From depression and trauma to borderline personality disorder, mental health concerns affect millions of people every day. As someone who battles depression and anxiety, I know all too well how they can impact daily life. Yet, where does mental health fit in a fantasy setting? How does a bipolar or obsessive compulsive protagonist fare while also encountering new planets, the magical, and the supernatural?
In recent years, there has been a steadily growing wealth of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror novels dealing with mental health, often resulting in powerful character arcs. There has been nothing more satisfying than to see a protagonist coping with mental illness becoming powerful enough to save themselves and the entire world. Here are just eight examples.
The Wintersong duology by S. Jae Jones
I’m a sucker for fairy tale retellings and was delighted to learn that the Wintersong duology was influenced by the 1986 film Labyrinth, German fairy tales, and the Erl-King myth, among other things. Wintersong tells the story of aspiring music composer Liesel, whose dreams are slipping away due to her duty to run her family’s inn and look after her sister Kathe. When her sister is kidnapped by the alluring and formidable Goblin King, she must undertake a perilous journey to save her by risking another thing she loves most: her music. There is some steamy romance, but it’s also a story of reclaiming your truest, most unbridled self. Liesel shows the symptoms of bipolar disorder in this book and it was wonderful to see her be loved and lusted after while she tries to recover everything that matters most to her.
The concluding sequel, Shadowsong, is much darker and introspective than its predecessor, but no less magical. Even though Liesel is back from the Underground, she can’t forget the Goblin King and things have changed for the worst. She and her violinist brother Josef are finally trying to follow their musical dreams, but they are distant. Not to mention, the barrier between aboveground and the underground is weakening. Throughout all this, her bi-polar disorder is out in full force, referred to in the book as “her madness” and drawing from the author’s own experiences. Now, Liesel must face her demons and discover the true origins of The Goblin King if she is to save herself and those she loves. By exploring bi-polar disorder through Liesel and depression and addiction through Josef, this book shows that you can manage your madness if you face it head on with help from your loved ones.
A Darkly Beating Heart Lindsay Smith
After a failed suicide attempt, teen Reiko is sent to her family in Japan to learn to get a handle on her emotions. Unexpectedly, she is sent to 19th century Japan while visiting the historic village of Kuramagi. In the 19th century, Reiko lives as Miyu, a young woman that gives Reiko’s anger and hate a run for her money. When Reiko discovers the secret of Kuramagi, she must come to terms with Miyu’s personal demons as well as her own. Reiko has anti-hero vibes about her, which piques my interest even more.
For a Muse of Fire by Heidi Helig
In the land of Chakrana, the Chakarans are made second class citizens after being invaded by the Aquitans from across the sea. Jetta and her family the Chantrays have learned to survive by performing shadow puppetry for their oppressors. Jetta’s shadow puppetry is particularly special because she infuses the shadows with the soul of the dead, but this must be kept secret. When Jetta and her family get the chance to travel to the Chakrana capital and go to Aquita, Jetta learns of a possible cure for her “malheur”, a stand-in for bi-polar disorder according to the author. Jetta must decide whether the cure is worth risking the secret of her shadow puppetry and her family’s livelihood. With a creative take on necromancy, searing anti-colonialism commentary, and vibrant world-building, this book is great for readers craving a new fantasy series.
The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle
It’s not hard to see how the horror genre can be used to explore mental illness by making the monsters in a person’s head come to life. Set in the fictional New Hyde Mental Institution, the novel begins with the main character, Pepper, being admitted in handcuffs for a 72-hour psych evaluation. On the first night, Pepper is attacked by a terrible creature. When other patients confirm that the creature is real and roams the halls at night, they must come together and face demons from within and without. While the main character has no mental illness, the other patients have ailments that range from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder to obsessive compulsive disorder. The book also tackles the unfortunate reality that is a faulty mental healthcare system that turns its staff and lack of resources into something truly terrifying.
Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves
This gem of an urban fantasy book centers on Hanna, a biracial Black girl with bipolar disorder and the new girl in the town of Potero, Texas. She moved there wanting to be loved by her mother Rosalee, but receives coldness, and a deal: If she can stay in the town for two weeks without being weirded out, she can stay at her mother’s. From there, things get trippy and sensual as she starts seeing horrible creatures and becomes close to Wyatt, a young man with mysterious powers. This book tackles themes like death, mother-daughter relationships, power, acceptance, and more. I had to take my time reading this due to some of the triggering content, but the payoff was worth it.
Borderline by Mishell Baker
Millie, a double amputee and suicide attempt survivor with borderline personality disorder, is recruited to join a secret organization that monitors the traffic of mythical creatures to and from a parallel world. On top of that, this organization (known as The Arcadia Project) gives her a mission that involves finding a movie star that is part of the Seelie Court of fairies. Talk about glamorous on multiple levels! Borderline is the first book in an entire series revolving around Millie’s involvement with The Arcadia Project and her mental health struggles.
The Red Threads of Fortune by Neon Yang
This powerful novella is technically part two of the Tensorate novella series, but can also be read as a stand-alone. After the tragic death of her daughter, ex-prophet Mokoya Sanao has been hunting sky creatures—naga—in the wilds and keeping to herself, traumatized and suicidal. While on the trail of a particularly threatening naga, Mokoya meets another naga hunter, the bewitching Rider. As they learn more about their prey, the two of them discover a secret that threatens the land of the Protectorate and forces Mokoya to come to terms with her past and whether or not her powers as a prophet can change the future. The most moving thing about this novella is how grief, loss, and trauma affects the characters differently and how the characters recover by building healthy relationships through honesty and compassion.
Latonya Pennington is a Black Asian queer freelance pop culture critic. They have written for Strange Horizons, Solrad, and Black Sci-fi among many others. Their work can also be found on their website.
About 90% of Philip K Dick’s oeuvre deals with (lack of) mental health.
The Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson might be the most high-profile fantasy example of this, as discussed most wonderfully here on Tor: https://www.tor.com/2018/06/05/ideal-heroes-mental-illness-in-brandon-sandersons-stormlight-archive/ Most of the centermost protagonists have some type of mental illness, portrayed with great authorial care and often highly relatable, and they have ups and downs in their efforts to cope with their own minds’ pitfalls whilst living, loving, and leading the fight against a planetwide apocalypse.
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this topic was C.S. Friedman’s _This Alien Shore_. If you’re going to venture into a hyperspace full of deadly monsters, paranoia is the only way to survive. So, in a way, it’s lucky that the *first* attempt at FTL irreversibly changed everyone who used it — because some of them changed into people with the right kind of variation to succeed as pilots.
But what if your planet doesn’t have anyone with the right kind of altered brain function? Well, maybe you could try a little secret human experimentation… until someone helps your test subject flee off-planet.
The Awakeners (may be bound separately as Northshore and Southshore) by Sheri S. Tepper is largely about how people manage (or don’t manage) to live in a culture that was founded on cognitive dissonance. Mental illness, as might be expected, is common. Some people join the Jarb Mendicants, who have discovered (or perhaps inherited) an herb native(?) to the planet that appears to be a perfect antipsychotic, and whose towers are refuges for all sorts of people the maintainers of cognitive dissonance do not like. Some go into the river and emerge transformed into living statues that cannot feel the more painful emotions. Some take far more drastic measures.
Spoilers, ROT13 to translate:
Gur crbcyr ng gur obggbz yvir jvgu na nyy-creinqvat eryvtvba gung nccrnef gb or urnivyl qvfgbegrq zrqvriny Pngubyvpvfz, pbzcyrgr jvgu gnetrgrq rguavp tebhcf, gbyrengrq bhgfvqref, cranapr, naq chetngbel. Gur crbcyr ng gur gbc xabj gung jung’f ernyyl tbvat ba vf gung gur crbcyr ng gur obggbz ner yvirfgbpx, jub ner hfrq nf sbbq (juvyr fgvyy fbeg bs nyvir) sbe gur angvir fncvragf, jub qrfgeblrq gurve bja sbbq fbhepr. Va erghea, gur angvir fncvragf cebivqr gur crbcyr ng gur gbc jvgu n fhofgnapr gung cebybatf gurve yvirf rabezbhfyl. Abegufuber vf nobhg yvivat va guvf flfgrz; Fbhgufuber vf nobhg gur nsgrezngu bs vgf pbyyncfr.
@1, Dick wrote an entire book dedicated to a planet settled by groups of people with different mental health problems, “Clans of the Alphane Moon”. That book should have been at the top of the list but sometimes TOR writers have a recency bias and favour more recently published books.
These days I tend to give Orson Scott Card a wider berth, but I’m thinking of the planet of rulers who don’t know they all have terrible OCD in Xenocide. (I was a teenager aware of having OCD but not getting the help I needed for it – adults kept dropping the ball – so seeing it portrayed in fiction was at least a solace.)
James A. Hetley has a protagonist with diagnosed as schizophrenic in The Summer Country, though that turns out to be a mix of actual trauma and the notion that having access to multiple worlds really does a number on the human brain.
I read both The Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan as dealing with mental illness. Both deal with darkness in and uncommon way that, when read from a mental health perspective, is quite helpful.
Here’s a couple of my favorite books that place mental health at the center of the story.
The Hollow City – Dan Wells (scfi story, deals with schizophrenia)
Michael Shipman is paranoid schizophrenic; he suffers from hallucinations, delusions, and complex fantasies of persecution and horror. That’s bad enough. But what can he do if some of the monsters he sees turn out to be real?
I Am Not A Serial Killer (John Cleaver Book 1) – Dan Wells (urban fantasy, deals with sociopathy)
John Wayne Cleaver is dangerous, and he knows it.
He’s spent his life doing his best not to live up to his potential.
He’s obsessed with serial killers, but really doesn’t want to become one. So for his own sake, and the safety of those around him, he lives by rigid rules he’s written for himself, practicing normal life as if it were a private religion that could save him from damnation.
Dead bodies are normal to John. He likes them, actually. They don’t demand or expect the empathy he’s unable to offer. Perhaps that’s what gives him the objectivity to recognize that there’s something different about the body the police have just found behind the Wash-n-Dry Laundromat—and to appreciate what that difference means.
I would like to see a fictional character who explicitly has a schizophrenia diagnosis, does not commit acts of extreme violence, and is not a thinly veiled autobiographical account of the author’s own experiences (as in ‘I never promised you a rose garden’).
There’s a literal handful of such characters, in any medium. About half of the Wikipedia list of characters with schizophrenia are comic book supervillains. It is a low bar, yet even in these days of representation and diversity, almost never achieved.
What I would really appreciate is a character with schizophrenia who you’d be happy to have as a babysitter, or in some similar position of trust. I haven’t yet found anyone at all like that. Suggestions very welcome.
The Webtoon Space Boy by Stephen McCranie has many characters with mental health issues, and directly addresses things like PTSD and depression without making them either defining for the characters or unimportant. It isn’t what the story is about but it is part of the human experience of the characters.
Gateway by Frederick Pohl is a multi-award winning novel that’s literally about a man going through psychotherapy for PTSD, and I would suggest that’s probably a better example than any of the above novels, none of which, I’m sorry to say, I have ever heard of.
Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “The Drowning Girl” is an award-winning novel that definitely belongs on this list.
A Mirror in Her Dreams and its sequel are pretty great examples of this, though I’m hesitant to diagnose the exact problem the main character has. Both are great books and well-narrated if you like audiobooks.
Series Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever belongs on this list as well. Protagonist suffers from post Leprosy infection, and struggles with depression, and paranoia
I’m surprised that Gideon the Ninth and the follow up Harrow the Ninth aren’t on here. Both deal with mental health issues.
CJ Cherryhs ‘Chanur’ books deal with mental health insofar as the central character is on the edge of a complete mental breakdown. I love her writing but her books often leave me wrung out by the end :-)
David Gemmel wrote Dark Moon and the character of Tarantio specifically he wanted to write someone with explicit mental issues as the hero. If I recall the interview correctly, he worked with kids with behaviour issues, with many of them were dealing with mental issues, and one straight up told him people with mental issues are always the bad guys, never the hero, so this kid had accepted his mental issues meant he was going to be a bad guy.
Most of Gemmell’s characters are dealing with trauma and mental issues, but Tarantio <spoilers and trigger warnings>
had created a second personality after childhood trauma (small child finding, and failing to save, his father committing suicide by hanging). The second personality, Dace, is very protective of Tarantio but also very aggressive, petty and malicious.
I don’t think it’s a medically accurate portrayal, but it’s a conscious choice by the author to create a narrative with a positive portrayal of someone with mental issues
David Gemmel wrote Dark Moon and the character of Tarantio specifically he wanted to write someone with explicit mental issues as the hero. If I recall the interview correctly, he worked with kids with behaviour issues, with many of them were dealing with mental issues, and one straight up told him people with mental issues are always the bad guys, never the hero, so this kid had accepted his mental issues meant he was going to be a bad guy.
Most of Gemmell’s characters are dealing with trauma and mental issues, but Tarantio <spoilers and trigger warnings>
had created a second personality after childhood trauma (small child finding, and failing to save, his father committing suicide by hanging). The second personality, Dace, is very protective of Tarantio but also very aggressive, petty and malicious.
I don’t think it’s a medically accurate portrayal, but it’s a conscious choice by the author to create a narrative with a positive portrayal of someone with mental issues
I’m so glad you included Borderline as I haven’t heard anyone ever discuss it and I don’t even know how I found it. The protagonists mental disorder is absolutely central to the novel, much more so than anything else I’ve read.
Cold Fire by Dean Koontz starts like a superhero novel, but reveals itself to be about unassimilated childhood trauma.
Not a single example in the is article with a male protagonist? Really? I’m disappointed. Mental issues don’t just happen to women. Maybe change the title of the article to reflect that you’re only writing about female protagonists, otherwise it be nice to have a more diverse list.
Wintersong has been on my TBR forever. This has convinced me to move it up the list ASAP!
Just thought I’d mention the Jurisdiction novels (go Andrej!) by Susan R. Mathews–at one point, it’s a throwaway mention that the hero has put himself on psychotropics to endure an unendurable situation/universe since he’s nearly died a couple of times by self-medicating with overproof cortac to excess.
Is that a typo? Is ‘as’ intended to be ‘with’?