May is National Mental Health Month
In my first novel, What Would Alice Do?, 13-year-old Lily has to figure out whether her mother is just really happy and energized, or moving towards a manic attack. And what, exactly, should Lily do about it? At the same time she’s trying to make friends in a new school in a small, conservative Midwestern town, very different from the Portland middle school she left behind.
I was 12 when my mom started talking about government conspiracies, flipping light switches on and off because there were bugs in them (something to do with her uncle working for the phone company; I never did understand that connection), and going to meet with imaginary CIA men. I didn’t have to figure out a solution; my dad took her to a hospital in Minneapolis. We lived in northern Minnesota, and it was winter when she left and still winter when she came back – so she could have been there for two weeks in February, or from February to the end of April. My sister and I can’t remember.
I don’t remember worrying about whether she’d get well or come home. I DO remember being terrified that kids at school would find out and I’d lose my on-the-fringe-of-popular status. Being scared to death I’d lose my half a dozen or so really close girlfriends. I’ve wondered since then if I was unusually self-absorbed, or if fretting about my social life was age-appropriate. To let myself off the hook I imagine that the popularity ladder and friendship were worries I could wrap my head around without it exploding. Other fears… not so much.
Years later I found out that one friend’s father was an alcoholic; another’s was a serial philanderer; and a third’s mother had recurrent, profound depression. Lots of secrets. Two had actually known about Mom – and told no one, not even me. I had no idea; they acted like everything was normal. Which was exactly how I wanted – needed – things to be at school, since home was out of control.
Since May is National Mental Health Month, I’m going to give you some statistics. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (www.nami.org):
- one in five adults in any given year suffer from a mental illness, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, and others.
- 20 percent of kids aged aged 13 to 18 live with a mental illness.
That means just about everyone reading this has either been mentally ill or known someone who was (or is). We’re all mad here.
While working on my query letter for What Would Alice Do?, I researched and read all the comparable titles I could get my hands on. I was disappointed – well, no, horrified – by many of them, in which the schizophrenic, bipolar or depressed parents beat and starved their children, tried to bury them alive, held their flesh against a hot stove, and set the house on fire.
Why does this push my buttons? For one thing, it’s not a true picture. I don’t doubt that there are individuals whose mentally ill parents have physically hurt them – but it’s far from the norm, despite what we see above the fold and on CNN. NAMI cites a Johns Hopkins study finding that 40 percent of national media stories on mental illness portray the mentally ill as violent, even though less than five percent of violence is related to mental illness.
I think most kids worry more about their afflicted moms and dads being capricious rather than cruel, humiliating rather than homicidal. Trust me, it’s terrifying enough when your mother talks about CIA men and flips light switches to short circuit bugs. Beyond mortifying when she hangs your dad’s clothes over the porch rail and rants about how their muddy colors block his energy flow – while your classmates parade past on the way to school.
Remember what I wanted most when I was 12? For my friends to stay my friends, to hang out with me as we always had. To go to the basement diner at Rexall Drugs and share a plate of dill pickles with cherry cokes. To spend hours at Bookcraft, choosing among fantasy novels and scented candles. To have sleepovers and séances. I can say with confidence that anybody missing a sane parent absolutely needs friends.
But wait, would you let your daughter spend time with a friend whose mother might bury, burn, starve or beat her children?
We need stories that show kids they’re not the only ones with mental illness in the family – or help them empathize with a friend’s ordeal. But demonizing the sick parent isn’t accurate, and doesn’t help.
I recommend these middle grade and young adult novels that paint a nuanced picture of mental illness in the family and its effects on kids, without depicting the parent as a monster.
Middle Grade
Letters from Rapunzel by Sara Holmes
A girl calling herself “Rapunzel” writes letters to a post office box after she finds a scrap of a letter written from her father to the box number. It says that the unknown recipient is the key to his succeeding as a poet and as a human. Now Rapunzel’s dad has been hospitalized for severe depression, and Rapunzel begins pouring her heart out in the letters, although she never receives a reply.
My Cousin’s Keeper by Simon French
When the new, strange kid at school turns out to be Kieran’s cousin, Kieran will have to choose between fitting in with the other kids and standing up for his cousin against the kids that bully him.
Sure Signs of Crazy by Karen Harrington
Twelve-year-old Sarah writes letters to her hero, To Kill a Mockingbird‘s Atticus Finch, for help understanding her mentally ill mother*, her first real crush, and life in her small Texas town, all in the course of one momentous summer. (*Sarah’s mother committed horrible violence, but far in the past; she’s been in a mental hospital ever since. Sarah struggles with her father’s alcoholic unreliability and her fear of becoming like her mother.)
Young Adult
Sage Priestly is seventeen, and she longs to reinvent herself — to strip away the fat, the past, the crazy mom, the unpaid bills. She longs to be her own version of the gorgeous and popular Mona Simms. Bit by bit she transforms herself. The popular jock Roger suddenly notices her. And when they start dating, Sage thinks her life is turning around. So why isn’t she happier?
Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta
Francesca is at the beginning of her school term in Year Eleven at an all boys’ school that has just started accepting girls. She still misses her old friends, and, to make things worse, her mother has had a breakdown and can barely move from her bed.
But Francesca had not counted on the fierce loyalty of her new friends, or falling in love, or finding that it’s within her power to bring her family back together.
The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson
For the past five years, Hayley Kincaid and her father, Andy, have been on the road, never staying long in one place as he struggles to escape the demons that have tortured him since his return from Iraq. Now they are back in the town where he grew up so Hayley can attend school. Perhaps, for the first time, Hayley can have a normal life, put aside her own painful memories, even have a relationship with Finn, the hot guy who obviously likes her but is hiding secrets of his own. Will being back home help Andy’s PTSD, or will his terrible memories drag him to the edge of hell, and drugs push him over?