In this guest blog post, author and fomer Nottinghamshire Healthcare clinical psychologist Anne Goodwin writes about portraying mental illness in fictional characters.
In my work as a clinical psychologist, I sought to reduce the stigma of psychiatric diagnosis and emotional distress. When I began a second career as an author, I hoped I wouldn’t compromise on that ethical stance. But any kind of agenda can kill a novel. Writers often exaggerate, even sensationalise, to keep readers turning the page.
When I set my latest novel in a long-stay psychiatric hospital, I knew to avoid the madwoman in the attic trope typified by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. But did I risk promoting other harmful stereotypes in my attempt to entertain? Fortunately, reader feedback suggests Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home spreads a positive message about mental health.
Trusting my characters, my story, myself
This novel took six and a half years from inception to publication in May 2021. During that time, I had to set my doubts aside to focus on craft. I had to trust that, if my book was well-written – with credible characters, an authentic setting and intriguing plot – the rest would follow. I had to trust my professional experience would equip me to write sensitive fiction about mental health.
Nevertheless, I feared being torn between two sets of potential readers and pleasing neither. So I’m relieved readers both with and without mental-health knowledge have enjoyed the book.
Values in action
Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home is about a brother and sister separated for fifty years and the idealistic young social worker who tries to reunite them. Readers are introduced to the institution alongside Janice, who is in her first post-qualification job. They can share her horror at some of the practices and her determination to make it better through community care.
But Janice doesn’t see everything. She misses the abuse that still occurs in quiet corners of the hospital. She neglects the signs that good intentions don’t automatically produce good results.
Janice’s blind spots mean she can draw attention to the values of a more enlightened care system without dictating what readers should think. I hope they recognise our collective responsibility to create inclusive communities where everyone has a place.
A heroine with a schizophrenia diagnosis
Janice’s efforts to improve the residents’ quality of life are laudable, but the real heroine is a seventy-year-old patient. Matty was admitted at twenty after having an ‘illegitimate’ child. Her alternative reality has sustained her through fifty years’ incarceration. Ghyllside is a country estate, the nurses are servants, her fellow patients are houseguests and the psychiatrists are journalists researching stories about a society heiress.
Readers love her. They rage at the injustice she’s suffered. They admire her endurance. They forgive her flaws – snobbishness and indifference to her peers – as marks of her humanity. Even when confused by her logic, they applaud her commitment to her personal truth.
As they discover her history, readers can identify with Matty. She dreamt of becoming a doctor, but the only career she’s had is as a mental patient. When she loses control, readers recognise that she’s angry, not mad.
Humour
I didn’t intend to write a comical novel. In fact, I cringed when Matty turned out to be funny. Mental distress is no laughing matter. People given a psychiatric diagnosis are too often the butt of jokes. But I wanted Matty to be both good company and authentically mentally ill.
Fortunately, readers enjoy the humour and don’t feel it diminishes the tragedy. Some report lurching between sadness and laughter throughout the book. Matty’s eccentricity isn’t the only source of amusement. Often, the joke is on the staff who can’t see beyond her grandiosity. Or on the townsfolk, anxious about the prospect of former patients as neighbours.
The location of ‘madness’
In writing Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, I hoped to debunk the myth that those who receive a psychiatric diagnosis have little in common with those who don’t. One way of doing so, as described above, was to illustrate the ‘sanity’ of a character labelled schizophrenic; another was to show the derangement in characters considered ‘sane’.
All three main characters have overly optimistic expectations. All three have unrealistic beliefs. Janice, the young social worker, trusts her instincts more than her colleagues’ experience. Henry, who has waited five decades for his sister’s return, allows his father’s Victorian prejudices to cloud his judgement.
All three face a destabilising personal crisis. Whether they emerge wiser is for readers to decide.
Find out more about Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, including reader reactions, here on my website.
Anne Goodwin is a former clinical psychologist with Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust who writes entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize. Her new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, is published by Inspired Quill. Anne will be talking about her novel in the context of asylum history at The Bookcase in Lowdham on 12 October 2021.