In my humble opinion, Jacqueline Ramsden (she/they) has an absolutely uncanny ability to hit the nail on the head with her characters. Every book of theirs is a delight, with characters so vivid you feel that you actually know them as personal friends – every layer of them, including whatever struggles or mental health conditions they may be dealing with too. The Art of Growing is a book I’ve read three times now because Sloane and Polly were such intriguing characters, and having read Jacqueline’s answers to this interview, the rest of her books are being bumped up on my TBR! So let’s see what they have to say… over to you, Jacqueline!
Firstly, what does mental health mean to you?
I think mental health is everything. Whether a person has good mental health or not, it impacts your mind in such a way that everything can be impacted by it, and that makes it unbelievably important.
I don't know that it feels that way for everyone, but for me, it's a huge part of my life. I imagine if your mental health is good, it's easier not to have to consider it or be impacted by it constantly, but, because mine tends to be a bit more of a struggle, I'm always very aware that everyone else might, at any point, be dealing with mental health challenges. For me personally, mental health is synonymous with C-PTSD and anxiety because these are the two conditions through which my life is filtered. There's been some depression in the past, but C-PTSD and anxiety are really the two biggest parts of my mental health.
My mental health impacts everything I can do, everything I can't. It's the thoughts in my head, the—often unpleasant—sensations in my body, the way I interact with people, and the way I react to the world around me. Essentially, it is the lens through which we experience the world and mine happens to be ill. The conditions may not be everything I am, but they are such a huge and inescapable part of my life that it would be disingenuous to ever claim that mental health isn't in everything.
Why did you choose to write about mental health in your books?
Partly because I think it's incredibly important and partly because it's unavoidable for me. I'm not certain I have a very solid grasp on what it's like to exist without your mental health being something that's constantly impacting you and needing to be considered. Obviously, everyone has mental health, but I don't really get any days where mine feels good and like I don't have to think about it. So, when it comes to writing, mental health is this massive thing that absolutely has to be part of the story. And, because I can't seem to exist outside of what's going on in my mind, as soon as I start writing characters, what's going on in their heads is the biggest part of them that I get, that becomes the story, and it's the one I want to tell because it's so true to how my everyday life is.
Even when I set out to write something that isn't specifically about mental health, pieces of it are there. I think you could pick up any of my books and see mental health themes. Actually, I think you could pick any of them up and learn more about my own mental health than I was planning on revealing, but I didn't see enough people like me in books when I was growing up, and I'm definitely committed to writing those stories now. I think it's important representation, I can't seem to not do that, and I like building worlds that turn out gentler than the one I inhabit. My characters will experience some of the mental torment I do, but it will always turn out well for them. I want to see for myself that it's possible, show other people that it is, and maybe, a little bit, try to convince myself that the way I am is okay and deserving of love. If I can do that for one person, if I can make one person feel like somebody out there gets it and thought that story was worth telling, then that's all I can really ask for as an author.
Is there anyone, or any book, that inspired you to write about mental health?
There's a fairly convoluted way to say 'yes' to this question that I'm not sure even counts...
Basically, one of my former therapists once recommended a book to me that was partly a memoir and partly research about anxiety. I love reading and understanding things, so I thought it would be a great idea. However, when I tried actually reading the book, I couldn't breathe. I don't know if it's because I knew the experiences were real, they were too similar to my own, or what it was, but every time I tried to read, my anxiety would just become unmanageable. I'd be sweating, shivering, tense, struggling to breathe. It was a mess, so I just gave up. I wasn't even that far into the book because of how quickly the symptoms would set in each time I tried reading, but I had to DNF and never pick it up again.
I don't know if that counts as inspiring me to write about mental health, but something about that experience sits with me when I write anxiety especially. I want to get it 'right' (caveat that anxiety looks different for different people, so there is no one 'correct' version), but also make it feel safer than that book made me feel. There is absolutely no way for me to know if I manage it, and I might be unwittingly giving someone else that same experience, but I write fiction and there's always a guaranteed happy ending, so I at least hope that safety net provides some comfort.
Tell me about your research process. What did you do to make sure your mental health representations were accurate?
My therapists have also been helpful. I don't quiz them on particular conditions, but I will talk through what I'm doing in a certain book, how it's feeling, what's worrying me about it. It's a little easier to feel like you're not just making things up when a professional is supportive of it and validating your experience!
And, of course, Lily Seabrooke is the first one to read anything I write, so getting her take is always helpful. She's good at letting me talk through the symptoms and how they're coming across in my writing. Her support is also particularly helpful when I'm inadvertently making a mentally healthy character a little too anxious (I do this a lot...), and she points out how a particular event might be processed in a non-anxious mind.
Do you have any more intentions to write about mental health in the future?
Absolutely! As I said, I think you could pick up most of my books and see some form of mental health representation, even if it isn't specifically named, and, as someone who really struggles with their mental health, I just really want to keep telling stories about people experiencing these challenges and still succeeding. As such, there will absolutely be more anxiety representation coming up, and some explicit C-PTSD representation. If you know what you're looking for, I imagine it's already fairly easy to see C-PTSD in the majority of my books—family-based trauma or negative familial relationships come up frequently—but I've never written a character that has C-PTSD named on the page. Mostly, this is just because of my own journey processing and accepting my own C-PTSD and getting to a place where I can write it with the justice it deserves, but, as with anxiety and depression, it's something that I think is really important to talk about. In a similar vein I think I will be attempting to tackle eating disorders too.
Lastly, why did you pick these specific conditions to represent in your books?
Anxiety is my constant companion, the condition I've known about for the longest, and the one that appears most frequently in my books. I don't get a break from it, so it just makes sense that any worlds I create in my mind are impacted by it. C-PTSD is constant, too, but accepting that and having it diagnosed has been a more complicated journey for me, so, in my books so far, it has generally manifested as anxiety.
Going into The Art of Growing, I knew what the concept was with Sloane's family, and I knew the impact of those kinds of relationships. At the time, I didn't have a C-PTSD diagnosis and thought I just had anxiety that was exacerbated around certain people and places. Thus, when Sloane was getting thrown back into her family home for the weekend, all I could imagine her feeling was anxiety. I wanted to show someone dealing with that, finding someone who knew they couldn't fix it but could help support her through it, and her finding the strength to distance herself from those who aggravate her anxiety. It was really important to me to demonstrate how anxiety breaks you down, but how that doesn't prevent you from having agency in your life, and cutting out the people who hurt you doesn't make you selfish or horrible, even if your mind is telling you otherwise.
I think the same holds true for putting anxiety into The Other Side of Leaving and Love, Morgan. Both Tilly and Iona are perfectly lovely, competent people, but their anxiety feels like this thing that holds them back and prevents them from experiencing the world the way other people do. It was all about demonstrating that this might be your experience of the world, but that doesn't stop you from being wonderful and loved and braver than the anxiety makes you believe. Depression was simply another layer of that for Tilly and was mostly me processing the moments I've lived with anxiety and depression, and exploring how that combination can work to make you feel like you're behind or 'small' compared to the people around you.
Essentially, I choose to write the conditions I know precisely because I am familiar with the ways they warp things in your life. I know how alone they can make you feel, and I want to help people like me feel seen and connected. I want to tell our stories because they deserve to be told. And I pick them because, really, they're all I know, and I think they're experiences that deserve stories.
What a wonderful thing to do, Jacqueline. All I can say is thank you.
If you are worried about your mental health, or that of someone around you, here are some helplines you may find useful.
If you’d like to read more books about mental health, I have a list of Sapphic-themed books with mental health rep, which you can find here. Please also check out my books, The Summer We’ve Had and Love You However, both of which have strong mental health themes, discussing Dissociative Identity Disorder and gender-dysphoria-fuelled self-harm, respectively.