Mental Health in Fiction

Friday 10 February 2017

I've been sitting on this idea for a few months now, but I've never found the words to accurately and coherently describe how I feel or discuss it without stepping on too many toes. I'm expecting a lot of toes to be stepped on, but I'm not sure if I care all that much. This is something I'm passionate about and my thoughts need to be honest. Even if they don't make much sense.

It's not a secret that I suffer with my mental health. It impacts my life and the things that I do on a daily basis, but it's also something that interests me greatly. Why is my brain acting like this? How can I help myself and make things easier? It's the reason I'm so interested in psychology and have applied to get a degree in Psychology with Clinical Psychology at university. It's also why I like to read books featuring mental illness, and what makes me so sensitive to the issues these books raise.

Why is it almost exclusively depression that's featured? I don't have anything against the representation of it - given that its many forms are some of the most common mental illnesses - but there's more to it than just feeling a bit sad, and it can manifest in many different ways. I want to read about more than just major depression. I want to see things about seasonal affective disorder, situational depression, psychotic major depression, depressive episodes, dysthymia, pre- and post-natal depression... I want characters who snap at their loved ones, characters who don't shower for weeks on end and can't remember the last time they picked up a hairbrush, I want characters crying over not even being able to tie their shoelaces tight enough, crying over not being good enough to do even the simplest things. I do not want characters feeling a little bit down yet still able to go out with all their friends and forget all their problems after five minutes. I want the reality, which is rare to see in young adult fiction.

Obviously, if you've chosen to recover or have learnt to combat your demons then things can get much easier. When you're in the depths of hell, however, you can't even contemplate having fun or ever being okay again, and that's what I want to see. I'm sick of 'severely depressed' teens in young adult fiction who are suddenly okay when the time is right and seemingly face no barriers when it comes to going out and acting like a 'normal' teen.

And depression and anxiety are not the only mental illnesses. OCD is not just about being clean. Where is the schizophrenic, bipolar, body dysmorphic, dissociative, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, dependent, antisocial representation? Are these disorders not beautiful enough? Not easy enough to romanticise? Are they too ugly? Too real? Too raw? I understand the stigma surrounding mental health and how it can make it extremely hard to speak up, but unless you do speak up the stigma will never end. Portraying depression and anxiety as things that can be cured by true love only serves to perpetuate the prejudice, too. It trivialises illnesses that ruin lives.

I can't gripe about the fact that a lot of authors writing about mental illness have never actually experienced it themselves, as just writing this post is difficult enough so I can't imagine tackling an entire novel on the subject. I can't be angry at the people on the receiving end of the stigma who don't want to draw attention to themselves, or want an escape when it comes to writing. I know how hard it can be to be open about mental illness. I know how exhausting being face to face with it every single day can be. I just wish the people choosing to write about it would do some research before hand.

Talk to people with the illness you want to write about. Ask them how they feel, how they cope day to day, which medications they take, how long it took to get a diagnosis, if they got a diagnosis. Ask about symptoms, ask about interacting with others, ask about how they wish people treated them.

Don't just assume that we're all broken and looking to be fixed.

9 comments:

  1. I definitely agree that most YA fiction only revolves around one side to mental illness, the general depression and social anxiety side. But like you, I would love to see more specific conditions represented, because authors need to realize that there's more sides to mental illness. For me, I would like to see more ocd representation that does not have to do with being overly clean. It's so annoying!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'd love to see that too! I'd love a focus on the intrusive, obsessive thoughts that come with OCD, as I don't think they get enough attention and when they do the pure terror is never quite captured properly. The best OCD rep I've seen so far is in Am I Normal Yet? by Holly Bourne. It's focused on being clean, but the main character acknowledges how she has the 'typical OCD' which I found quite funny.

      Delete
    2. I haven't read that! I'll definitely check it out. I read a book called OCDaniel which had some great rep as well, because he had different compulsions than just cleaning. It was really good!

      Delete
  2. Charlotte, wow. This post has brought me to tears. This is so beautifully put, and I completely agree with you. I suffer from severe OCD, anxiety, depression, and panic attacks, so seeing misrepresentation so regularly is so damaging. There's so many different illnesses that come in so many different forms, so we need a such representation as possible. Thank you so much for writing this ♥

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Please don't cry!! I am glad to see that this has had an effect (albeit not quite the one I was after haha) as it proves that we need this. I don't have OCD myself but in the past I've had obsessive tendencies, and I get frequent, horrific intrusive thoughts. And I've yet to see crippling anxiety done well in YA. Nothing I've read has managed to capture the severity that I suffer with and it just... makes me so mad that it's so dumbed down and idealised.

      Delete
  3. I completely agree Charlotte! I think we've made a lot of progress in terms of mental health representation in the past few years, but, on the other hand, we still have a long way to go. Thanks for sharing and, as always, fabulous post! <3

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Zoe. I just wish things would improve faster, as it's not like authors don't have the information out there to help them!

      Delete
  4. Hell yes!!!!!! Totally agree; I also find that too often, mental health is the victim of lazy writing - e.g. when stuck for a villain's motivation, give them a mental illness! When you're not sure how to end things? It was all a hallucination!

    Like, dudes, really?! Lol.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. YES, I totally forgot to touch on that. I recently read something where the person with PTSD annd Munchhausen by proxy was painted as the villain. While yeah, they'd done some shitty things - which mentally ill person hasn't? I know I have - why was she only seen in a bad light when that knowledge came to light? Why was her therapy not seen as a good step? It was a complicated situation but it made me so angry. Ugh. However, I think the hallucination thing can be done well IF the character has psychosis or some other disorder that causes them. Not just a 'normal' person when the author is being lazy.

      Delete

Got a thought or an opinion? I'd love to hear it.

design by amanda inez