Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters

This book explores how mental illness is portrayed in 21st-century young adult fiction and how selected works can help teachers, librarians, and mental health professionals to more effectively address the needs of students combating mental illness.

• Offers extensive analysis of contemporary young adult fiction featuring youth with mental illness to help school and youth services librarians make informed collection development and readers' advisory decisions

• Examines the symptoms and warning signs of mental illness in adolescents in addition to how various disorders are diagnosed and treated

• Offers strategies for teachers and librarians to integrate quality texts into middle and high school curricula and into community initiatives aimed at confronting the stigma associated with mental illness

• Follows a standardized chapter format that makes it easy for readers to learn about the books and the mental illnesses they highlight

• Provides an extended list of resources at the end of each chapter that includes additional young adult fiction and nonfiction as well as adult fiction texts