Claire McNeel is the author of Darkness Runs Deep (30 January 2024)

My paternal great-grandfather Archie was a chemist with his own pharmacy. He married, attempted to enlist in the army during WWI but was knocked back for medical reasons, then had two boys. He died after drowning in a lake in 1926, aged 44. For decades, this was the story my family knew.

My dad researched Archie’s history and discovered that he was a talented district cricketer and played ten games for Carlton in the Victorian Football League. At some point, he was diagnosed with neuritis, a painful nerve condition, and while being treated for heroin addiction (at the time a legal substance), he drowned. The drowning was reported to be intentional rather than accidental, but the stigma around suicide led his family—my family—to hide this fact and everything about him.

I can only speculate that while Archie was highly educated, his capacity to express how he was feeling was limited by the language of the time, and that perhaps this prevented him from getting the help he needed. 

Within Darkness Runs Deep, a handful of characters experience challenges that manifest as symptoms of anxiety or depression, but they don’t use terms like ‘mental health’ or ‘mental illness’ or even ‘wellbeing’. This is to reflect the setting: country Australia in the early 1990s. Thankfully, our collective understanding of psychological health has evolved to the point that narratives involving characters with mental illness or symptoms of mental illness are increasingly common.

Presenting relatable characters, however, demands that we acknowledge how mental illness is steeped in stereotypes and clouded by stigma. With this comes the trap of defining characters by their illness. Diseases such as cancer are not used as the descriptor for a person with the condition (ie. they’re not ‘a cancer’, but ‘diagnosed with cancer’, ‘suffering from cancer’), but the same language is not consistently used to describe mental illnesses. It’s not uncommon to hear someone say they’re ‘so OCD’ or ‘totally schizophrenic’. As such, it’s not just the words we use, but how we choose to use them that will determine whether a story will resonate with readers or be a source of anger or disappointment. 

In the context of acknowledging, managing, and potentially overcoming symptoms of a mental illness, fictional characters have the capacity to promote a level of introspection in the reader, helping them to understand what they are experiencing in the real world.

Yet, while terminology around mental health and wellbeing are prolific, this doesn’t necessarily translate to having the tools and resources required to manage our feelings, emotions, and experiences. Conversations about our mental health are rarely easy to start, and when presented in novels can sometimes come across as unnatural.

To promote a more organic experience, I used Australian rules football as a carriage to bring fictional characters in a fictional small town back together. Sport can be a wonderful unifier; supporters refer to the collective ‘we’ when discussing their teams—we won, we lost—revealing a shared passion (or obsession). 

Newspaper clippings highlight that Archie was an outstanding athlete, and sport was possibly an outlet for him that offered a supportive environment. Hopefully, presenting authentic fictional narratives can be a starting point to deeper conversations about who we are, how we feel, the support we need, and the support we can offer.