Mental Health Notes - News, Education and Advocacy

Delve Into The Minds Of Halloween’s Most Common Characters

by Alicia Sparks, Mental Health Notes on October 31st, 2008

Oh, man. I freaking love Halloween. Not only does it kick off a serious season of celebration here in America, but it’s also just plain ol’ awesome.

Unfortunately, I won’t be doing anything this year (unless you count listening to the really scary coyotes behind my house), but that didn’t curb my desire to find out what kinds of bone-chilling Halloween goodness I could collect in my virtual trick-or-treat bag.

And, the full-sized bag of Skittles from the entire bunch? WebMD’s 5 Halloween Character Case Files.

This article offers “case files” of five popular Halloween characters: the witch, the zombie, the ghoul, the vampire, and the werewolf. The article isn’t terribly long, but it isn’t a mere fluff piece, either. It includes commentary from professors of psychology, pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences, as well as a clinical psychologist and even a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who actually published a psychoanalytic explanation of Dracula.

My only complaint is that I would have liked a bit more information about ghouls. You can’t tell me a person that there were people back in the day who had psychotic-like symptoms and obsessive-compulsive desires to eat corpses, and not elaborate. I mean, I want to know why!

Anyway, go on and check it out. Learn about a vampire’s “psychological need to control others” and his potential schizophrenia, how werewolves probably had a “rare psychiatric disorder called lycanthropy,” and how the people who were called zombies were actually mentally tortured by…priests?

Scary.

Image: SXC and Julia Freeman-Woolpert.

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POSTED IN: Mental Health Notes