Discussing male mental illness representation in contemporary literature

When we think of literature about mental illness, we might recall the more famous texts – Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, or Suzanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, for instance. On the surface, this makes sense: women are more likely to be diagnosed with a mental health condition, and conversations about women’s mental health and illness are more accepted within culture. However, men’s mental illness has impacts on rates of suicide, which are nearly 3 times that of women in the UK. Talking about male mental health and illness is vital: there have been many campaigns in recent years to continue the conversation, from the Movember Charity, CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), to celebrity figures discussing their mental health in the media (Louis Capaldi, Prince Harry). These conversations seemingly open up opportunities to challenge the stigma against mental health struggles in men. Books written about men’s mental illness, however, are more common than many may assume. But do these books tell the same story as those about women?

In my research, I have found that there are many recent books that seemingly explore the male experience: these include A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara, US, 2015), Imagine Me Gone (Adam Haslett, US, 2016), The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes, UK, 2011), Isaac and the Egg (Bobby Palmer, UK, 2022), The Marriage Plot (Jeffrey Eugenides, US, 2011), Swimming Home (Deborah Levy, UK, 2011), and Restless Souls (Dan Sheehan, UK, 2018). Each of these books engages with male mental illness, including depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder and suicide. Each of these books, too, presents a limited view of the male experience.

This has been the major thread running through depictions of male mental illness in contemporary literature. Whereas the well-known texts about women might explore how it feels, for the male experiences, there is a need to justify why it’s happening. For example, in A Little Life, perhaps the best known of this collection, the author Hanya Yanagihara devotes much of the book to exploring the causes and reasons behind central character Jude’s poor mental health. Jude’s experience is narrated for him rather than by him, and the flashbacks and history become a reason for his behaviour. This is a pattern across stories about male mental illness – men are often spoken for, and their behaviour explained rather than their experience being explored.

Why is this important? Surely fiction can offer different perspectives? Well, yes. But when it becomes a pattern that men’s mental illness has to be given a ‘reason’, then it reflects and reinforces stigma around men’s mental illness in culture. Despite there being these ongoing conversations, the lack of engagement with the experience suggests we’re still a bit uneasy with men’s emotions that don’t conform to our expectations.