mask and entire Wrench persona are complex coping methods that developed into his sort of existent personality? YOU COULD MAKE AN ARGUMENT FOR ADD but I'm not super attached to it. There's also an offhand reference of possible abusive childhood ("disrupted childhood" is how they put it in the FBI files and that's such a slimy way of saying it, I fucking love it) and given the general fandom consensus that his facial mark is a burn (tho imo it could still be a birthmark) that would really hold it up too. PTSD, probably. Marcus has PTSD almost definitely, and a lot of the same impulse control problems. His comes out in anger though; he's not quite as outwardly destructive as Wrench is, but his anger definitely burns sharper and brighter than Sitara or Josh's does. He's got issues with internal locus of control too, which ends up with him functioning under the perception that he's the one who makes or breaks everything. He says "we fucked up" to reassure Josh, but in later conversations and asides to himself, it's "I fucked up." I didn't get there in time. I didn't save him. I should have seen it coming. It's my fault. Dude holds grudges like no tomorrow too. You can't really blame him, but I think that Marcus probably has a lot of maladaptive coping methods that just get squirreled away because they happen to work withing the context of the cause. He attaches to people really quickly and easily too; while there's obviously time shenanigans going on because the game wasn't going to actually show the weeks of boring codemaking and breaking, even within that context Marcus takes on the entire Dedsec organization in SanFran as his family really quickly. The Dedsec crew had been monitoring him for a while before they brought him in, so they probably felt like they already knew him by the time he'd joined, but Marcus didn't have that. He attaches to T-Bone equally quickly, despite objections from the rest of the crew (and the conversation with Wrench, post several T-Bone missions, where Wrench questions if T-Bone is loyal is pretty telling imo. Sitara still doesn't trust him up at the final mission. Josh barely connects with him at all. It's such a radical shift between that and how they treat Marcus that really shows how quickly Marcus trusts people, which is pretty ironic coming from a dude who got fucked by the system so often.) Sitara's got depression, I think. Like all the Dedsec crew, she tends towards anger rather than complete collapse, but she seems to have a hard time connecting with positive feelings. Probably not PTSD, because from what we know her homelife was strained but mostly in the sense that she had moral disagreements with her family, and she doesn't have many symptoms. Given that she uses art to express herself, she's probably got the best coping methods out of the lot of them.
I don't think it says as much about the characters as it does about me that one of my two Fictional Crush characters more or less canonically has PTSD and probably depression, and I headcanon the other one as also having PTSD and probably depression.
I mentioned BPD!Amethyst in the first post, but here's the great meta post about it that led to me developing that headcanon.
More Wrench thoughts: the way he tends to bounce from thing to thing combined with his tendency to get locked into one thing for hours without swaying is making me lean towards ADD too. His explosive personality and a lot of his anxiety triggers could be related, and either way he's definitely unmedicated. Also imo, he's got a shit opinion of therapy and psychiatric health. If he's ever seen a counselor, it probably wasn't of his own will, and it probably wasn't someone who seemed actually willing to help. I'd be very surprised if he trusted any mental health professionals, much less doctors as a whole.
I like to think Gon from HunterxHunter has dyscalculia. He's, like, really bad with numbers. Killua obviously has major, deep-running trauma-related shit but I don't want to try and drop a diagnosis on him until I'm caught up on the manga.
From Critical Role, Talesin mentioned in Talks Machina that Percy Spoiler: critical role spoilers for 65-ish on? made a bunch of decisions like finally kissing Vex after he died because holy shit he freaking DIED, but that it was also part of a manic phase that's eventually going to crash. Which I'm pretty much taking as Word of God that Percy is some flavor of bipolar on top of having hella PTSD. This is also pretty much canon, but Sans and Alphys from Undertale are both depressed as fuck. Spoiler: ending spoilers The game is pretty explicit about Alphys's suicidality, and that she kills herself if certain characters die, but it seems like that's something she was considering even before grief pushes her off the metaphorical ledge. The note she leaves when you go into the True Lab reads to me like a suicide note, and when she turns up at the end of the quest she's actively making the choice to live. It really gets me that she leaves that note AFTER she hooks up with Undyne, because it's an acknowledgement that you can't fix depression with a relationship no matter how much you love someone. Then there's Sans's whole "just give up, I did" deal. The fact that in the genocide route Sans suggests that hey, maybe he's just lazy is more suggestive to me that he DOES have depression than otherwise. He doesn't seem actively suicidal, but he also isn't particularly worried about dying in his boss fight, just that his death means that the player will go on to destroy everything. In the true ending he's expecting a reset because his life is an existential shitshow, but I do wonder what the hell he's going to do with himself if there's no reset at all and he has to move on with his life.
So I'm starting to wonder if Pearl has some sort of personality disorder. Rose is pretty clearly her FP/depended/what have you, and the levels of emptiness she seems to feel all seem to relate to Rose being gone...and of course, empty feelings can be a Personality Disorder Thing. I'm not 100% sure of this one but it's a thought? Specifically, reading up on the symptoms of DPD, she seems to fit a lot of criteria there to some degree. I've seen a few people headcanonning her as having BPD as well, but I'm less sure of that one--though that might be because she's around someone (Amethyst) who's so completely textbook borderline it hurts. She also pretty clearly has issues with anxiety and depression, IMO. I've seen some suggest OCD as well, but the neat freak tendencies/seeming compulsion to keep everything clean and symmetrical don't seem to stem from obsessive thoughts, so idk. Is purely compulsive OCD a thing? :P
I could see codependent personality disorder? A lot of pearls probably have that or something similar from being raised to view their worth through how much they do or dont make someone else happy.
pearl factory: i have created a pearl the diamonds: you fucked up a perfectly good slave is what you did. look at her, she has anxiety
Me and @Carnivorous Moogle sometimes throw around the idea of Jim from Trollhunters being ASPD. Also eventually by the end of the first season he absolutely has PTSD. Most of the changelings probably have PTSD for sure. Aaarrrgghh absolutely has PTSD.
Asriel/Flowey is the BPD poster child imo. Chara is his FP and his world is absolutely demolished when they die - he has a hard time accessing how he feels about anyone beyond them after they die, his grief is so strong it permeates into this numbness around everything else. Also, chronic feelings of emptiness, etc. I know its handwaved as him being soulless but it just sounds like trauma to me. Hostility, mood changes, his attempts to appeal to whatever Chara wants there (I mean... he's all like, gosh you know? if you want to kill everyone it's cool but I'd be happy just going up on the surface with you if it's you?) Frisk becomes his FP thereafter and he does that whole noble sacrifice thing where he's like, gosh if it would make them happy... I'll be down here. Alone. Don't reset, let Frisk be happy bc they charmed my little gay heart and I love them now. Heck half the shit Asriel/Flowey talks about is being abandoned/ having no one there - 'but nobody came' is a big line for ut as a story but it's an especially big line for Asriel who teases you with it and then, also admits when he has you in a one-on-one as Chara, that it's actually tied to something incredibly traumatic for him. Really, he's teasing you about what scares him a lot.
Mostly agreed, though it's hard for me to pin Greg down as having any specific issues (save for the whole losing Rose thing, but he seems to have dealt with that relatively healthily, all things considered, and the hoarding thing, which seems to kind of run in the family anyway), and Garnet is an odd case because she's two people--although Ruby clearly has anxiety and Mindful Education seems to imply that Sapphire does too, so it's entirely possible that Garnet would have similar issues? But yeah, in general, totally agreed. Steven pretty clearly has PTSD at this point. Amethyst is pretty much textbook borderline. Connie definitely has some form of anxiety disorder (and seems to have some depressive tendencies), and gives me some sperg vibes as well? Lapis was confirmed by a Crewniverse member (I think Jesse Zuke? It wasn't Rebecca Sugar herself but its 's definitely something that's been written into the show) to have PTSD and depression. Peridot is sperg af. Just. The Ubersperg. Some anxiety stuff going on too, I think. Jasper has some pretty serious and blatant self-worth issues (and Sugar herself confirmed that one--she said that the reason Jasper refused Steven's offer to heal her was that she genuinely didn't think she deserved it). I'm not 100% sure about Rose, though I've seen people suggest that part of why she essentially killed herself was due to depression and grief over her past actions. Not sure how true that is, but it would explain a lot. I'm not even sure where the fuck to begin with Pearl. She pings me as sperg, it's all but stated that she has PTSD, and there seems to be some other shit going on in there that I can't entirely pin down. Her clinging to Rose to the degree that she did was most likely a brainweird thing, IMO, but beyond that I'm a bit stumped beyond just saying "Pearl is highly fucked up."
I think people have varying opinions on Pearl, but to me I've always pinned her clinging to Rose as either BPD or DPD. Imo, it's BPD but I also have? an inclination? towards that answer because I have 'BPD traits'. Actually, thinking about it I wonder if Pearl is the type who would get diagnosed with 'BPD traits'. Either way imo she pings my radar as having BPD - not just because of her relationship with Rose but due to her relationship with Amethyst and Garnet as well, and hm, definitely being pretty dependent on Rose. You know? I'm tempted to say she's 'autistic w ptsd, anxiety and bpd traits' before I went 'well that's a lot?' but then I remembered I'm diagnosed with most of those things and more than that countwise so... fair.
See, I have BPD and I can't quite see all of it in Pearl, but that's probably because Amethyst is there being The Ultimate Borderline and that might be like...drowning out Pearl's borderline traits? She definitely has some, though--Rose is pretty clearly a Favorite Person in some capacity, and her actions in Cry For Help could be a particularly drastic and fucked up form of attention-seeking. I personally lean a bit more towards DPD for her, but I also don't know a huge amount about DPD so I am hesitant to say? (And I uh...kinda have most of the disorders I mentioned in my post, so I might also be projecting like a mofo, which I do a lot in general.)
