“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
Benjamin Franklin
As the “launch day” for my first novel has arrived, I pause to wonder if the book is worth reading. If I look at the time I have put into it and the purpose for which I have written it, I actually do believe Holding on to a Sound Mind is worth reading for the audience I intended it for. People suffering with their mental health may find it encouraging. Family members or friends of those suffering with their mental health may find it helpful. Mental health professionals may find it enlightening.
My overall hope is that this book will influence a society that largely misunderstands mental illness and the mental health community. I have a mental illness, a quite serious one, and I find it hard to describe the experience that you go through when you encounter a psychosis, or a deep depression, or an anxiety attack, or a fit of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, all of which I have suffered. In the novel I am about to release, I focus mainly on schizoaffective disorder, the main mental illness I deal with. I try my best to explain what happens when a person goes through a psychosis. It is actually quite excruciating and largely painful to the sufferer. If people can understand even a little bit of this pain, then the book will have been worth the toil it took to write it.
Writing something worth reading is difficult because after it is written, one really has no idea how it will be received. I hope upon hope that people will appreciate my book and share it with others. Recovering from a bout with a serious mental illness is definitely an ordeal, and this ordeal has a way of touching everyone it comes into contact with. Due to my mental illness, my family has suffered, my friends have suffered, and I, of course, have suffered. So, my writing of this book overall needs to be for a good purpose. I simply want people to understand, so they can have compassion on the next person they run into who is suffering with some kind of mental health issue.
If we can share in our sufferings with one another, I think the world will become a better place to live in. Having compassion on someone who is suffering has a profound impact on the sufferer and the one who shows compassion. And if someone else witnesses this compassion, I think it kind of has a ripple effect. People are encouraged. People see hope. And where hope exists, so can love.
In the Bible, 2 Corinthians 1, verses 3 and 4 says “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” In my troubles with mental illness, God has comforted me. I hope Holding on to a Sound Mind will comfort others, too.
—Ann Elizabeth Yeager