Mental Health in Fiction

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.