Mental Illness in Writing

As many of you will soon learn (or for anyone reading the sidebar), I'm currently a college student. With this being the case, I spend a significant amount of my time interacting with other students in my classes. This semester I'm taking a play-writing class in order to expand my writing horizons, and naturally, we discuss the process of writing for an audience, but also the content of our classmates’ work.

For the past two weeks my class has been working on structuring a five-point plot and writing at least ten pages of it. During discussions of our plot points and through reading my classmates' plays, I couldn't help but notice a trend. Many of these works dealt with mental illness in the climax, as the distinguishing characteristic of the protagonist, or within another character as a conflict the protagonist must overcome. Not any specific mental illness by name, generally, but with a clear suggestion that the mental illness was an issue.

Now, I can't deny that the spiral into madness is a classic drama/fiction technique. It is employed just as often as suicide and murder, both of which my classmates take advantage of almost as readily. Personally, though, this experience raised a lot of questions for me. I can't help but wonder to what level sensitivity to people with mental illnesses needs to be applied in today's age. How should mental illnesses be approached and utilized in different forms of creative writing? What purposes do and should they serve in building a story?

I've never been the most politically correct person, and sanitizing everything in art (no matter what its form) takes a little away from creativity and craft for me. I do think, however, that a certain level of sensitivity is required. When one of my classmates decides to write a play that employs a magical object called 'happy pills,' for example, and attention is called to the connotation this phrase colloquially bears with antidepressants, this is something that should be taken into account--not swept under the rug because they don't “work the same” as anti-depressants. When dealing with mental illness (or anything that can be construed as such) it's paramount to be aware that some people suffer from these illnesses, even if you don't. Personally, I do, and whether they work the same or not, a "happy pill" will always mean an "anti-depressant" to me. And if that connotation isn’t what you’re going for, then reworking some ideas is probably necessary, because if two people jump to same conclusion right away, more are sure to follow.

It's not just a matter of sensitivity, either. It's cheap to always fall back on insanity or a disorder. There are a thousand conflicts people encounter in life to draw from. While many people suffer from one or more disorders, most people don't "go crazy" from them, kill someone, or commit suicide. Locking people up in insane asylums doesn't work the same way it used to, either. While the use of mental illness can be compelling when dealing with the difficulties of that illness, using it for shock value or to explain a character’s motivation feels weak and rings hollow in current times. If you character does kill someone, I’d rather it be because of a culmination of events, rather than a mental illness. I’d rather something more grounded in common experience.

How do you feel about the use of mental illness in narrative? Tried and true or cheap and overdone? How much sensitivity should be given when dealing with mental illness? When is mental illness appropriate in writing? Sound off below.