Trigger Warning: The mention of suicide, depression, schizophrenia, postpartum depression, involuntary commitment, psychiatric treatments, and alcoholism may be triggering to some readers. Please engage in self-care while reading this article.
Struggling with mental health can demand incredible strength. This article is a celebration of five female authors who battled with their mental health and turned that struggle into raw, inspiring art with a powerful message. This incredible effort produced some of the world’s greatest fiction.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist writer and lecturer during a time that still treated women as inferior. After giving birth to her daughter, she suffered from what we now call postnatal depression. Back then, the doctors were convinced that her depression and melancholy were just side effects of being a woman. The cure for this, dreamed up by a male doctor, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, was called ‘the rest cure treatment’. It involved complete isolation, bed rest, and no intellectual stimuli. The doctor also ordered her to “never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”. This treatment was so detrimental to Gilman’s already worsening mental health that she began having suicidal thoughts.
About ten years later, Gilman published The Yellow Wallpaper. It is a short story based on a similar premise. In it, a woman is prescribed the rest cure and completely isolated from the outside world. Her husband, who is also a doctor, makes sure of it. The main character, due to a lack of mental stimulation, starts to think that the wallpaper in her room can move. She is convinced that a woman is stuck behind the wallpaper and trying to escape. The Yellow Wallpaper is a powerful story, illustrating the detrimental effects of a woman’s complete loss of autonomy.
Janet Frame
Janet Frame had a hard childhood full of tragedy and hardships. Two of her siblings died in tragic accidents when she was young. She started training as a teacher but quickly realized that her real dream was to become a poet. Misunderstood and stuck in a society that didn’t allow women to fulfill their creative dreams, Frame started developing depressive and suicidal tendencies. After being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, Frame spent a total of four and a half years in different mental institutions.
But she never stopped writing. Owls Do Cry is often viewed as semi-autobiographical. The main character, Daphne Withers, is confined in a psychiatric institution after a mental breakdown. There, she has to undergo severe treatments and is regarded as less than human. Janet Frame uses this novel to severely critique the psychiatric care system and to illustrate the alienation and isolation of people who suffer from mental illness.
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath, like most of the women in this article, knew she wanted to write. From a young age, she started keeping a journal. Her academic career during school and college was stellar. But behind the straight-A student, her poetry showed glimpses of her inner self: full of intense, complex emotions. Plath attempted suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. She was hospitalized and underwent psychiatric treatment. Her emotional and psychological struggles continued to weigh on her until she took her own life at the age of 30.
Her novel The Bell Jar tells the story of a young, ambitious woman by the name of Esther Greenwood. Like Plath, Esther Greenwood excels in life and starts a promising internship in New York. However, she struggles in this new world she finds herself in. Feeling increasingly detached from reality, as if trapped under a bell jar, Esther attempts suicide. She is sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. The novel portrays the damaging effects of strict gender roles and how they can contribute to mental health issues.
Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys grew up in the Caribbean to a Welsh father and a Creole mother. Not fitting into either the white British colonial class or the Black population left Rhys completely alienated. Moving to England did not help the matter and she struggled with isolation, poverty, and marital troubles. Drifting from job to job and marriage to marriage, Rhys turned to alcohol. Her feelings of alienation and displacement never quite left her, causing her to battle with depression and alcoholism for most of her life.
Wide Sargasso Sea deals with similar themes of alienation. The protagonist Antoinette, similar to Rhys herself, is rejected from both the colonial class and the Creole population. Struggling with her identity and alienation, Antoinette’s mental health deteriorates. She is taken advantage of by her family and later her husband, who doesn’t even call her by her own name. Rhys’s battle with mental health and feelings of marginalization informed Antoinette’s narrative. This novel is a raw, realistic portrayal of alienation and mental decline.
Jennifer Dawson
Jennifer Dawson had experience both in treating patients in mental health institutions and being a patient herself. This gave her a dual perspective on the psychiatric system and one that she did not like.
Her novel The Ha-Ha deals with a young woman named Josephine who has been a patient at a mental health institution for a while. Slowly but surely she begins to win her independence back, going to work in town during the day. But she views the mental hospital as her home. Josephine feels like she does not quite understand the rules of society and how to fit in. The novel, written from Josephine’s perspective, creates a link between femininity and mental illness and illustrates how non-conformity to gender roles can cause women to be viewed as mad. Dawson’s detailed account of the treatment of women in psychiatric institutions is a powerful feminist act.
These authors struggled with their mental health and were victimized by a sexist culture that misunderstood it. They had an experienced understanding of mental health and its social stigmas. This dual challenge is central in their art. It prompted them to produce intimate depictions of mental illness, amidst realistic portrayals of a culture that worsened it. The result is some of the greatest fiction of all time.
Suicide and Mental Health
To feel safe at all times is a basic human right; let’s work to make this world physically and mentally safe for everyone.
If you or someone you know is battling with mental health-related distress, we urge you to be kind and hold space for them, and contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (confidential, free, available 24/7/365):
→ Call or text 988
→ Chat at 988lifeline.org
→ Connect with a trained crisis counselor
European RNCE +44 (0)141 331 4180 or www.rcne.com/
List of Hotlines in 46 Countries: https://wave-network.org/list-of-helplines-in-46-countries/
If you want to read more about mental health, check out this article spotlighting five psychologist authors here.
Want some mental health fiction recommendations full of realistic portrayals of BIPOC mental health? Click here!
