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  • Josiah DeGraaf replied to the topic Mental Illness/Disorders In Christian Fiction in the forum General Writing Discussions 6 years, 8 months ago

    There are a lot of good thoughts here already, so I suppose I’m mostly going to be piggybacking off what other people have said! 🙂 Like @ncstokes alluded to, I don’t see a lot of representation of characters with mental illnesses or disorders in the Christian fiction I’ve read. The closest I’ve seen people generally get is by portraying characters with depression or anxiety–and normally in those cases they’re portrayed as spiritual problems to overcome (which certainly can be the case for some people), not as also being mental illnesses (which can also definitely be the case for some people). The only Christian book I can think of that depicts a character with a mental disorder is Death Comes for the Deconstructionist by Daniel Taylor, which won the Christianity Today award for best novel a couple years back, but my memory is pretty fuzzy on the book.

    I suspect that many writers are scared away from this subject by the wealth of research that needs to be done to do this well along by fear of offending someone. But I definitely think that depicting more characters with mental illnesses or disorders is important and would love to see more Christian works doing so!

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