The Walking Dead Character Analysis

Travis Langley’s book, The Walking Dead Psychology: Psych of the Living Dead, analyzes how the trauma of living in a zombie apocalypse can affect the psyche. The book goes over all the psychological aspects of the show, The Walking Dead. The show is about a zombie apocalypse and seeing how the characters survive it. Throughout this book, there were different topics surrounding the main characters and their mental health. One of the main topics that stand out in this book is that the characters of The Walking Dead. As we see by watching the show, the characters experience things that no human would ever want to experience. They withstand so many traumatic events. The main character Rick is the one who suffers the most mentally. He had to kill his best friend, Shane, and after this is when Rick started to lose it. When Lori, his wife, died Rick, we can tell as viewers that something isn’t right with Rick. From this book, it is learned that Rick may have posttraumatic stress disorder. Rick’s traumatic experiences and his actions such as avoiding love ones, having flashbacks and hallucinations show that he must have PTSD.
A reoccurring theme in the show is that the main characters get into violence with other healthy people. The characters don’t often come together and try to stop the walkers, but instead go against each other resulting in a death of one of their own. This is when the characters encounter someone who is either a psychopath or a sociopath. The book talks about this in the section “It’s the Humans you have to Worry About: Becoming a Sociopath.” A sociopath is similar to a psychopath, but a sociopath develops the traits of a psychopath after certain circumstances. An example of this is the governor who is accountable for many deaths including