Writing for your mental health

Imjustdru

Man. This speaks to me on a deep level. My writing came from a moment that effected me emotionally and mentally.

First, it was poetry. Then I dug deep and wrote a comic book to ease the pain. My thing is I may have used writing as a crutch those years ago before I took a different approach to living.

Thanks.

Arrow

I’ve heard that some really good authors die early because of mental reasons or so, it’s sad. Thank you for this post! I’m hopping right back to writing, since I really haven’t been doing much lately.

Glitterpen

Thanks for writing this great blog post. It’s a good reminder for us to practice self-care and seek help when we need it. I think I’ve gotten to a place where I don’t think of myself as “a schizophrenic nutjob with anxiety/depression.” I’m a person with many skills who is living with and suffering from schizophrenia and some other health issues.

Writing isn’t therapeutic for me (in that it doesn’t lessen the symptoms of my illnesses), but it helps me understand the world better, because I ask so many more questions about life than I used to. It also gives me purpose and it’s another skill that I have (which makes me feel good). I got into writing, mostly because I read so much. One day, someone suggested I should write a novel, so I added that goal to my bucket list. I wasn’t too keen on it to start with, but it turned out to be a decent hobby.

Yeller

Writing poetry surely saved my mother’s sanity and perhaps her very life. She and her siblings grew up in deep poverty in the 1930s, even living in a cave dugout for a time. Then her brothers went off to WWII and returned with what we now know as PTSD. Suicides, child abuse and violence followed them home. Then mom married and lost a child to a farm accident, and another child was born with severe problems due to some 1950s pregnancy drugs. All of her siblings and extended family suffered poverty, suicides, crime and so on. Only she came through all that … and she often reflected that it was because she began to write poetry. A wonderful older poet took her under her wing and helped her. She said poetry helped her organize the world in her mind, even if she wasn’t specifically writing about her own personal problems. I recently read that Hemingway said the same thing. Writing gives organization and meaning to the mind, and to a troubled mind that can be a godsend.

Vkkerji

I totally agree with you!

Giglio

Agreed, in general. Your mother’s story is encouraging.

Writing can also be an obsessive compulsion, and loss of the ability to achieve self-imposed standards can create trouble in various forms.

G

Hippie

What a great message, thanks for sharing. I like to thinking of my writing as not only self-reflection therapy, but a chance to rewrite my story. We live, we learn, and we grow.

Miked

Some of my best scenes are ripped from real life. I don’t have the same type of issues- mine are physical- but I draw often upon those issues in writing.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is told entirely from the Chief’s POV, a paranoid schizophrenic.

David and Jordi and Lisa are deep and personal dives into the world of schizophrenia, illustrating how mentally compromised people can reach out to experience love. It was written by a famed psychiatrist.

David Foster Wallace’s MC in Infinite Jest is a smart, high-functioning schizophrenic. Wallace’s treatment of the MC is best-of-class and completely original in style. Ulysses for Millennials.

It may be too personal for you to write about but I get the impression from your posts that maybe it’s not. I think a look into a schizophrenic world would make for a fascinating story depending upon how you write it. You don’t have to write every painful episode, and you can make up or embellish others- that’s the beauty of fiction.

Glitterpen

I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Older books like that made me think twice about asking for help. Even asking questions about mental illness, like if we’re still forced on meds, could tip off someone into thinking I’m losing my marbles. For a while, I was terrified of being locked away and forced on meds, until the schizophrenia became unbearable and I had no other choice but to ask for help.

I’m open about the illness to an extent. Sometimes, I think I wouldn’t want to write anything that embarrasses other people. Other days, I believe I shouldn’t care, because they have it coming.

Miked

The keyword here is “older”. It’s not like that anymore, or if there are places like that they are rare. I have some insight thanks to my son.

Absolutely! Sock it to 'em, right between the eyes. That’s what makes an effective story.
If it’s too much for them, they won’t read it.

These are older as well. Written by a psychiatrist, for a more realistic and empathetic view.

Imjustdru

Word? I saw the movie with good ol’ Jack Nicholson and it was fantastic!

Alexmcg

I’ve been writing almost as long as I can remember. I wrote my first novel when I was fourteen. (I have it on my shelf to keep me humble.) So I have been producing stories for a half century. I had a few run ins with depression, but it didn’t affect my writing.

Then about eight years ago I burned out at work while dealing with a chronic pain issue. The result was severe depression. Since then, my writing life has shifted from white water canoeing to try to paddle through wet cement.

My depression doesn’t define me, but it slows down the process of my being my self. Writing for me is less about treating depression than hanging on to life with all my strength. I may or may not get my mojo back, but I refuse to stop creating stories.

My characters have their own struggles which have their roots in my living of which depression is only a small part.

Miked

Try the book. Different POV, just as fantastic! Ken Kesey’s writing is fresh and subversive.

Writestuff

I feel like for me writing and mental health are connected. But not always in good ways.

I definitely fall into that category of having a lot of stuff in childhood and stuff like that that I use writing as a way to explore and figure out.

But at the same time my work is never autobiographical, whatever $hit I’m working out through my writing it’s pretty well hidden in allegory and metaphor. Not intentionally I might add. It’s just that I’m reader-minded if not commercially minded in my writing. I want to write stuff people want to read and connect to.

On the flip side my desire to write to find time to write and to make some sort of material success out of it has at times had a really negative effect on my mental health.

On one hand my writing is my therapy on the other hand I do ultimately want and need it to go some place in the end.

Glitterpen

Realistically, I’d get face a lawsuit if I were to talk about certain things that have happened to me. It’s likely I’d never win, because anything I write in a biography about schizophrenia would only serve to strip more and more credibility from me. I’m not doing well financially.