Can Fiction Fight Stigma?

Can Fiction Fight Stigma?

My debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was about a woman with a marginalised identity. When I began writing it in 2008, many of those with that identity kept it hidden. We’ve become more familiar with that identity since that novel was published in 2015. Nevertheless, many readers still tell me my character, Diana, has increased their empathy and understanding. 

When I began my latest novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, set in a long-stay psychiatric hospital, I wasn’t thinking about changing attitudes. I was aiming to write an entertaining story set in a fictionalised version of my former workplace. I hadn’t anticipated how much readers would take the central character, Matty, into their hearts.

Although around one in four of us will have mental health problems in any given year, only around one in a hundred would receive a schizophrenia diagnosis in their lifetime. Meeting Matty on the page might be the closest many of my readers would knowingly get to someone diagnosed with a serious psychiatric disorder. Given the stigma surrounding mental health difficulties, that’s quite a responsibility.

If you’ve met Matty, you’ll know she’d rise to the occasion. However, as she doesn’t recognise herself as a patient, her sense of occasion may differ from ours. Admitted at twenty after having an ‘illegitimate’ child, her alternative reality has sustained her through fifty years’ incarceration. Ghyllside is a country estate, the nurses are servants, her fellow patients are houseguests and the psychiatrists are journalists keen for the latest gossip about a society heiress.

Matty’s grandiosity makes her entertaining company. However, I was determined she’d be more than a batty old biddy. I wanted readers to identify with her character. I wanted them to recognise her underlying pain.

Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home has three viewpoint characters; writing in the close third-person helped me get under their skin. Although the other two – particularly Janice, her social worker – present Matty sympathetically from the outside, Matty’s perspective from the inside, distorted as that may be, transforms her from an object of pity to a heroine.

I wrote Matty’s scenes with two conflicting realities in mind – hers and the hospital staff’s – and believing completely in both. My years as a clinical psychologist might have made this second nature, but isn’t this what all writers do? When we have compassion for our characters, we represent their truth as convincingly as possible, even if it differs from ours. When I made myself at home inside Matty’s head, I could be a conduit for her humanity: her warmth; her endurance; her flaws.

Such is the alchemy of writing fiction. But that’s not the whole story: I deployed some other techniques more deliberately to draw readers in.

Unlike the other two point-of-view characters, I wrote Matty’s scenes in the present tense. This felt authentic for her character, but I worried the shifts between past and present might jar on some readers. So far, no-one has commented on this. I hope that’s because it feels right.

In the old long-stay hospitals, a patient’s history began on admission. In fiction, a character’s backstory begins in childhood, or in generations before. I ensured I knew Matty’s history by writing a 30,000 word account of her life prior to the asylum. Although I wrote this to enrich my perception of her character, I discovered enough twists and turns to interest readers. I decided to include a condensed version in the book.

This historical thread accentuates the gap between Matty’s youthful aspirations and her wasted adult years. She dreamt of becoming a doctor, but the only career she’s had is as a mental patient. How can we fail to empathise, especially when the injustice of her situation is exposed? As one reviewer put it: “Matty’s story chilled me to the bone! I can’t imagine anyone reading this book and not being moved.” 

Through this strand, readers can trace the roots of her difficulties; indeed, they have more insight than the hospital staff. The psychiatric team dismiss Matty’s veiled allusions to past trauma as mere delusion. Readers see, not a jumble of psychiatric symptoms, but a woman’s survival struggle. When she loses control, the staff are baffled, but readers can see the situation from her point of view and empathise with her anger.

Stigma and prejudice thrive on fear and ignorance. Fiction increases empathy by allowing us to view the world through another’s eyes. We discover similarities can outweigh our differences; fellow human beings not us versus them. As we mark World Mental Health Day (on October 10th), I like to think of Matty fighting stigma, in her endearingly eccentric way.

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Anne Goodwin writes entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice. She is the author of three novels and a short story collection published by small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize. Her new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, is inspired by her previous incarnation as a clinical psychologist in a long-stay psychiatric hospital. Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of prize-winning short stories.

 

MATILDA WINDSOR IS COMING HOME

In the dying days of the old asylums, three paths intersect.

Henry was only a boy when he waved goodbye to his glamorous grown-up sister; approaching sixty, his life is still on hold as he awaits her return.

As a high-society hostess renowned for her recitals, Matty’s burden weighs heavily upon her, but she bears it with fortitude and grace.

Janice, a young social worker, wants to set the world to rights, but she needs to tackle challenges closer to home.

A brother and sister separated by decades of deceit. Will truth prevail over bigotry, or will the buried secret keep family apart?

In this, her third novel, Anne Goodwin has drawn on the language and landscapes of her native Cumbria and on the culture of long-stay psychiatric hospitals where she began her clinical psychology career.

 

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Category: On Writing