Diagnosing and Comparing Mental Disorders of Serial Killers in Fiction: An Interdisciplinary Study of Iain Banks’ "The Wasp Factory" (1984) and Bret E. Ellis’ "American Psycho" (1991)

• Published in: The international journal of literary humanities Vol. 20; no. 1; pp. 157 - 171
• Main Author: Briedik, Adam
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Madrid Common Ground Research Networks 2022
• Subjects: American literature; Antisocial personality disorder; Banks, Iain; Civil disobedience; Ellis, Bret Easton (1964- ); Fiction; Genre; Humanities; Insomnia; Interdisciplinary aspects; Mental disorders; Novels; Palahniuk, Chuck; Personality; Philosophers; Schizophrenia; Serial murders; Society
• ISSN: 2327-7912; 2327-8676
• DOI: 10.18848/2327-7912/CGP/v20i01/157-171

In the present study, I analyze a genre of fiction that is relatively recent. One of the domineering themes occurring in transgressive fiction is mental illness as manifested through its protagonists. Using the fifth edition of “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM-V), the article attempts to diagnose and subsequently compare the mental disorders of two serial killers from two novels: Iain Banks’ “The Wasp Factory” (1984) and Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho” (1991). While Banks’ Francis Cauldhame is a genuine example of a person with paranoid schizophrenia (PS) with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Ellis’s character of Patrick Bateman is also mistakenly interpreted as schizophrenic; however, he manifests symptoms of three distinctive mental disorders compiled in the B cluster of personality disorders: antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and histrionic personality disorder (HPD).