Within the past few years, there have been fierce discussions of representation in fantasy, specifically physical disabilities and chronic illnesses. Some argue that it’s unrealistic, as magic should heal all wounds, while others note that a good magic system has limits, and the human body is perhaps too complicated to fully heal.

I, certainly, believe it’s important to represent the full breadth of human experience, including disabilities. However, I’ve noted a potent disregard for a certain class of disabilities in these discussions: mental illness.

As a fantasy author and a person with Bipolar 1 disorder, I’d like to question why we can’t naturally integrate neurodivergency into our fantasy worlds. But first, let’s talk about what representation really means and how it should be used.

Representation should not be the primary selling point.

A good story is the selling point, not how many identities you have slathered upon a character.

Few things make me grit my teeth more than seeing books advertised with a heaping list of buzzword identities before we even know the plot. I do not want to know that this is about lesbian intersex POC vampires in space. I want to know why these characters are interesting.

Lord help me if you say they’re interesting because they are XYZ identity, because no they are not.

So telling me that you have a bipolar lesbian intersex POC vampire is still not going to get me interested. I have no idea whether you’re going to do a good job of representing this mental illness, just as I don’t know whether you’re going to do a good job representing any of the other identities you’ve added to signifiy that you are a Very Moral Author.

What would get me interested? Showing me that this mental illness has a primary role in the story, that it shapes the plot and the character, and that it introduces significant challenges similar to what I, or any other bipolar person, may experience.

The mental illness needs to mean something, or it’s simply virtue signalling.

Now, many people chafe at the idea that “every identity has to be there for a reason.” I would agree.

You can write a Black character without it having to be some deep story about racism, and you can have a gay character just because. That’s fine. In fact, I’d argue that this type of casual representation is essential.

Fantasy, and every other genre, doesn’t exist just for cishet white men. Humans are humans; we all have many of the same experiences, even if they are influenced by our marginalization (or lack thereof).

Have characters of whatever color, sexuality, gender identity, or etc that you please. Again, the representation is not the selling point; the story is. A character is not better or worse for being a certain race or sexuality, and banking on that to sell your series is a bad idea.

But.

Mental illness is a little different. It completely changes a person’s life: both their everyday experience and their overall trajectory. The earlier that a mental illness appears, the more it changes someone until they are not who they could have been.

Likewise, very serious mental illnesses like bipolar will make someone struggle with everyday things in ways that a layperson doesn’t even consider, such as wondering if they’re in the same reality as everyone else or frustration with their limitations.

This has to be relevant. You cannot just stick a mentally ill person in there and call it a day.

Trauma is everywhere in most fictional universes.

People make fun of superhero movies because the everyday people act like ants, blithely going on with their lives even as the world is being ripped apart by demigods. Maybe we get a little vignette of a scared child crying and the superhero comforts them, but for the most part, the background characters are sort of dehumanized: they run or scream, but nothing else. We don’t see lasting effects of these dramas.

These are popcorn movies where no one wants to think too hard, but once viewers leave the movie theatre, the mirage goes away and they’re left feeling unsatisfied.

If your city is being destroyed on a regular basis, wouldn’t you, I don’t know, leave? The fact that there’s denizens of Metropolis or Gotham after a few rounds of these battles is more surprising than that superheroes exist. Therapy sessions in these cities must cost a million dollars because demand is so high.

So there’s a reason that Marvel and DC Comics pump out dozens of these movies a year: people watch them once and move on. They don’t have staying power. The movies are so overwhelming on their own that you wring out all of the dopamine from them in one go and need your next fix.

It’s easy to drop a book, not quite so easy to leave a movie theatre mid-run. As such, us novelists are at a huge disadvantage; we must fight harder to keep our audience’s attention. We can do this by exploring the human condition in all its facets, making something that will stick with them. That means making things interesting and realistic.

Assuming that you’re working with humans as protagonists (because most fantasy stories do), then they’ve got act like IRL people. And IRL people get traumatized by quite a few things.

If you have wars in your fantasy story, you have trauma. If you’ve got famines, you’ve got trauma. If you have oppressive regimes, you have trauma.

There may be trauma behind the scenes you’re not seeing. No matter how wonderful your society, there are still going to be abusive people. There will be domestic violence, substance abuse, sexual assault, murder. These problems have existed since time immemorial, and as much as we may try to fix them, they are showing no signs of going away.

When traumatic experiences occur, mental illness isn’t too far behind. That’s just how it works.

Mental illness has existed in all cultures and all eras.

When I was studying abroad at University of Stirling, we read The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner in my Scottish Literature class. I did a presentation explaining how the MC’s symptoms closely matched a psychotic episode, including the fact that delusions often involve persecution and religious themes.

I also did research proving that James Hogg, being close to many medical professionals and alienists (the precursor to psychiatrists), would have been familiar with the emerging research into psychosis. He was a writer who loved exploring contemporary issues, and I’m sure that he would have been fascinated by this new topic.

But my peers didn’t believe me. They insisted that it was more logical to assume that the MC really was talking to the devil and that the book wasn’t an exploration of mental illness. To them, it was easier, simpler, and safer to assume that James Hogg, writing before the full formation of psychiatry, couldn’t possibly have seen, heard, or read about someone having a psychotic episode.

To say I was pissed to be set upon by 20 other students, all claiming I was making things up, would be an understatement. I had all the research right there, hours of digging into the stacks and exploring the evolution of psychology.

But I shouldn’t have been surprised, I guess.

I’ve come across this misconception of mental illness history more than you’d imagine. People really do seem to think that bipolar, schizophrenia, OCD, and other illnesses just magically cropped up when we started studying them. Because these conditions weren’t called out by name, and were instead implied or merely depicted, they did not exist back then.

That is clearly not true. Why would we have started studying mental illnesses if they weren’t already there? Did a bunch of people wake up one day and invent them? Of course not.

In fact, there’s evidence to suggest that bipolar disorder is the result of evolutionary pressures during the Pleistocene era and may have been caused by interbreeding with Neanderthals. Yup, guess you really can call me a Neanderthal and I can’t complain.

This mental illness is older than all of human literature, yet we somehow believe it’s never been depicted before the modern era. That’s pretty ridiculous. Diabetes, gout, and epilepsy have been documented throughout world literature and archaeology; no one would claim they appeared out of nowhere once modern medicine decided to call them something.

So if you’re creating a fantasy society, why wouldn’t there be mental illness? The disorders don’t need the same names we use to exist.

Of course, a second world would not have the same evolutionary adaptations as ours. Maybe there’s completely different illnesses we don’t have. Regardless, it’s clear that humans have developed all sorts of neuroses over history, and there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t in another world, too.

The human mind is complex, and magic is not a panacea.

So here’s the real meat of my argument, and it has to do with magic systems.

In my upcoming third book, Funeral of Hopes, Orrinir is grappling with what we would call C-PTSD. His parents were abusive and abandoned him at the War Academy, something that would absolutely destroy a child.

While he’s been able to manage stuff relatively okay for the first few decades of his life, everything is thrown into the air when he gets word that his estranged father is dying. Now he’s revisited by all these horrible memories he tried to suppress, and he doesn’t know how to deal with them.

He’s angry and scared; his abandonment issues crop up, and his relationship with Uileac suffers immensely. One minute, he’s pushing Uileac away, wanting to be alone, and the next he’s terrified that his lover is going to leave him forever.

And, of course, he doesn’t want to infodump all his feelings because they’re too scary to confront. We, and Uileac, get his background drip-fed to us over 60k-ish words; he can’t manage to get it all out in one go.

Understandably, Orrinir is looking for a quick fix now that he’s really struggling. High Poetry seems like the perfect solution, so he goes to Irith Druidinn and demands she help him.

Irith says no. She tells him that the human mind is far too complicated to mess with and that if she does the poem wrong, he could go insane.

And she’s right. The human brain is one of the most complex structures in the known universe. Even after over 100 years of psychiatric study, researchers still don’t know everything about mental illness; they’re not even quite clear on how bipolar actually happens or how to fix it.

We know that certain medications work but not really why. Hell, I’m on an anticonvulsant medication for my bipolar, and I don’t have epilepsy. They have theories on why this medication works but no clear answers; it just does.

So, if we have a society that doesn’t have MRIs and double-blind studies, and they have an inkling that the brain is super complicated and hard to fix, then why would they keep trying after a few disastrous experiments?

Omnipotent magic systems are boring because every single conflict seems pointless. If you can wave a magic wand and solve anything the characters come across, why write a story at all?

Giving magic realistic limitations, such as dealing with mental illness, makes them more grounded and, therefore, more interesting.

Mentally ill people deserve representation too.

Authors may shy away from representing mental illness for a few reasons:

• They don’t want to disrespectful;
• They just don’t want to do it;
• They’re not confident in their ability to accurately depict mental illness;
• They want to focus on all the fun happy adventurous parts of the story;
• They think that books being escapism means they must be divorced from reality, never tackling true challenges;
• They assume readers don’t want to think about mental illness.

These are all reasonable. You don’t have to do anything in your books that you don’t want to. Neither I nor anyone else is going to put a gun in your face and force you to write stuff you don’t like.

And yes, some readers may not want to read about mental illness, which is also reasonable.

But there are also a few reasons that authors may ignore mental illness that are … not so valid.

• They think that writing about mental illness is a downer;
• They believe that retconning real world problems is reasonable because no one wants to talk about mental illness in the first place;
• They think that mentally ill stories aren’t important;
• They have a limited understanding of mental illness and don’t want to learn;
• They only think of mental illness as a potential conflict and not a form of characterization;
• They think that mental illness is just being “quirky;”
• They think mental illness makes a character incompetent or helpless.

I’m probably not going to change your mind if you think this way, which is unfortunate.

Mentally ill people have a lot to give the world. We have interesting stories that can make unique plots, and we have a special lens on the human experience which other people may not understand.

You can help translate our experiences for others who may never gotten to know someone with bipolar, or OCD, or schizophrenia, or a Cluster B personality disorder, or any other mental illness.

And, most importantly, your depictions of mental illness can change minds.

Writers know that stories are important. Many of us have been transformed forever by picking up a certain book; it blew the doors open on an experience we may never have considered.

By depicting mental illness in a sensitive and thoughtful way, you can develop empathy in others, helping them see the connections between fantasy and real life.

You’re not obligated to, of course, but by doing so, you could make a real difference in real peoples’ lives.