Mental Illness In Young Adult Literature

This book explores how mental illness is portrayed in 21st-century young adult fiction and how selected works can help teachers, librarians, and mental health professionals to more effectively address the needs of students combating mental illness. Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters highlights American young adult literature published since the year 2000 that features characters grappling with mental illness. Chapters focus on mental disorders identified by the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD, and OCD. Each chapter begins with a description of a mental illness that includes its prevalence, demographic trends, symptoms, related disorders, and treatment options before examining a selection of young adult texts in depth. Analysis of the texts explores how a mental illness manifests for a particular character, how that character perceives him- or herself and is perceived by others, and what treatment or support he or she receives. The connections between mental illness and race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and identity are examined, and relevant research from education, psychology, and adolescent health is thoroughly integrated. Each chapter also provides a list of additional readings. An appendix offers strategies for integrating young adult literature into health curricula and other programs.

Young adult literature is aimed directly at adolescent readers and generally attempts to address the perceived real-life concerns and issues of that population. However, despite the fact that many adolescents live with mental illness, there are very few examples of YA literature that present accurate representations of the experience of living with a mental illness. This study examines problematic representations of mental illness and mental health care in young adult literature. Because this issue is complex, it requires an interdisciplinary approach in order to historicize and deconstruct these depictions.

Fostering Mental Health Literacy through Adolescent Literature provides educators a starting point for engaging students in the study of adolescent literature that features mental health themes with the intended goal of developing students’ mental health literacy while simultaneously attending to English Language Arts content and literacy standards. Each chapter, co-authored by a literacy expert and mental health specialist, features a specific adolescent novel and provides middle and high school teachers background information on the novel’s featured mental health theme(s), along with pedagogical approaches for guiding readers into, through, and out of the novel. In doing so, this text seeks to raise awareness of mental health issues thereby reducing associated stigma and normalizing individual and peer mental health experiences for all adolescents.

This book explores how mental illness is portrayed in 21st-century young adult fiction and how selected works can help teachers, librarians, and mental health professionals to more effectively address the needs of students combating mental illness. Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters highlights American young adult literature published since the year 2000 that features characters grappling with mental illness. Chapters focus on mental disorders identified by the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD, and OCD. Each chapter begins with a description of a mental illness that includes its prevalence, demographic trends, symptoms, related disorders, and treatment options before examining a selection of young adult texts in depth. Analysis of the texts explores how a mental illness manifests for a particular character, how that character perceives him- or herself and is perceived by others, and what treatment or support he or she receives. The connections between mental illness and race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and identity are examined, and relevant research from education, psychology, and adolescent health is thoroughly integrated. Each chapter also provides a list of additional readings. An appendix offers strategies for integrating young adult literature into health curricula and other programs.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, twenty percent of youth ages thirteen through eighteen live with a mental health condition, with fifty percent of all lifetime cases of mental illness beginning by age fourteen. Although mental illness is a fairly common health problem, it is more stigmatized and less accepted than most physical illnesses. One mental illness that epitomizes this idea is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), an anxiety disorder that consists of both unwanted ideas and behaviors. OCD impacts fewer individuals than other mental illnesses, such as generalized anxiety disorder, but it is arguably more debilitating and stereotyped. This lack of understanding and negative perceptions can result in people, especially young adults, with symptoms of OCD feeling afraid to talk about their issues and seek help. If they are not able or willing to talk to others about mental health concerns, then the information they receive about mental health may come from other places, such as the books they read. Young adult literature is rising in popularity, and many books featuring mental illness have been published in recent years. This project analyzes the existing young adult literature featuring OCD in order to help practitioners and young readers discern which of these books are most useful in representing OCD for both readers with this mental illness and readers who have not encountered it directly.

This thesis project includes a written short story titled "Quiet Dissonance" that explicitly depicts anxiety and depression within the genre of Young Adult literature. The purpose of this story is to consciously de-stigmatize the mental health issues by depicting these mental disorders as authentically as possible with both research and my own real-life experience of being diagnosed with both anxiety and depression, rather than relying upon stereotypes and the influence of the media. This story is consciously written through the point of view of first person narration, allowing for further exploration into the interiority of the thoughts of the protagonist as they struggle with the reality of their mental health issues versus how they are presenting themselves to the people around them.

This text offers 6th - 12th grade educators guided instructional approaches for including diverse young adult (YA) literature in the classroom as a form of social justice teaching and learning. Through the YA books spotlighted in this text, educators are provided pre-, during-, and after reading activities that guide students to a deeper understanding of topics that are often considered taboo in the classroom - race, racism, mental health, immigration, gender, sexuality, sexual assault - while increasing their literacy practices.