Hey, everybody! Mental health issues impact a lot of people, and it’s important to represent them accurately in fiction. Here are some tips to help you write about mental health—let’s get started!

Motivation

What’s your motivation for writing about mental health issues? Is it to eliminate stigmas? Provide clarity? Be realistic to your characters and plot? It’s important to remember these reasons. Keeping them at the forefront of your mind will help you to avoid being insensitive or painting a bad picture of people suffering from these issues. Mental health issues are a real problem for a lot of people, and you need to write them with empathy and understanding.

Research

This is crucial when writing in general, but becomes even more important with topics such as mental health. The last thing you want to do is rely on stereotypes, which already have a negative impact on people dealing with…