Script Shrink

CW: death, suicide

That’s up to the character. Some people are extremely resilient. While they would feel grief when they lost their loved ones, they would return to normal after mourning for a time.

Other characters may not have that resilience, and each death may affect them even more than the last. After a certain point, they may fall into depression (not just bereavement), and may even consider suicide if they’ve lost everyone they’ve cared for.

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CW: violence, death, police brutality

Honestly? It seems to me that the mindset of superheroes would be closer to that of cops than soldiers. The general idea is that cops set out to keep the peace and prevent crimes from happening, where soldiers are meant to engage in war.

Cops do kill people sometimes. They also still get PTSD from the things they see / do while on duty. But they don’t get it at the same rate that soldiers in combat do.

Is it possible for your superhero to be cheery and upbeat? Yeah. But I imagine she’s still going to be affected in some way if someone she could have saved gets killed right in front of her.

Check out my post on Acute Stress Disorder. It’s basically a shorter-term version of PTSD that requires less symptoms, and could be a good way to show that your character has been affected by what happened, but is able to recover from it fairly quickly.

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The first and most obvious possible consequence of this would be developing PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).  However, while ‘strong willed’ isn’t necessarily in the list of factors that can prevent someone from developing PTSD, there’s something that is called “resilience” that can be an important factor in how the character ‘bounces back’ from a traumatic experience.  Here’s a great place to do some more reading on this concept!

There’s also something called ‘acute stress disorder’ that is like PTSD, but less severe and has a much shorter duration.  (I’ll be covering these in a future post)

You might also want to look into phantom limb syndrome - where someone still feels sensations from the limb as if it still exists!

Yep, PTSD would be a huge risk.  There’s also Acute Stress Disorder, which has many of the same symptoms of PTSD, but is less severe and requires a shorter duration of symptoms.

As I said in one of my first posts (see here), there are a lot of factors in determining who gets PTSD and who does not.  A teen superhero might just luck out and be really resilient to the effects of trauma.

…Though now that you mention it, it would be kind of amazing if the only one who knew about a superhero’s secret identity was their therapist. Though that would probably run into an ethical dilemma about whether or not said superhero poses a threat to themselves and/or society, and if they were a minor, could qualify as child abuse…