1. MENTAL HEALTH In literature

2. WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? -Mental health, not illness -Many different definitions -OED – ‘A person’s condition with regard to their psychological and emotional well-being’ -Many different conditions -1 in 4 people will be affected in their lifetime

3. ROMANTICISED

4. Her paintbrush is a razor, Her canvas, her wrists, "I deserve the pain." She shrugs and insists. …. Her artwork is all over her, Her beauty is on her thighs, and if you look in her old trash, you'll find her letters of goodbye. ‘Her Masterpiece is Her Story’ - Madison Marie She went to sleep closing her eyes beginning to dream of broken butterflies tearing her lovely monarch wings on faithless love that angels sings... ‘The Cutter’ – Ken Carroll

5. STOCK CHARACTERS ‘Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost sure that Miss Havisham's face could not smile. It had dropped into a watchful and brooding expression - most likely when all the things about her had become transfixed - and it looked as if nothing could ever lift it up again’

6. LINKED TO VIOLENCE

7. PLOT DEVICES

8. REALISM “What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets and that's it. ” ‘What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can't be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.’ ‘He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.’

9. Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look ‘Daddy’ – Sylvia Plath And now I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas. The child’s cry Melts in the wall. And I Am the arrow, The dew that flies Suicidal, at one with the drive Into the red Eye, the cauldron of morning. ‘Ariel’ – Sylvia Plath

10. NO HAPPY ENDINGS

11. A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear— O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green: And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! ‘Dejection: An Ode’ - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

12. NOT JUST THE ‘POPULAR’ ONES ‘Curious Incident is not a book about asperger's....if anything it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder’

13. CAN LITERATURE HELP WITH MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES? ‘I wish you could live in my brain for a week. It is washed with the most violent waves of emotion… And you think it all fixed and settled.’ Virginia Woolf, 1926