Mental Illnesses in Novels

In the media now a days, there is the trend to make a character have a mental illness. And while I'm all for bringing this stuff to the attention of the public who just wants everything nice and sweet and 100% fine, they almost never represent it properly.

For characters with depression, most of the time it is like this:

Girl is sad.

Girl meets boy.

Girl instantly is fine because she has a hot new boyfriend.

That is not how it works. Whether you're in a relationship or not, depression does not go away. It makes you not want to do anything. It makes you moody, snippy, it makes you angry at yourself–so much so that you end up yelling at and hurting people you love. It makes you bawl your eyes out and feel hopeless and lifeless and dead. No amount of happy thoughts can stop it. And yes, talking to friends helps... but sometimes it just makes it worse.

When it comes to anxiety, they're portrayed as really nervous.

It is SO MUCH MORE than that. You panic because of things you have no control over. You feel like you're going to hyperventilate and die if you don't get fresh air. Sitting alone in your room you feel like the shadows are going to reach out and suffocate you, and you scream and cry. Sometimes, no amount of controlling your breathing or thinking about happy things can draw you out of that.

This is something that has always annoyed me, because I have friends with illnesses–and I do too. And seeing people portray our issues in a romanticized, "just think happy thoughts and it'll go away" light is very painful and... dare I say... angering. These are legitimate problems that don't just go away because you imagine kittens, or because you have a boyfriend or whatever.

You see, everyone experiences things differently. Many people can have depression, but there's always something different for each person. And for some, thinking happy thoughts does help for depression. Slowing your breathing does help for anxiety. Running can help someone's OCD (it really helps my friend). But that's not all there is, and that's really all that people who don't have issues think there is to it.

I feel like all writers are crazy in some way. And I feel that if we have issues or problems in our own lives, we should count those as blessings. We have the ability to give a unique viewpoint on an important topic. And we can share it from experience. It makes it more real, it shows that it isn't as easy as a glass of wine (or coffee if you're underage) and a chat with a friend.

We as writers have been given amazing power. We have the ability to twist someone's emotions, to cause them to stay awake staring at the ceiling, contemplating what we wrote. We have the ability to accurately portray issues that we deal with. We have the ability to educate people, show that this is not something that is just going to go away, that these are actual problems that hurt people and make their lives very difficult.

And that is why my main character has problems. She has depression, anxiety, and depersonalization (and at the end of the series, PTSD). And these things do not go away when a male character enters her life. He doesn't take it away, make it disappear like smoke into the night. He helps her through it. She still deals with it, it actually poses a problem with many things that happens in the series. But that's life. And I have chosen to portray it accurately (or at least how I experience it).

I know I don't usually talk about this, but I really felt I had to. I know I mainly focused on depression, anxiety, and OCD, but those are the one's I'm very, very familiar with. And it isn't something to boast. These are sad, real problems that people I love have to deal with. But they're real. And that is why I think it's worth sharing.

~Olivia Ann