In an article for Writer’s Digest, Lisa Williamson Rosenberg discusses how emotions connect to mental health and offers five tips for exploring mental health in your fiction.
“Emotion dictates a protagonist’s unique response to difficulty,” Rosenberg writers. She uses an example of how two characters may react differently to encountering turbulence on a flight. “Passenger A is pleasantly lulled to sleep, as the rocking sensation recalls being soothed as an infant in the arms of an adoring mother,” she writes. “Meanwhile, passenger B—who survived a devastating earthquake that decimated her family’s home and killed a sibling—is profoundly retraumatized.” Whether and how these characters reveal their emotions adds layers of conflict.
Writing about any kind of mental health difference or struggle is challenging, because you want your character’s experiences to ring true. “Even if you only hint at it in the narrative, as an author, you need to understand the root cause of your character’s struggle before you decide what the manifestation will be,” Rosenberg says. “Family quirks, trauma, relocation, immigration—all of these can impact mental health.” In fact, mining your own family and past can be a powerful development tool.
Whatever your path into your character, be sure to read and research whatever challenge you want to depict. Ensure that your character is three-dimensional, not merely the sum of their quirks or symptoms. Rosenberg also says it’s ok to use humor. “Par for the course with mental health issues are misadventures, foibles, and overcorrects that can end in comically disastrous results,” she writes. “As long as readers can laugh with rather than at the mix-ups, it’s all good. In fact, if everything we wrote about mental health were tragic, if everything we wrote about trauma were traumatic, the work would be pretty hard to stick with as a reader or as a writer.”
