Mental Health in Fiction
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Increase your own awareness by reading these stories of mental illness, treatment, and wellbeing. Created April 2025.
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Coup De Grâce
Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station. (NoveList Plus)
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Martyr!
An alcoholic, addict and poet, Cyrus Shams, the orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, finds his obsession with martyrs leading him to examine the mysteries of his past and to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. (NoveList Plus)
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Rootless
Giving voice to the misgivings around motherhood and the pressures that those closest to us can bring to bear on pivotal decisions, this debut cracks the personal and familial wide open. (Library Journal)
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We Could Be Rats
Two small-town sisters have very different experiences of post–high school life...A dark story of unhappiness, mental health struggles, and growing up with volatile parents. (Kirkus)
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Alone With You in the Ether
An artist with bipolar disorder and an obsessive mathematician embark on an unconventional romance in this cerebral love story from Blake. (Publishers Weekly)
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The Red Arrow
Facing artistic failure, piled-up debt, marital woes, and a pervasive sense of dread, a young writer hopes to move forward by agreeing to ghostwrite a famous physicist's memoir, but things get even worse when the physicist disappears. Then our hapless protagonist undertakes an experimental psychedelic treatment and finds his life flooded with joy, as past and present suddenly crisscross. (Library Journal)
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One of Us Knows
A woman with dissociative identity disorder finds herself at the site of the childhood trauma that caused her break, fighting for survival against threats both external and internal. (Kirkus)
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The Flowers of Buffoonery
This opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes. The Flowers of Buffoonery pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love, and of self-hatred and depression. (NoveList Plus)
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Liar, Dreamer, Thief
A woman with OCD and carefully constructed coping mechanisms has her world crumble around her when she witnesses her unrequited crush and coworker jumping off the Cayatoga Bridge with an accusation that it’s all her fault. (NoveList Plus)
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More or Less Maddy
In the stirring latest from neuroscientist and novelist Genova, an NYU student’s life is changed by the onset of bipolar disorder. (Publishers Weekly)
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