Burn the Pamphlet, Wrestle With the Bear: Mental Health Narratives and YA Literature

Our cultural scripts for mental illness are pretty uninspiring. The suicide pamphlet in the school nurse’s office advises you to Get Help and Speak to a Counselor, where “help” is often a code word for “life-long medication,” and the counselor might be the wise healer of your dreams, or might be a not-very-wise adult who hands you another stupid pamphlet and sends you on your way. If you weren’t so busy being outlandishly sad or paranoid or hyper, you would be tempted to shout: “People! I am going through what may prove to be one of the most potent and devastating experiences of my life, and you want me to read a fucking pamphlet?”

In a cool culture, they’d send you into the forest to wrestle a grizzly bear, or everyone in your village would surround you in an all-night evil-spirit-dispelling drum circle dance, or they would give you a nice old Pippi Longstocking house on a leafy street where you could live in a way that worked for your brain and didn’t bother anyone.

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of the suicide pamphlet (or the OCD pamphlet or the psychosis pamphlet) can tell you that when it comes to talking about mental illness, our culture has a terrifyingly limited vocabulary. We tiptoe. We oversimplify. We squawk the same Top Ten Tips over and over like parrots in a cage.

The conversation about mental illness has become completely jammed up by this squawking, and it’s going to take a lot of smart, inquisitive, and imaginative people to unjam it.

This is where YA comes in. Many of those potential conversation-changing people are kids and teens right now. One of the exciting things that YA literature can do is provoke teens to question different elements of their culture—whether you’re talking about politics, gender stuff, or reality TV. Why should mental health be excluded from that kind of questioning?

One thing I love about YA right now is that so many books have moved past the “issue-addressing” narratives of previous decades and are delving into the messiness and complexity of experiences like mental illness not as “issues” to be “resolved” but as part of a larger story. What is the difference between an “issue novel” and a novel-novel, and why is this difference important?

In an issue novel, the Problem is shown to be a certain situation or behavior (teen drinking! disordered eating! manic escapades!) which is shown to cause Conflicts that result in Consequences. The conflicts and consequences surrounding this single situation or behavior are the main drivers of plot and character; the story is over when the situation has been defused and/or the behavior modified. A novel-novel might also involve a problematic situation or behavior which creates conflicts and consequences, but the Problem is shown to be something greater than that choice or behavior. The Problem might be free will, or social justice, or alienation, or finding one’s place in the world—but whatever it is, it takes place in a much larger context in which the “problematic situation or behavior” forms a small piece. With that in mind, the plot might not hinge on the situation or behavior or at all—it might simply be taken as part of the background.

If The Catcher In The Rye was an issue novel, we might see Holden Caulfield receiving counseling for the death of his brother, getting help for his drinking habit, making up with his parents, and going back to school.

If Wonder When You’ll Miss Me was an issue novel, the story would most almost certaintly revolve around the protagonist “coming to terms” with her highschool tormentor instead of hitting him in the head with an axe and running away to join the circus with her imaginary twin.

In Dante and Aristotle Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the teenaged characters drive into the desert to smoke pot. In a lesser version of the story, the pot smoking would be discovered and addressed and Made Into An Issue; luckily for the reader, Benamin Alire Saenz allows it to simply be a beautiful and believable part of the story.

So how do we write YA novels involving mental illness without turning them into issue novels? First, ask yourself if a given behavior or situation really needs to be treated as an “issue” at all (with all the capital-r Resolutions that this entails). Is mental illness really the main source of conflict in the story? Or can mental illness be part of a story about love, or freedom, or intergalactic space wars? Do you need to “Resolve” it in a dramatic way? Or can you treat it like Dante and Aristotle’s illicit toking in the desert?

As a YA writer, you are quite literally affecting the range of stories teen can access about mental illness. Are you going to hand them another pamphlet, or send them to wrestle with the bear?

***

Hilary has offered up a signed copy of Wild Awake to one winner. Enter below and I’ll draw a name at the end of the month.