Scrolling through Bluesky the other day, I came across a post that asked the question (and I’m paraphrasing here), Why do people who don’t have mental illness insist on writing stories about people with mental illness? The person pointed out that they had OCD and were upset that it’s so often misrepresented in stories.
One of the things that I wasn’t prepared for after I published Clean Freak and was selling at craft shows and conventions was that everyone wanted to tell me about their OCD. Of course, no one whom I talked to fit the clinical definition as I understood it after doing research for the story. I never told anyone that they didn’t have OCD and I am certainly not an expert who can make that kind of diagnosis. But I think that it’s indicative of how stories have misrepresented it that so many people think they have it.
So yeah, maybe OP has a point.
While an undergrad, I charmed my way into a couple graduate level writing courses, including one for play writing. During the semester, I wrote a full-length play, Visceral Memory, which I ended up submitting to and making it to the final round of a competition in which I got to watch a staged reading of it, which was super cool. After snagging an honorable mention, I took the play to my boss at the theatre where I worked. He read it and said that it wasn’t representative of his experience with a family member of his living with Alzheimer’s dementia. Stricken, I trunked it, worried that I had misrepresented people living in that situation.
Of course, while there’s commonality, no one’s single perspective is ever a totality of experience. That’s why I shouldn’t have taken my boss’ word as the final word and trunked my play. In the same way, I wouldn’t have told anyone that I didn’t think they had OCD. Although I can understand why, from the perspective of someone diagnosed with something, there’s a certain jealousy that goes along with that. A protectiveness to say, “No one understands this but me.” Which is true, insofar as no one understands what you’re going through but you.
But that’s why reading is so fundamental.
I consciously make the effort to read outside my demographic of boring middle-aged white dude. Even though it’s not lived experience, it is shared experience, which helps me become a better and more well-rounded person. At least, I hope it does.
Because, in a lot of ways, it would be easy to just be a boring middle-aged white dude and let that be the only perspective I concern myself with.
Writing from other perspectives helps me exercise my empathy. I may not have OCD, but writing Clarence as a character helped me understand folks who do. I only hope that I did him justice in the same way that I hope I did Sal justice as a gay man (“Experiment: Schroedinger”) and Viola as a woman (“In God’s Own Image”) and all the other characters who aren’t simply boring middle-aged white dudes.
So I don’t know if that answers OP’s question or if I was really trying to answer it in the first place. I think that it’s good to write fully developed characters rather than caricatured stereotypes, but relying solely on lived experience would make for pretty narrow stories of the kind I’m not interested in reading or writing.
