A rather big reason I like my current novel: the way it portrays family as
experienced by someone with a mental illness. I'm aware that family
intolerance and abuse exists, especially in cases with mental illness,
but I'm also aware that there are many cases where the family isn't intolerant, abusive, or otherwise harmful towards the family member with
the mental illness, even they don't understand the person's experience
or know what to do about it.
I don't know
for sure, but I'm willing to bet that there are less families that are
abusive/toxic towards people with mental illness than there are family
that are abusive/toxic. And even if that's not the case, I've seen a lot of abusive or dysfunctional families in fiction, to the point where I'm
beginning to think they might be just plain overrepresented. (Which
doesn't mean realistic representations of abuse are not necessary; they
are, but representations of another kind of reality would also be good.)
And
another thing I don't see a lot of in fiction: family members or
relationships that are toxic but not necessarily abusive or caused out
of ill will on the part of the toxic person. The novel I'm writing has a
character - the mentally-ill protagonist's aunt, who looks after him
for most of the story as he undergoes recovery - whose actions have a
mostly negative affect on her nephew until it is made very clear to her
the effect she's having. When it's pointed out to her that she needs to
change, she does so to the best of her ability. Furthermore, all her
toxic actions are born from the fact that she has an inherently
nurturing and protective personality and doesn't know what to do with it
when she's finally presented with a target for her nurturing and
protection. All of them. It's not because she's
bad/selfish/dysfunctional/bad at dealing with people/[insert other
negative trait here]. It's because she really, really wants someone to
look after (preferably in a mother/child kind of relationship but with
aunt/nephew being acceptable, too) and when she's finally put into that
kind of situation, she's ill-prepared for it and she doesn't realize
that a mentally-ill young adult (and thus, from her perspective,
vulnerable) shouldn't be treated the same as a child.
Maybe
I don't read/watch enough things with families in them, but I honestly
don't remember the last depiction I saw of a family that wasn't
dysfunctional or significantly not-ideal in some way. Which isn't to say
that I'm trying to write an ideal family or anything - I'm trying to
write a family that I think is realistic - but many of the families I've
seen in real life aren't like the families I see in fiction, in that
they're not as dysfunctional. (Actually, now that I'm thinking about it,
I can think of some examples of families portrayed in a positive light,
where none of the members are or were harmful to each other in any way,
but a lot of the time, one of, if not the, main message of the piece of
fiction was about how families are or can be good.)
I
don't know, I'm just really happy about portraying something that 1. I
don't think is portrayed very much in fiction, or 2. isn't likely to be
portrayed in this kind of story.
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