A review of Kia Jane Richmond’s Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters. ABC-CLIO, 2019.
After meeting Kia Jane Richmond at the Annual NCTE Convention in Baltimore in 2019, I knew I had to read her work. Rather than starting with a short article—of which she has written many—I began with her newly published work, Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters, and I’m so glad I did.
Who Is Kia?
Kia is a dedicated advocate for teachers and students, and her years in the classroom, her careful research, and her passion for supporting students come through in every word of this book. You might be wondering why I am bringing a book from 2019 to your attention in 2025. This is a fair question. Since its publication, this book has grown more and more important each year to our thinking and conversations as English teachers. Kia’s book ensures that you and I can give our students the mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors (Sims Bishop, 1990) they need. Her careful research and thoughtful writing are and will be our backup when we need to rationalize our book choices and support our students in the months and years to come.
Kia, the director of the English Education program at Northern Michigan University and winner of her state affiliate’s Excellence in Teaching/Mentoring Award, adds mental illness to the conversation of critical perspectives on young adult literature and provides pathways for teachers to bring novels discussing mental illness into their classrooms, starting tomorrow.
Between 2009 and 2019, research into mental illness in young adult literature had increased, but there had been no book-length treatment of this subject since the late 1990s. With the increase of the number of books being published for young adults, especially those portraying youth living with a mental health disorder, and with the staggering statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health about the increasing number of young adults living with a mental health issue—they estimate “that more than 20 percent of the young adults experience mental illness” (Richmond 3)—Kia’s book is just what we need to help us build up our classroom libraries and our ability to effectively teach and reach our students.
Who Is This Book For?
Written for teachers, this book is based on extensive and thorough research and effectively weaves together psychology terms and definitions, pop culture references, and young adult novels. Though Kia’s focus is classroom teachers, this book is also designed for librarians, counselors, and community health specialists.
How Do I Use This Book?
The book is not meant to be read cover to cover. In fact, I would recommend reading the introduction—only 11 pages—and then diving into whichever chapter meets your needs right now. Each chapter is set up in the same way:
- The opening: each chapter opens with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM–5) definition and description of a specific mental disorder, along with the criteria for being diagnosed and currently available treatment options.
- The middle: in each chapter, Kia summarizes young adult novels (between two and four per chapter) which portray the specific disorder and explains how the mental illness is portrayed, asking
- How does it affect the life of the character living with it?
- How does it affect those people around the character?
- How do the characters’ friends and family respond to the disorder?
- Is the character able to receive treatment, or do they have access to treatment options?
- The ending: each chapter ends with a list of other texts that portray the disorder (young adult, adult fiction, and nonfiction).
At the end of the book, Kia provides some “strategies for incorporating young adult novels about mental disorders into existing curricula and community initiatives focused on confronting stigma associated with mental illness” (9), including sample lesson plans and activities.
A Couple of Examples
The summary and analysis Kia provides here give readers the insight into these novels that we need to go into the classroom tomorrow, start recommending books to our students, and begin implementing strategies that will engage our students and build up their knowledge, empathy, and understanding. To this end, Kia discusses ten different disorders and summarizes and analyzes thirty young adult novels in the ten content chapters in the book. The two I connected to most were the chapters on anxiety disorder and feeding and eating disorders.
In the chapter on “Anxiety Disorder and Related Disorders,” we learn about Deb Caletti’s The Nature of Jade, which takes us into the life of Jade, a high schooler who has been diagnosed with panic disorder. Weaving the information from the DSM-5 into her summary and discussion of the book, Kia points out that “Self-criticism and self-doubt like Jade’s are common among individuals with anxiety. Quieting her inner voice is something she takes up in therapy” (84). In another instance, readers experience a panic attack with Jade and are with her as she uses “the tools she has learned in therapy to bring her mind back in tune with her body” (84).
Though I live with anxiety, which is what drew me to the aforementioned chapter in particular, the chapter on eating disorders was particularly heartbreaking for me because my sister suffered almost her entire life with an eating disorder.
In the chapter, “Feeding and Eating Disorders,” Kia walks us through four novels: Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson, Pointe by Brandy Colbert, Starved by Michael Somers, and Sugar by Deirdre Riordan Hall. By reading through the DSM-5’s description of feeding and eating disorders and Kia’s discussion of the novels, I gained insight into my sister’s struggles that I had never had before. In addition, one of the books discussed made me rethink a misconception I had about eating disorders. Starved, “told in a mixed format of first-person narratives, journals, and poems from Nathan, and third-person tales from his family and electronic communication between school personnel” (145), is about a high school boy who lives with an eating disorder. Because of spending my teen years watching Lifetime movies, which, as those of you who grew up in the 90s know, is a channel by and for women, I hadn’t consciously thought about young men suffering with these issues. Over the course of my teaching, though, I have noticed more attention being paid to the harm done to young men by unrealistic body image expectations, thankfully, and Kia’s discussion of this novel reminded me that it isn’t only girls and women who struggle with feeding and eating disorders. These disorders can happen to anyone.
Nathan, in Starved, not only struggles with an eating disorder; he also lives with a somewhat abusive father and has to learn to navigate health insurance, the court system, and, eventually, foster care. Jade, and some of the other characters from novels in the chapter on anxiety disorder, not only live with anxiety but must also deal with bullying, possible sexual assault, friendships falling apart, and coming to terms with their sexual identities.
The novels discussed in this book are not pigeon-holed, single-issue novels; the people portrayed help us understand the multidimensionality of others as well as think deeply about our own lives and (mis)conceptions.
Why Do These Stories Matter?
Often, we see young adult literature in what I would call a traditional way: it is great as part of our classroom libraries, it is wonderful for sustained silent reading and choice books, and it can be a great bridge to “more difficult” novels. All those things are true, but young adult novels are and do so much more, too. Young Adult Literature deserves a place in our curricula and in the lives of our students as more than an aside. It enables us to understand ourselves and others.
Kia’s book empowers teachers to use books that will make meaningful and visible the lives of people living with mental health disorders. As Rudine Sims Bishop argued, books are not only mirrors in which we and our students can see ourselves reflected; they are also windows into the lives of others and the sliding glass doors that provide us entry into those lives, that increase our understanding of ourselves and other people.
Work Cited
Sims Bishop, Rudine. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, vol. 6, no. 3, Summer 1990. https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf
Learn more about the author on our 2025 Contributors page.
MEJ 