Mental health and illness have had a rather dubious tradition in fiction. The Victorians were particularly fond of locking ‘mad’ women up in attics and labelling them ‘hysterical’; years later, authors would gleefully write about forced lobotomies, diabolical nurses and botched electro-shock attempts on the ‘insane’. It is clear that mental health was grossly misunderstood — in medicine and in literature — in the past, even more than it is today.
That, perhaps, is why an accurate, empathetic representation of mental health in fiction is of such importance today, not just because May is the month of mental health awareness, but also because we are living in unprecedented times, when a global contagion has wreaked all kinds of havoc on our health — the health of our bodies as well as that of our minds. Thankfully, the treatment of mental illness in modern writing over the past few decades has witnessed a positive shift. The ‘mad’ woman in the attic can finally come downstairs and tell her own story — think of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells readers what happened to Bertha Mason, Edward Rochester’s “violently insane” first wife who was locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre with no way of countering her husband’s claims.
Memoirists, too, talk about their own experiences with vulnerability — Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, which details her time in a psychiatric hospital, is an evocative, searing example — thereby foregrounding their own voices in the discourse on mental health. However, fiction writing serves another purpose: it provides a degree of remove that might help authors tell their stories without having to worry about the backlash that the stigma attached to mental health inevitably brings up. These are the books that give readers the deeper understanding of mental illness — and the way various cultures deal with it — that they so desperately need. More important, these books — such as Jeff Garvin’s Symptoms of Being Human, in which the acute anxiety of the gender-fluid protagonist, Riley, is depicted with authenticity — allow readers to care about the characters. They also remind those who are struggling that they need not suffer alone. Both functions are hallmarks of great literature.
To witness our own grief and struggles, albeit through fictional characters and imaginary settings, is the key to us connecting with and thinking about our own experiences. To recognize ourselves in others can be cathartic. It can even be painful. But such portrayals, if handled with empathy, are immensely valuable.
This, perhaps, is the most significant takeaway from writings about mental illness, especially at this time of loss and reflection. Few understood the need for such representation — and the need to acknowledge a new type of protagonist in literature — as well as Virginia Woolf did, as a woman, a writer and a human being who fought — and lost — a battle against mental illness. “Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in whatever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?”