Kelly Jensen is an associate editor and community manager for Book Riot, as well as a former teen librarian, and a blogger at STACKED. Her writing has been featured in The Horn Book, School Library Journal, The Huffington Post, and VOYA Magazine. She’s the author of It Happens: Contemporary Realistic Fiction for the YA Reader, a pair of essays in the forthcoming The V-Word anthology edited by Amber Keyser (Beyond Words, 2016), and the editor of the forthcoming Feminism for the Real World (Algonquin Young Readers, 2017).
Many characters who may be mentally ill reject treatment out of hand, considering therapy a waste of time and suspecting medication will turn them into a zombie. Why are these narratives so popular? What are the alternatives?
What about readers like me, who never see their own illnesses depicted? To see story after story where depression draws a straight line to suicide is, for better or for worse, expressing that depression only functions in one way.