| Having spent the bulk of my wage-earning life in mental health care, it’s not surprising that the theme crops up in my writing. But, as a reader, my professional experience can make me more picky. For World Mental Health Day this week, I’m asking for your favourite novels about mental health, sharing some of my own reading recommendations and illustrating how I’ve drawn on the theme in my fiction. Continue reading also for news of how to be in with the chance of winning a signed copy of my next novel, which is set in a psychiatric hospital in the process of closing down. |  |
 | For World Mental Health Day 2015, I wrote about mental health in fiction across the lifespan, from childhood to old age, sharing links to a dozen novels to illustrate the point. You can read that post by clicking on the image to the left. |
Today I’m adding another four from last year’s reading: two featuring mental health as part of everyday existence; two about psychiatrists whose own disturbance mirrors that of their patients. Click on the image to go to the reviews. Thanks to publishers Legend Press, Peirene, Riverrun and JM originals for my review copies.
Tracey Emerson’s She Chose Me pits a disturbed and disturbing, yet nevertheless sympathetic, young woman with an impressive capacity to bend reality in her determination to fill the mother-shaped hole inside herself, alongside a middle-aged woman summoned back from her globetrotting life by her mother’s failing health.
Set in a superficially serene Icelandic fishing village, And the Wind Sees All by Guðmundur Andri Thorsson translated by Bjørg Arnadottir and Andrew Cauthery, is about the darkness beneath the surface and our collective reluctance to acknowledge it exists.
Tracey Emerson’s She Chose Me pits a disturbed and disturbing, yet nevertheless sympathetic, young woman with an impressive capacity to bend reality in her determination to fill the mother-shaped hole inside herself, alongside a middle-aged woman summoned back from her globetrotting life by her mother’s failing health.
Set in a superficially serene Icelandic fishing village, And the Wind Sees All by Guðmundur Andri Thorsson translated by Bjørg Arnadottir and Andrew Cauthery, is about the darkness beneath the surface and our collective reluctance to acknowledge it exists.
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Jott by Sam Thompson is inspired by the author’s grandfather, a psychiatrist and lifelong friend of Samuel Beckett who helped the latter research his first novel by taking him onto the wards. Beckett aficionados will find much delight in the novel’s meta-fictions, but I admired it for the themes of failure, psychoanalysis and psychiatric hospital care.
With themes of incarceration, hunger, and the location of madness, Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry is a multi-layered historical novel set in an asylum near Boston, on the island of Nantucket and a US naval ship.
With themes of incarceration, hunger, and the location of madness, Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry is a multi-layered historical novel set in an asylum near Boston, on the island of Nantucket and a US naval ship.
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And now to the theme of mental health in my own published fiction:
| Middle-aged psychology lecturer, Diana Dodsworth has sacrificed her career prospects, and the opportunity for intimate relationships, in order to keep her past identity a secret. When she meets Simon at a dinner party, their connection over a shared interest in Cairo brings the promise of something more. Yet the conversation triggers unwelcome memories for Diana of the teenage decision that radically changed her life. As the relationship develops, |  |
she becomes conscious of the widening gap between the woman she is and the woman she feels she ought to be. Now she must make another decision to embrace the part of her she’s been at pains to deny.
Diana feels such a sense of shame at the core of her identity, that she’s constructed a false self to hide her secret behind. She’s the kind of person who could potentially benefit from psychotherapy services, except that past experience has left her very suspicious of any kind of help. She’s self-harmed since childhood (with a rather vivid and visceral description of cutting in the first chapter) and found the conflicts of adolescence almost too much to bear. Unfortunately for Diana, her involvement in mental health services in the early 1970s, when a course of aversion therapy (albeit sympathetically administered) from a clinical psychologist and a “good talking to” from a psychiatrist weren’t a great deal of help. In contrast, the contemporary strand of the novel shows how care packages for those with similar identity issues have somewhat improved.
 | For most of his adult life, Steve has been a drifter, but now he’s decided to settle down. He buys a house, gets a job and persuades a gorgeous woman to move in with him. Life‘s perfect until she wants to start a family, and threatens to leave him if he won’t agree. He has an unusual and alarming idea about how to resolve the relationship crisis – and he happens to live in a house with a cellar. |
As a mentally disordered offender, Steve disrupts our desire for a clear demarcation between victim and villain. His emotionally neglectful childhood has left him with abandonment issues, which he’s managed to side-step for most of his life by avoiding long-term bonds. Rather than addressing his own vulnerability, he locates it in others: in his mother’s dementia; in the psychiatric patients at his partner Liesel’s workplace; in her childhood trauma. Eventually, he pushes it as deep as it can go into the underground prison. As the novel is narrated from his point of view, the reader gets to follow him into the cellar of his mind. Steve certainly doesn’t see himself as a bad guy, yet, the more he tries to justify himself, the more deluded and dissociated he becomes.
| Identity is the overarching theme of my short story collection, with a mixture of thought-provoking, playful and poignant perspectives on what it is to be. They explore how our minds and bodies, our relationships with friends and family, our work roles, culture, religion, nationality and much more, shape the someone we become. |  |
Mental health issues arise in several stories in relation to social isolation, the challenge of new motherhood, the aftermath of sexual abuse and other kinds of trauma, extreme body dysmorphia, hallucinations and delusions, bereavement, eating disorders, burnout and emotional detachment. A couple are narrated from the point of view characters locked in alternative realities. (I hope that doesn’t seem too negative – I think my stories are a lot of fun!)
You can watch and listen to me reading from all three books in my new video:
Mental health is a major theme in my next novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, set against the backdrop of the longstay psychiatric hospital closures in the late 1980s and early 1990s, partly influenced by my own experience as a newly-qualified clinical psychologist. Here’s a taster – AKA the trouble with blurbs – and I’d welcome your feedback.
A brother and sister separated by bigotry and decades of deceit.
Henry was six when he waved goodbye to his glamorous grown-up sister; he’s put his life on hold awaiting her return.
Never mind what others say, Matty knows she’s a society hostess in a stately home.
Janice wants to put the world to rights, but she needs to sort herself out first.
As the asylums prepare for closure, their paths intersect. Will Henry be reunited with his sister? Or will the buried secret of their childhood push them further apart?
When do high hopes become delusion? Can we ever rectify the injustice of the past?
Henry was six when he waved goodbye to his glamorous grown-up sister; he’s put his life on hold awaiting her return.
Never mind what others say, Matty knows she’s a society hostess in a stately home.
Janice wants to put the world to rights, but she needs to sort herself out first.
As the asylums prepare for closure, their paths intersect. Will Henry be reunited with his sister? Or will the buried secret of their childhood push them further apart?
When do high hopes become delusion? Can we ever rectify the injustice of the past?
I don’t yet have a publication date but, as soon as I do, I’ll be running a promotion exclusively for my email newsletter subscribers with opportunities to win a signed copy anywhere in the world. If you’re not already subscribed, why not register now? I promise I won’t spam you, but will email you around four times a year.
Don’t forget to share your mental health novel recommendations in the comments section below:
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