Why I Write About Mental Health

I’ve been personally affected by mental health struggles throughout my own life, and I’ve walked with others going through mental health journeys as well. Most of us have. So why not talk about it?

Mental health plays a crucial role in so many meaningful stories, and as someone personally affected by mental health struggles throughout my life, it’s important to me that my work reflect those realities as well.

While I primarily write for those directly affected, I cannot deny that writing about mental health is also a call for empathy from larger society. It's an acknowledgment that each person's journey is unique, and mental health challenges deserve to be approached with compassion and understanding. Literature has the power to foster empathy and understanding, and writing about mental health allows readers to gain insights into the lived experiences of individuals facing challenges they themselves may never have been impacted by in their own lives. It's an opportunity to educate, encourage conversations, and build understanding between those directly impacted and those seeking to offer support. When we’ve seen something before, even in a storyline in a book, it primes us to be able to identify and better understand that thing in our real lives as well.

Unfortunately, stigma often shrouds conversations about mental health. I mentioned this in a previous post about why I write disabled characters, and my motivation and desires are similar here. By exploring these sides of the human experience through story, I not only hope to offer representation to people like me and those I love, but as a happy bonus, to contribute to the destigmatization of mental health challenges in broader society. Open dialogue and honest portrayals in literature can challenge misconceptions, ideally encouraging a more inclusive and accepting societal mindset. As of now, none of my stories beat you over the head with any of this, but if I can write a scene where my main characters attend a grief support group, or they’re talking about therapy, or they’re helping a loved one through a panic attack or PTSD flashback, I think that’s a good thing. We should be able to write and read about mental health openly and freely, as so many of us live with these issues daily or know someone who does.

Mental health affects individuals across diverse backgrounds, yet representation in literature has been limited, but I think it’s so important for people to see themselves reflected in characters in an authentic and true-to-life way. It's about acknowledging that these experiences exist, are valid, and are part of the human experience for many of us. Writing about mental health (or anything else for that matter) is often an exploration of personal experiences and that’s certainly true for me. As a writer, I draw from my own journey and of those close to me. I don’t pretend to know everything, even about the mental health conditions I’ve lived with personally or studied over the years, but I hope that by including my own lived experience in my characters’ stories, it will ring true and connect with the readers it’s meant to reach.

Writing about mental health is also a form of advocacy. It's a call to action for increased awareness, resources, and support systems. Through narratives that resonate emotionally, I hope to contribute to a collective effort to prioritize mental health on personal, societal, and policy levels. Mental health challenges often involve navigating emotions and thoughts that are difficult to express. Writing becomes a medium for that expression, offering a language for the very complex experience of mental illness and healing. It’s always been an outlet in my life, sometimes revealing more to me than my conscious awareness would previously allow, and by using my voice, hopefully others will feel emboldened to live more openly and express themselves more freely as well. Sometimes that’s all it takes to shift the world and how it looks at these things.

If we want to change things, we have to do something. For me, it’s this. Writing about mental health encourages conversations that may have been previously silenced or overlooked. It's about creating spaces where individuals feel safe to share their stories, seek help, and contribute to a broader discourse on mental health, and sometimes the easiest way to create those spaces is by introducing these concepts in a nonconfrontational way: fiction. We eliminate a good deal of defensiveness and judgment simply by framing it within a made-up story with made-up characters. This distance allows us to actually be able to talk about it, often in new and progressive ways.

Bottom line, we deserve to be seen and heard in all spaces within society, and the world might be a better place if people had more exposure to people different from themselves. Writing (and media) gives us that opportunity, and I fully intend on utilizing it.

Happy reading and conversations!