How to Write a Poem on Mental Illness
Writing a poem on mental illness can be an emotionally overwhelming task if you have experienced it for yourself, but it doesn't have to be. It can also be a coping mechanism for you, as long as you realize that something as therapeutic as this art form can actually reduce the severity of your underlying condition.
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Instructions
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Get your creative juices flowing by identifying and researching words pertaining to what people with mental illness go through. Examples could be the terms "depressed," "anxious," "schizophrenic," "exhausted," "hallucinogenic," "delusional."
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Decide what style your poem will be in. Write a haiku if you want to use only 17 syllables for your entire poem. On the other hand, if you feel more words are in order, consider a poem written in free verse or blank verse.
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Narrow down words and phrases related to mental illness. For example, if you decide that your poem will be on clinical depression, make sure your poem emphasizes synonyms like "sad," "blue," "melancholy" and "black cloud."
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Incorporate vivid, descriptive details that paint a "mental picture" in the reader's mind. An example could be something like "he started wandering in his own mind/realizing that he actually was in Peter Pan's Neverland/while taking Prozac."
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Choose what words and phrases will go in which stanzas. The easiest approach to this technique could be arranging those words and phrases by order of importance. For instance, if your poem deals with anxiety, try to include words like "anxious" or "nervous" in the opening stanzas so that the reader has a concrete understanding of what living with clinical anxiety is like.
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Tips & Warnings
If you feel as if others will continually criticize your poems since they deal with social and medical stigmas in our society, consider writing in a journal instead of on a regular notepad. This way, no one will know what the poems are about until they are ready to go to press.
Be careful not so much about the tone of your poems, but the imagery your poems depict. It is not so nice to fool your readers into thinking that living with mental illness is as easy to visualize as a person walking outside on a nice sunny day.
