Mental Health in Fiction

Mental health is a complex and important topic that has been explored in various forms of fiction, including literature, film, television, and other media. Here's a list of some notable works of fiction that delve into mental health themes or have characters that deal with some type of mental health related topic.

Showing 1 - 14 of 14  There are a total of 14 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Anxious people"
Star rating for Anxious people
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Looking at real estate isn't usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can't fix their own marriage. There's a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about...
Book cover for "Bewilderment"
Star rating for Bewilderment
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental...
Book cover for "Elder race"
Star rating for Elder race
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"[A] junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the locals he has sworn to study to save a planet from an unbeatable foe"--Provided by publisher.
Book cover for "The five-star weekend"
Star rating for The five-star weekend
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
Hollis Shaw's life seems picture-perfect. She's the star of the popular food blog, Hungry with Hollis, and is married to Matthew, a dreamy heart surgeon. But after she and Matthew get into a heated argument one snowy morning, Matthew leaves for the airport and is killed in a car accident. The cracks in Hollis's perfect life-her strained marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter, Caroline-grow deeper. When Hollis hears about something...
Book cover for "The haunting of Hill House"
Star rating for The haunting of Hill House
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:

Now a hit Netflix miniseries directed by Mike Flanagan and starring Michiel Huisman, Carla Gugino, and Timothy Hutton

Past the rusted gates and untrimmed hedges, Hill House broods and waits.

Four seekers have come to the ugly, abandoned old mansion: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of the psychic phenomenon called haunting; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a lonely, homeless girl well

...
Book cover for "The heart principle"
Star rating for The heart principle
Author:
Series:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
A woman struggling with burnout learns to embrace the unexpected—and the man she enlists to help her—in this new New York Times bestselling romance by Helen Hoang.

When violinist Anna Sun accidentally achieves career success with a viral YouTube video, she finds herself incapacitated and burned out from her attempts to replicate that moment. And when her longtime boyfriend announces he wants an open relationship...
Book cover for "The many daughters of Afong Moy"
Star rating for The many daughters of Afong Moy
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
"From the New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet comes a powerful novel about the love that binds one family of women across generations. Dorothy Moy breaks her own heart for a living. As Seattle's former poet laureate, that's how she describes channeling her dissociative episodes and mental breakdowns into her art. But when her five-year-old daughter, Annabel, exhibits the same behavior and begins remembering...
Book cover for "The Midnight Library"
Star rating for The Midnight Library
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? In [this novel], Nora Seed finds herself faced ... with the possibility of changing her life for a new one: following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist. She must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library...
Book cover for "My year of rest and relaxation"
Star rating for My year of rest and relaxation
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend,...
Book cover for "The plus one"
Star rating for The plus one
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"What starts out as a fake wedding date turns into something these childhood enemies never expected in The Plus One, a sparkling romantic comedy by Mazey Eddings. She's not looking to fix him. She's looking to love him, if he'll let her in. Some facts are indisputable. The sun rises in the east, sets in the west. Gravity exits. Indira doesn't like Jude. Jude doesn't like Indira. But what happens when these childhood enemies find the only thing they...
Book cover for "The prince of tides"
Star rating for The prince of tides
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
Interweaves the events of Tom Wingo's summer in New York and his relationship to Susan Lowenstein, his sister Savannah's beautiful psychiatrist, and the complex history of the South Carolinian Wingo family, from World War II through Vietnam.
Book cover for "Stella Maris"
Star rating for Stella Maris
Series:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the second of a two-volume masterpiece: an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence."--Provided by publisher.
Book cover for "The Unfortunates"
Star rating for The Unfortunates
Description:
An edgy, bitingly funny debut about a queer, half-Nigerian college sophomore who, enraged and exhausted by the racism at her elite college, is determined to reveal the truth about The Unfortunates--the unlucky subset of Black undergrads who Just. Keep. Disappearing.
Book cover for "Yours truly"
Star rating for Yours truly
Series:
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"Dr. Briana Ortiz's life is seriously flatlining. Her divorce is just about finalized, her brother's running out of time to find a kidney donor, and that promotion she wants? Oh, that's probably going to the new man-doctor who's already registering eighty-friggin'-seven on Briana's "pain in my ass" scale. But just when all systems are set to hate, Dr. Jacob Maddox completely flips the game . . . by sending Briana a letter. And it's a really good letter....