**The Lack of Representation and Misrepresentation of Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature**

As someone who has experienced mental illness firsthand, I am deeply concerned about the lack of representation and misrepresentation of mental health in young adult literature. Over the past 15 years, I have spent time with a nutritionist, social worker, and psychiatrist, which has helped me to better understand my eating disorder and navigate recovery. While I feel that my eating disorder is currently under control, I still attend bi-weekly sessions with my social worker, which highlights the importance of seeking professional help for mental health issues.

Many young adult books follow a similar pattern, where the protagonist struggles with mental illness and eventually finds success through therapy or medication. However, this portrayal can be unrealistic and misleading. Not enough books focus on clinical therapy, which is a crucial aspect of recovery. This lack of attention to therapy can potentially work up the already messy idea that society has about clinical work. By not addressing the option of professional help, authors may inadvertently scare off suicidal teens who might be fearful of entering therapy or might reject treatment altogether.

**The Misrepresentation of Medication in Young Adult Literature**

Medication is also seriously misrepresented in many young adult books. I have personally experienced both the good and the bad of pharmaceutical therapy, having gone on antidepressants that helped with my depression but also developed schizophrenia-like symptoms due to the medication. While this experience was a rollercoaster ride, I believe that medication can be a valuable tool for managing mental illness. However, some people are super against using medication in treatment for mental illness, and that's totally fine. The problem is that prescription drugs for mental illness in young adults is either completely dismissed or is demodified, which is super harmful.

**The Importance of Including Medication as an Option**

There are certain disorders where research is limited, and medication might be the only option. For example, treating things like schizophrenia requires medication. It's essential to discuss medication as an option when talking about mental illness. We need to see the good and the bad and the ugly of all these different stories but unfortunately, we only see the bad. This needs to change. By excluding or misrepresenting medication, authors are creating harmful stigmas against it, which can be detrimental to young readers who might be looking for help.

**Diversity in Representation: What Does It Mean?**

Representation is relative, and what applies to one person does not necessarily apply to everyone. This is why diversity in representation is crucial for literature. We need more stories that showcase a wide range of mental health experiences, rather than relying on the same progression of an illness. Authors tend to follow the same narrative arc, which neglects the unique experiences of individuals with mental illness. It's time to break free from this pattern and include more diverse perspectives.

**The Excessive Use of Romance in Mental Illness Literature**

Another issue is the excessive use of romance in mental illness literature. While it might be a comfortable genre for authors to write about, it can take away from the disorder itself. Readers need to see the complexities of mental health, rather than relying on romantic plotlines to tell their story.

**The Need for More Professional Help in Young Adult Literature**

One of my main concerns is that young adult literature often neglects to include professional help as a viable option. This can be incredibly damaging, especially for readers who might be looking for guidance and support. We need more books that feature therapists, psychiatrists, or other mental health professionals as characters or plot points.

**The Discussion Continues**

I hope that my thoughts on mental illness diversity and representation in young adult literature will inspire a wider discussion about this topic. What do we need more of? What do we need less of? What's being done right and what's being done wrong? I'd love to hear your thoughts and engage in a conversation about how we can improve the way mental health is represented in literature.

**Enter My Giveaway for "Mental"**

To celebrate International Book Giveaway Day, I'm excited to announce a special giveaway for my book, "Mental." To enter, simply follow these guidelines:

* Leave a comment on this video with your thoughts on mental illness and young adult literature.

* Follow me on social media using the hashtag #MentalGiveaway.

* Share this video with your friends and family who might be interested in learning more about mental health.

Don't forget to subscribe to my channel for new videos and giveaways every week. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you tomorrow for a new video!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up hello my name is Emma and today for mental illness awareness week we're kind of shift and focus a little bit and we are going to be talking about diversity and representation of mental illness in ya literature the topic of discussion for this video came to me about 6 months ago when I had posted a tweet observing how in a lot of big mass of ya sequels the main protagonist is suffering greatly from the effects of the first book which kind of results in this theme of the miserable protagonist which I have personally come to find very repetitive and unpleasant to read and I am not seeing that to diminish what the character has gone through or like establish criteria for being emotionally damaged or anything of that sort it's just this cycle of a traumatic event at the end of the first book the first half of the second book the protagonist is miserable and broken but they're able to pick themselves up in like a slit second and then everything is fine for the rest of the sequel that Trope has just become very repetitive and I just don't like it it's not unpleasant to read because the main character is depressed because that's something I love reading about it's just that I'm sick of reading the same course of events over and over and over again on that thread of tweets I got a lot of positive feedback from a lot of people agree with me especially in that particular instance but I did have one person disagree with me who said they enjoyed this Trope of the miserable protagonist because it was someone they could relate to so this discussion had formed off of two realizations at the end of that tweet thread number one it reinforced my belief that representation is relative and not objective or absolute and number two it may me realize that we are so lacking in diversity of stories in mental illness books the book of this video is focused on point two but as for point one when talking about diversity as a whole it is extremely difficult to to assign one absolute Authority that determines what is right and what is wrong and what is accurate and what is inaccurate I'd like to think that I've surrounded myself with a group of readers that are empathetic enough to understand that while some stories may not represent all they do represent others and vice versa I think a great example of this is personally all the right places this is a book that I really did not love it kind of went against all of my 9 years of experience with mental illness and my past 5 years of studying psychology but that does not exclude the massive amount of people that have really identified with this story and it's given them comt and I think that's a great thing so when talking about diversity and diversity in mental illness I always have to remind myself that what might not be accurate for me is definitely going to be accurate for others now while this whole conversation of what is good representation can get pretty murky I feel like some of it might have to do with the fact that in literature concerning mental illness we are exposed to these same stories over and over and a lot of the stories that don't normally get recognition are just falling further and further into the sidelines that is why we need diversity of mental illness in ya now as somebody who has a lot of experience with mental illness and is studying to be a clinical mental health counselor for me it's very easy for me to look at a book and find an author who has really tried very hard to create a true and accurate character and somebody who just Googled the symptoms of something like bipolar disorder and decided to base a story off of it this is where we get into the concept of personified illness where the character doesn't represent anything other than the dsnv definition of the disorder which is a big problem it's pretty easy to write a book about mental illness what's not easy is creating an authentic character that is more than their diagnosis another problem I have with this is by following the same generic progression of the disorders you are excluding a ton of voices that might be suffering from the same illness but are not a textbook case I think the best way I can describe this is I have read a ton of books on Mental Illness but I have not been able to identify with a character in my present mindset since high school and I graduated high school almost 3 years ago and I've read a lot of books about mental illness in those past 3 years it is so easy for me to say wow this is how 15-year-old anorexic Emma which is great for 15-year-old anorexic Emma and you know even now it's still great for me to be able to read a book and relate to a past mindset but I have yet to say this is how 20-year-olds eating disordered Emma feels right now I have yet to find a character who has been in recovery for years or has been on medication but wean themselves off of it or is trying to prevent themselves from relapsing or actually relapsing some of the time currently I have not found somebody in my position a position I can promise you a lot of people are in and that is a really terrible and disappoint pointing thing that fact sometimes reinforces already present or occasional thoughts that I'm alienated from my disorder like I'm not the right kind of anorexic which is the absolute opposite of what you look for when reading a book about mental illness by telling the same story of somebody Who develops a disorder in the beginning following that development for a couple of months but ending the story right as they begin to come to terms with it or enter recovery you are eliminating a wide variety of people that are in so many different stages of their illness which I think actually take up the majority since everybody's story is so different I also think when writing a lot of why a authors specifically gravitate towards disorders like anxiety and depression and eating disorders that are more romanticized in the media whereas things like psychotic disorders and personality disorders get way less attention and when they do they're normally designated to undesirable characters which just reinforces stereotypes think of the ratio of protagonist to villains with narcissistic personality disorder that is like one to 10,000 give me a main character who's a sociopath to prove they're still normal functioning human beings stop reinforcing that all bipolar individuals are moody or that all schizotype of persons are weird or that all psychopaths are murderers because they're not when you only designate certain archetypes of characters to a particular disorder like the suicidal main character falls in love but the histrionic antagonist deserve their death you are further creating a stigma within the already present stigma of mental illness a big part of tackling diversity is giving voice to the populations that are normally undermined by Society by doing this you can inform others of what it's like to have a mental illness and even disprove some of those disgusting stereotypes that people love to reinforce but what I feel is most important about that is you're able to offer others in a similar situation comfort someone to relate to someone to identify with but on the other hand if the only representations we get of narcissism are characters like Lord Voldemort that person doesn't really have anyone to identify with at all do they another thing that I feel also stunts the growth of diversity is how Reliant mental illness stories are on romance in young adult literature if you've been watching my channel you know that I am am a romance lover so I am spewing some real shit here now when I survived my first wave of anorexia when I was 14 I didn't have a boyfriend I only had my friends and family to help push me into recovery so it really gets under my skin when a lot of these books being published about mental illness end with a love story rather than ending with the development and the progression of this person's disorder and Recovery it gets to the point where a lot of the times I feel like disorders like anxiety and depression are actually being exploited to produce a good deep love story let me be clear that my is not here for your entertainment and I refuse to let my struggles be used as a plot device to propel a romantic interest I think the excessive inclusion of romance in mental illness novels and the keyword there is excessive because there are so many powerful love stories about individual suffering from mental illness that absolutely deserve their Spotlight and I'm not trying to diminish them whatsoever but the ones that are reliant on romance are what needs to stop and we need to step away from mental illness romance novels and focus solely on mental illness novels related to to the topic of romance I also think it sometimes replaces a lot more important aspects of mental illness which is so problematic what I find to be a reoccurring theme in mental illness novels is the impressive lack of professional help and medication now I personally been in and out of therapy since I was like 6 years old but my official recovery for anorexia started at 15 over those 5 years I've spent time with a nutritionist a social worker and a psychiatrist although I'd like to think that my eating disorder is currently under control I still go to bi-weekly sessions with that social worker I started with 5 years ago when I first entered recovery especially if you're a minor which I would say all of these young adult books follow probably about 80% of the time at least if you're diagnosed with a mental disorder you have to partake in some kind of clinical therapy thinking back on the mental illness books that I have read I would say less than half of them focus on some kind of clinical therapy not only does it seem a little unrealistic to me the lack of attention things like therapy get in books could potentially workp the already messy idea Society has of clinical work but by not even addressing the option of professional help some suicidal teen might be fearful of entering therapy they might think it doesn't work or they might reject treatment when in reality reading about a character who is in a similar situation to you but responding well to counseling might actually push them to join treatment medication is also seriously misrepresented in ya now I am personally someone who has experienced the good and the bad of pharmaceutical therapy long story short that will discuss later in the week that's more fleshed out I went on to anti-depressants which did help with my depression but I did develop schizophreniform from the drugs they fixed my dosage and I haven't had a relapse of my psychosis in 4 years so I probably experienced the best of the best and the worst of the worst when it comes to medication but I'm somebody who would truly recommend it to anyone even with all of that I have met some people that are super against using medication in treatment for mental illness and that's totally fine but I think when you're presting ing the option of treatment it's something that should be addressed and people should know is there to try the problem is prescription drugs for mental illness in young adults is either totally dismissed and not discussed at all or is this kind of demodification of medication that is super super harmful there are certain disorders that when paired with traditional therapy medication can really help like anxiety and depression and I can tell you from experience this is a really great asset some of the time but unfortunately there are other disorders where research is really limited and for makeo theapy might be the only option and treating things like schizophrenia medication is just something that needs to be talked about when talking about mental illness we need to see the good and the Bad and the Ugly of all of these different stories but in my opinion we only see the bad and that really needs to change now I'm not saying that clinical therapy and drug therapy are the only options for mental illness because that's not the case but by excluding them completely or misrepresenting them you're creating very harmful stigmas against things that could potentially be very helpful to your target audience no I'm not an author and I don't claim to know how writing works but if you're writing a book about mental illness and you're not writing it for people who have suffered from mental illness and are looking for someone to identify with or writing for people who are looking for better information and new ways to learn about mental illness who are you really writing for I think that really concludes all of my thoughts on mental illness diversity and representation in young adult literature what I hope you take away from this discussion is firstly representation is relative what does or does not apply to you is not the same for everyone and that's why the topic of diers diversity is important to literature in General on a deeper level we cannot stop at inclusion we need to make sure that within that incorporation we have a widespread execution that does cater to all with the variety of stories that we are seeing personified illness is a thing that needs to stop Point Blank we need a wider spread of stories within a disorder being told because authors tend to follow the same progression of an illness and like I said not everybody's story is the same we need to stop highlighting certain disorders and neglecting others the excessive use of romance and mental on this novels can actually sometimes take away from the disorder which is a big problem and there needs to be more professional help included in these books this is a topic I am extremely extremely passionate about and I would love to keep the discussion going so please feel free to leave your thoughts on mental illness and books below what do we need more of what do we need less of what's being done right and what's being done wrong and of course don't forget to enter my Giant menta on this International book giveaway all of the guidelines and instructions for the give away or in the description of this video but that is it thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you tomorrow for a new video byehey what's up hello my name is Emma and today for mental illness awareness week we're kind of shift and focus a little bit and we are going to be talking about diversity and representation of mental illness in ya literature the topic of discussion for this video came to me about 6 months ago when I had posted a tweet observing how in a lot of big mass of ya sequels the main protagonist is suffering greatly from the effects of the first book which kind of results in this theme of the miserable protagonist which I have personally come to find very repetitive and unpleasant to read and I am not seeing that to diminish what the character has gone through or like establish criteria for being emotionally damaged or anything of that sort it's just this cycle of a traumatic event at the end of the first book the first half of the second book the protagonist is miserable and broken but they're able to pick themselves up in like a slit second and then everything is fine for the rest of the sequel that Trope has just become very repetitive and I just don't like it it's not unpleasant to read because the main character is depressed because that's something I love reading about it's just that I'm sick of reading the same course of events over and over and over again on that thread of tweets I got a lot of positive feedback from a lot of people agree with me especially in that particular instance but I did have one person disagree with me who said they enjoyed this Trope of the miserable protagonist because it was someone they could relate to so this discussion had formed off of two realizations at the end of that tweet thread number one it reinforced my belief that representation is relative and not objective or absolute and number two it may me realize that we are so lacking in diversity of stories in mental illness books the book of this video is focused on point two but as for point one when talking about diversity as a whole it is extremely difficult to to assign one absolute Authority that determines what is right and what is wrong and what is accurate and what is inaccurate I'd like to think that I've surrounded myself with a group of readers that are empathetic enough to understand that while some stories may not represent all they do represent others and vice versa I think a great example of this is personally all the right places this is a book that I really did not love it kind of went against all of my 9 years of experience with mental illness and my past 5 years of studying psychology but that does not exclude the massive amount of people that have really identified with this story and it's given them comt and I think that's a great thing so when talking about diversity and diversity in mental illness I always have to remind myself that what might not be accurate for me is definitely going to be accurate for others now while this whole conversation of what is good representation can get pretty murky I feel like some of it might have to do with the fact that in literature concerning mental illness we are exposed to these same stories over and over and a lot of the stories that don't normally get recognition are just falling further and further into the sidelines that is why we need diversity of mental illness in ya now as somebody who has a lot of experience with mental illness and is studying to be a clinical mental health counselor for me it's very easy for me to look at a book and find an author who has really tried very hard to create a true and accurate character and somebody who just Googled the symptoms of something like bipolar disorder and decided to base a story off of it this is where we get into the concept of personified illness where the character doesn't represent anything other than the dsnv definition of the disorder which is a big problem it's pretty easy to write a book about mental illness what's not easy is creating an authentic character that is more than their diagnosis another problem I have with this is by following the same generic progression of the disorders you are excluding a ton of voices that might be suffering from the same illness but are not a textbook case I think the best way I can describe this is I have read a ton of books on Mental Illness but I have not been able to identify with a character in my present mindset since high school and I graduated high school almost 3 years ago and I've read a lot of books about mental illness in those past 3 years it is so easy for me to say wow this is how 15-year-old anorexic Emma which is great for 15-year-old anorexic Emma and you know even now it's still great for me to be able to read a book and relate to a past mindset but I have yet to say this is how 20-year-olds eating disordered Emma feels right now I have yet to find a character who has been in recovery for years or has been on medication but wean themselves off of it or is trying to prevent themselves from relapsing or actually relapsing some of the time currently I have not found somebody in my position a position I can promise you a lot of people are in and that is a really terrible and disappoint pointing thing that fact sometimes reinforces already present or occasional thoughts that I'm alienated from my disorder like I'm not the right kind of anorexic which is the absolute opposite of what you look for when reading a book about mental illness by telling the same story of somebody Who develops a disorder in the beginning following that development for a couple of months but ending the story right as they begin to come to terms with it or enter recovery you are eliminating a wide variety of people that are in so many different stages of their illness which I think actually take up the majority since everybody's story is so different I also think when writing a lot of why a authors specifically gravitate towards disorders like anxiety and depression and eating disorders that are more romanticized in the media whereas things like psychotic disorders and personality disorders get way less attention and when they do they're normally designated to undesirable characters which just reinforces stereotypes think of the ratio of protagonist to villains with narcissistic personality disorder that is like one to 10,000 give me a main character who's a sociopath to prove they're still normal functioning human beings stop reinforcing that all bipolar individuals are moody or that all schizotype of persons are weird or that all psychopaths are murderers because they're not when you only designate certain archetypes of characters to a particular disorder like the suicidal main character falls in love but the histrionic antagonist deserve their death you are further creating a stigma within the already present stigma of mental illness a big part of tackling diversity is giving voice to the populations that are normally undermined by Society by doing this you can inform others of what it's like to have a mental illness and even disprove some of those disgusting stereotypes that people love to reinforce but what I feel is most important about that is you're able to offer others in a similar situation comfort someone to relate to someone to identify with but on the other hand if the only representations we get of narcissism are characters like Lord Voldemort that person doesn't really have anyone to identify with at all do they another thing that I feel also stunts the growth of diversity is how Reliant mental illness stories are on romance in young adult literature if you've been watching my channel you know that I am am a romance lover so I am spewing some real shit here now when I survived my first wave of anorexia when I was 14 I didn't have a boyfriend I only had my friends and family to help push me into recovery so it really gets under my skin when a lot of these books being published about mental illness end with a love story rather than ending with the development and the progression of this person's disorder and Recovery it gets to the point where a lot of the times I feel like disorders like anxiety and depression are actually being exploited to produce a good deep love story let me be clear that my is not here for your entertainment and I refuse to let my struggles be used as a plot device to propel a romantic interest I think the excessive inclusion of romance in mental illness novels and the keyword there is excessive because there are so many powerful love stories about individual suffering from mental illness that absolutely deserve their Spotlight and I'm not trying to diminish them whatsoever but the ones that are reliant on romance are what needs to stop and we need to step away from mental illness romance novels and focus solely on mental illness novels related to to the topic of romance I also think it sometimes replaces a lot more important aspects of mental illness which is so problematic what I find to be a reoccurring theme in mental illness novels is the impressive lack of professional help and medication now I personally been in and out of therapy since I was like 6 years old but my official recovery for anorexia started at 15 over those 5 years I've spent time with a nutritionist a social worker and a psychiatrist although I'd like to think that my eating disorder is currently under control I still go to bi-weekly sessions with that social worker I started with 5 years ago when I first entered recovery especially if you're a minor which I would say all of these young adult books follow probably about 80% of the time at least if you're diagnosed with a mental disorder you have to partake in some kind of clinical therapy thinking back on the mental illness books that I have read I would say less than half of them focus on some kind of clinical therapy not only does it seem a little unrealistic to me the lack of attention things like therapy get in books could potentially workp the already messy idea Society has of clinical work but by not even addressing the option of professional help some suicidal teen might be fearful of entering therapy they might think it doesn't work or they might reject treatment when in reality reading about a character who is in a similar situation to you but responding well to counseling might actually push them to join treatment medication is also seriously misrepresented in ya now I am personally someone who has experienced the good and the bad of pharmaceutical therapy long story short that will discuss later in the week that's more fleshed out I went on to anti-depressants which did help with my depression but I did develop schizophreniform from the drugs they fixed my dosage and I haven't had a relapse of my psychosis in 4 years so I probably experienced the best of the best and the worst of the worst when it comes to medication but I'm somebody who would truly recommend it to anyone even with all of that I have met some people that are super against using medication in treatment for mental illness and that's totally fine but I think when you're presting ing the option of treatment it's something that should be addressed and people should know is there to try the problem is prescription drugs for mental illness in young adults is either totally dismissed and not discussed at all or is this kind of demodification of medication that is super super harmful there are certain disorders that when paired with traditional therapy medication can really help like anxiety and depression and I can tell you from experience this is a really great asset some of the time but unfortunately there are other disorders where research is really limited and for makeo theapy might be the only option and treating things like schizophrenia medication is just something that needs to be talked about when talking about mental illness we need to see the good and the Bad and the Ugly of all of these different stories but in my opinion we only see the bad and that really needs to change now I'm not saying that clinical therapy and drug therapy are the only options for mental illness because that's not the case but by excluding them completely or misrepresenting them you're creating very harmful stigmas against things that could potentially be very helpful to your target audience no I'm not an author and I don't claim to know how writing works but if you're writing a book about mental illness and you're not writing it for people who have suffered from mental illness and are looking for someone to identify with or writing for people who are looking for better information and new ways to learn about mental illness who are you really writing for I think that really concludes all of my thoughts on mental illness diversity and representation in young adult literature what I hope you take away from this discussion is firstly representation is relative what does or does not apply to you is not the same for everyone and that's why the topic of diers diversity is important to literature in General on a deeper level we cannot stop at inclusion we need to make sure that within that incorporation we have a widespread execution that does cater to all with the variety of stories that we are seeing personified illness is a thing that needs to stop Point Blank we need a wider spread of stories within a disorder being told because authors tend to follow the same progression of an illness and like I said not everybody's story is the same we need to stop highlighting certain disorders and neglecting others the excessive use of romance and mental on this novels can actually sometimes take away from the disorder which is a big problem and there needs to be more professional help included in these books this is a topic I am extremely extremely passionate about and I would love to keep the discussion going so please feel free to leave your thoughts on mental illness and books below what do we need more of what do we need less of what's being done right and what's being done wrong and of course don't forget to enter my Giant menta on this International book giveaway all of the guidelines and instructions for the give away or in the description of this video but that is it thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you tomorrow for a new video bye\n"