Bad Psychology

Psychology is the science of human thought, emotion, and learning, including interpersonal relationships. Bad Psychology is what happens when a fanbrat attempts to use psychological concepts in fan fiction... and fails. Badly.

It is common in 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 Psychology is the mental cousin of bad biology.

It can include things like:
 * 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 desperation to survive.
 * 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.
 * Magically curing mental illness just because the character who had one fell in love. Actually, magically curing mental illness, period.
 * Healing sex: A character traumatized by rape suddenly being cured of their trauma... because someone else has sex with them.
 * Any of the myriad incest fics 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.
 * Melodramatic depictions of self injury, which use self injury mostly to accent how sad someone is (usually about how their Twu Wuv 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".
 * 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....)
 * Unrealistic depictions of love and human relationships. Overlaps with OOC and bad slash.
 * 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.
 * Using conditions like ADHD or dyslexia as excuses for horrible writing (instead of as reasons to find a beta).
 * 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.

However, beware: Some continua do not have the same rules for psychology as World One. If the world in question depicts psychology, mental illness, or human behavior in unrealistic ways, the fan author cannot be blamed for it. FicPsych cautions agents not to bring residents of these continua into a Reality Room, as this may result in a re-writing of the character's psyche.

It's also important to take into account non-human psychology. Elves who are raped will fade, for example; a different response from a human's. Orcs are incapable of kindness. Vulcans have different minds and personality tendencies from humans, as do Klingons, Romulans, Ferengi or many other Star Trek species. House-elves truly do love being servants (but still don't like being mistreated). Dracula-verse vampires cannot be reformed by Twu Wuv. The minds of digital or robotic characters, energy creatures, and Cosmic Horrors can be so alien as to be difficult or impossible to understand. So Bad Psychology can sometimes mean applying Real World psychology to species which are not from the Real World--something as silly as trying to apply your knowledge of raising kittens to the process of growing tomatoes!