One of the great advances of the last hundred years is the way we view mental illness.
People who once would have been shunned are now understood and supported.
It’s not easy for the sufferers or their family and friends, but that is where fiction can be so helpful in showing what mental illness feels like.
Perhaps the most influential novel about depression is The Bell Jar by the great American writer Sylvia Plath. Esther Greenwood, the heroine, is a bright, beautiful young woman who lands a job at a top fashion magazine.
But though she appears to have everything, she finds herself slipping into a terrible depression and ends up being committed to an institution after a suicide attempt.
That the novel is largely autobiographical is doubly poignant — Plath took her own life a few years after it was published. It’s particularly revealing about depression from the inside, showing how people who apparently have all life’s blessings can feel they have nothing worth living for.
The effect of attempted suicide on a family is explored in All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews.
Elfrieda is a concert pianist, beautiful with a loving husband, but she keeps trying to kill herself.
Her sister Yolanda, who is a novelist, loves her so much that when Elfrieda asks her whether she will take her to Switzerland to end her life, she is faced with an unbearable dilemma: is the real act of love to keep her beloved sister alive in a mental institution or to help her to die?
It’s a funny, tragic, agonising book that perfectly illustrates the bleak logic of depression and the challenging ethics surrounding it.
Jude St Francis, one of the characters in Hanya Yanagihara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A little Life, is a self-harmer. A brilliant lawyer, he was sexually abused as a child. Cutting himself with razor blades is his way of dealing with the pain he still feels.
His friends want to save him from himself, but Jude’s problems run too deep.
This long and heartbreaking novel is a profound reflection on the damage early trauma can do the psyche.
The author and broadcaster suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.
Daily Mail