I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

Mental health memoirs provide first-person accounts from individuals living with psychiatric conditions and, in some cases, also detail their treatment journeys. Unlike traditional memoirs, they explore an author’s life primarily through the framework of mental health and mental illness. They are sometimes episodic in nature, focusing primarily on the author’s experience of mental illness, but it is also common for authors to provide an overview of the way that mental illness shaped their childhood and continues to impact their lives as adults.

These memoirs are important for the way that they shape public discourse, opening up conversations around mental health and psychiatric conditions that challenge preconceptions and offer the opportunity to reduce stigma. The popularity of mental health memoirs has coincided with conditions like depression and anxiety becoming both better understood and less maligned in popular culture. While conditions like Sehee’s were once thought of dismissively as the result of a “depressive personality,” they are now understood as complex manifestations of the way that both genetic predisposition and environmental factors work together to co-construct the self.

Memoirs have exploded in popularity during the last several decades, and mental health memoirs have been some of the most widely read kinds of life writing. Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994) is an early example of a popular mental health memoir. At the time of its writing, both depression and psychopharmacological treatment were misunderstood and stigmatized, and Wurtzel’s account of her own experiences challenged the reading public to reframe their biases and misconceptions. It also contextualized Wurtzel’s experiences within broader trends that she identified within her generation, and is now seen as both a personal narrative and a portrait of cultural change during the final days of the 20th century. Many of Wurtzel’s experiences dovetail with Baek Sehee’s, and the memoirs share an interest in the way that depression impacts young, creative professional women.

Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1993) is another 90s-era example of an early mental health memoir. Like Prozac Nation, it was adapted into a popular film. Kaysen’s memoir focuses on her time at an inpatient psychiatric clinic during the 1960s. Kaysen was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, a psychiatric condition that remains stigmatized and largely misunderstood. Her memoir is credited with humanizing major psychiatric disorders and decreasing the stigma around them. Although Kaysen’s memoir details the kind of depression that Baek Sehee characterizes as “more obvious,” the two women share a desire to help their readers navigate their own crises and bring attention to the profound impact that mental health can have on individual lives.

More recent examples include Jennette McCurdy’s bestselling I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), a memoir that chronicles the author’s experience as a child star on Nickelodeon and her dysfunctional relationship with her mother. Like Baek Sehee, Jennette McCurdy struggles with body image, experiences disordered eating, and locates the roots of many of her adult difficulties in the fractured familial relationships of her childhood. Both Baek Sehee and Jeannette McCurdy provide realistic accounts of the lasting impact of abusive families and hope to help readers who have faced similar struggles.

Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), a collection of 13 essays, also provides a first-person account of an author’s battles with serious psychiatric conditions. Wang lives with schizoaffective, bipolar, and post-traumatic stress disorders, and is interested in the way that her status as a first-generation immigrant shapes her experiences of mental health. Like Baek Sehee, she focuses both on the nature of her psychiatric illnesses and on their treatment, and like Baek Sehee, she details the non-linear nature of therapeutic progress.