Mental Health Awareness in YA Lit
TW: Mental health, depression, suicide, eating disorders, sexual assault
I had a very new experience with my internship this past week. I read a new book that I really enjoyed; I would go so far as to say that I would put it on the same level as books like The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska, and All the Bright Places — books that I read around age 14 that I held on a pedestal as my favorite YA literature at the time.
The problem, however, is that this book dealt very heavily with mental health issues. Not that that in itself is inherently bad; in face, I really enjoy when YA literature tackles deep issues like that and helps bring awareness. For some it may bring light to a topic they’ve never really understood, and for others it may help them feel like they’re being heard and represented.
The real issue with this book lied with how it approached this issue. For one, the main character is suicidal and readers are getting a first person perspective of how she feels. The very first scene we see of our protagonist is her visiting a pharmacy to ask someone how many sleeping pills you’d have to take for it to be lethal (under the pretense of being worried about a friend who’s taking sleeping pills regularly). As she’s going through this, she’s also mentally composing a suicide note and berating herself for nothing she writes being “good enough.” Pretty heavy stuff for just the first chapter, and it only gets worse from here.
Overall, the plot of the book centers around our protagonist’s decision to kill herself at the end of the week, unless the world shows her a reason why she should live. She’s away at college for the very first time, across the country from her family, and the only piece of home she has with her is the best friend she’s always envied for being prettier and more popular than her. She consistently feels inadequate next to her friend and at almost every turn she’s comparing herself to every other girl around her. At the same time, she can’t help but notice how every person perceives her (especially when standing next to the gorgeous best friend), and assumes that all attention she gets is negative, particularly when concerning guys. She craves positive male attention, wants a boyfriend more than anything, but has too much social awkwardness and self doubt to put herself out there to meet anyone.
None of this is outright wrong. I mean, as a girl very similar in age to the protagonist I could relate all too well to her perspectives. Unfortunately, this is pretty common girl behavior to compare ourselves to the other girls around us, pick apart our flaws, and hope someone will pay attention to us. I think the part that started to concern me, though, was the protagonist’s overwhelming desire to obtain a boyfriend — to the point that she seemed to think that getting one would be her sign that she should stay alive.
While I do think that it’s a normal part of treatment and recovery to find something to live for (I know many people who said that in the beginning of their progress they encouraged themselves to stay alive by saying their plants need them, or their pet), I don’t know how I feel about making that reason to live a romantic prospect. What happens if the relationship ends? Does that completely erase your reasons to live? Is your sense of self so attached to that other person that you literally can’t live without them? As someone who has struggled with suicidal thoughts in the past and who is in a healthy, long-term relationship, this just doesn’t add up for me. Being in a relationship has never eradicated my suicidal thoughts, unless you consider the times I’ve spoken to my partner about what I’m feeling. While talking to people close to me is helpful, his attention and affection toward me does not simply “fix” me and make me stop feeling all those negative things — it’s much more complicated than that.
But I digress. The real question that this brings to my mind is how much responsibility falls on the author here? Obviously the protagonist’s mindset is unhealthy, but this is just the beginning of her character arc. By the end she’s learned a lot and there is a definite positive message readers can come away with, and I can support that. However, until then, young impressionable readers are being exposed to a very unhealthy way of thinking, and only by reaching the end of the book will they, along with the protagonist, realize the fault in that.
Of course the hope is that every person that picks up this book will read the entire way to the end, but we also have to keep in mind that this is a book meant for teenagers, who are often distracted enough as it is (and many times aren’t willing readers). Combine that with the insight into depressive thoughts and I think it’s quite likely many readers will put the book down without finishing it. As part of my pitch letter for this book I researched teen suicide rates and they have grown significantly over the past decade, which leads me to believe that rates of depression in teenagers must be growing as well. And again, as someone who has struggled with suicidal thoughts, I fully believe that this initial insight into the protagonist’s thoughts would be incredibly triggering for a lot of individuals. I would hate for anyone to read this book and feel triggered so they put it down without reaching the positive message at the end; in that situation, they only leave the book with a mixture of bad feelings and likely a need to talk to someone so they don’t process it all negatively.
But again — does the responsibility fall on the author to approach this differently? In some ways, the author was just being very blunt and accurate about the thought process of someone planning to commit suicide. So should we just slap a Trigger Warning label on the book and call it good? Because for people who don’t struggle with depression or suicidal thoughts, this book could easily function as genuinely detailed insight into what those thoughts feel/look like. In telling a story to a certain audience, should authors be held accountable to take additional potential audiences into consideration as well?
If I’m not making sense, I’d like to reference the commonly unhealthy relationships in YA literature. Of course the one everyone knows is Edward and Bella of the Twilight universe. If it isn’t obvious enough that it’s clearly not a good basis for a relationship when Edward wants to eat Bella, Bella also becomes obsessed with Edward and wants to throw away her whole life to be with him. When he attempts to distance himself from her to protect her, she becomes depressed for several months because he was the center of her whole world, and she only gets better once he’s back in her life. She later decides to reject going to college in favor of marrying Edward and starting her life with him. As most adults would probably agree here — this isn’t a healthy portrayal of a relationship.
But, is it Stephanie Meyer’s job to portray a healthy relationship? I mean, her goal is most likely just to tell an entertaining story. How that affects young readers isn’t her problem, so should she be held accountable if reading Twilight results in young girls pursuing unhealthy relationships? It’s this idea that I find myself pondering with mental health in YA as well. Is it up to the author to be mindful of mental health triggers while writing, or is it enough to simply put a Trigger Warning?
In my opinion, I feel that authors do have some level of responsibility here. I, for one, am really tired of unhealthy portrayals of everything in YA. I’ve reached a point where I’m sick of female protagonists crushing on the guy that treats her like shit. I hear so many Cassandra Clare readers loving Jace from The Mortal Instruments or Will from The Infernal Devices, and then I read these books and just feel disappointed. I feel no connection to the relationships here, I feel no yearning for the male counterparts — I just feel annoyed that the main character is wasting her time on someone who doesn’t treat her well and adults have the audacity to call it romance. When will someone write a YA fantasy where the main character can have a normal, meaningful, healthy relationship for readers to swoon over, but also have that romance NOT be the center of the whole book? I came here for swordfights with supernatural creatures, not to be teased with a budding romance I don’t even care about.
But I also feel that it’s much more serious when you put this in terms of mental health. Maybe your protagonist does feel like the world owes them a reason to live, or that a boyfriend could be the only possible reason to live, but let their be an outside source relentlessly telling them the opposite so it’s at least clear this is going in a positive direction. Maybe that takes away from the elements of storytelling, but I’d rather have a less effective story than know that something I wrote triggered a young person negatively. But on the other hand, maybe I’m just overthinking and overreacting.
To get back to the book at hand, though, I felt it had pros and cons with other issues it dealt with. For one, one of the protagonist’s friends is sexually assaulted at a frat party. There are moments in the story where the protagonist talks about not knowing what to say to her friend — and seriously, no one ever tells you what you’re supposed to say to someone immediately following something like that, and what can you say that’s going to make any difference? At the same time, the oldest and most experienced member of the friend group makes it clear to everyone that what happens next should be entirely up to their friend — she should be the only one allowed to decide whether it gets reported, which is true.
On the other hand, I do not feel nearly as confident as the subtle victim-blaming that goes on. Not that any of the friends try to claim it was the victim’s fault, but the victim herself says over and over that she should’ve known not to follow the guy upstairs so it’s her own fault, and this idea never gets corrected in the end. Sure, us women are taught from a disturbingly young age what actions to take to avoid these situations — but at the end of the day it is still the r*pist’s fault for doing what they did, not the victim.
Besides this, throughout the book there are several references to weight. It is made abundantly clear over and over that this friend group has a “fat” friend and that because of her weight she can never be as pretty as everybody else. The author goes so far as to say what the girl’s weight is, which was an instant red flag to me. Citing that weight for young women to read, especially when connecting it to the idea of “fat,” is so potentially damaging for women who are near to or over that weight. Later on, another character claims that she “used to be fat” and says what weight she used to be, once again connecting the idea of fatness to a particular weight (which was also 30 lbs lighter than their “fat” friend). And, to top it all off, the protagonist stresses about her weight on the downlow, oftentimes making plans to eat pizza for dinner and then mentioning her morning run to “work off the pizza,” as if a couple slices while studying physics is going to make or break her. I’m not saying that working out to take care of your body is bad, but this idea that you can’t just eat a normal (especially for college students) meal for dinner is ridiculous.
Well, I’ve had my rant about this book. I spoke to my supervisor about these concerns, of course, and made them clear in my pitch letter as well, but I also feel like this particular book gave me a lot to think about in regards to my own values within the publishing industry. I hope that in the future I will be able to balance a line between mental health representation and not publishing content that is triggering.
