Mental Health May: Your Brain, an Occasionally Unreliable Narrator

If you’ve read The Great Gatsby, Lolita, or Wuthering Heights, you may recognize the phrase. It’s used to describe a narrator who isn’t telling you or can’t tell you the whole story. They could be naïve or they could be intentionally withholding information or they could be lying for their purposes. They might even tell you they’re unreliable—the Holden Caulfield approach.

And anxiety? Depression? They’re unreliable narrators. They’re lying—or at least not telling you the whole story.

Teens and adults need to know what a big, fat, stupid liar depression is. Emery Lord blogs at To Write Love On Her Armsand reminds us both how to sniff out an unreliable narrator in a novel - and in our brains.