Just how important the literary arts can prove to be when it comes to the matter of acting as a server for people suffering with mental health issues in an effective manner is, rather ironicallly, quite a hard thing to put into words. It all too easy for someone with good tidings regards they not having to experience the solitude of being boxed off as such due to a preconceived, often uninformed and, as a result prejudiced manner to turn a blindceye is most certainly disappointing and a thing that really does need to change and quickly. However, saying that, this particular perspective on the part of the aforementioned is also fairly understandable seeing as this does more often than not pose a question from the people who count along the lines of “but why should we expect those who don’t suffer to understand?” We are, after all, on our own in both our body and our mind as things stand, mental illness or no mental illness, and really do believe in our altered state that nothing can change that, ever. Mental health is, as we all should know by now, a very serious thing, something so troublingly prevalent at the present time, not to mention a strange and petrifying aspect of life because we can never know what is truly going on inside of someone else’s brain. The literary arts can undoubtedly go a long way to achieving an awful lot in a very short space of time because those words on a page, however aligned are, put plain and simply, soothing and utterly direct in their giving nature. Blurred lines for now, if you like. What is more, the art of literature can cause, even as much as oh so subtly push people towards unearthing a place of solace where they might then feel the need to use their imagination, an outlet that has been used wrongly all this time owing to a supremely frayed mind. It is a severe case of a work in progress. These people, and they are you and I, just minus a personal touch perhaps, are able to read from the comfort of their own room, be that as a patient in hospital or at home. Either way, if we do allow for it, and I mean really allow for it, those words can make a telling, life-changing in many instances difference. For a person with mental health issues, when you are at your worst the chances of real recovery can appear to be almost an impossibility. This is why we need to slow our racing minds right down to a murmur and to give everything a little time. Recovery will not happen overnight, of course it won’t, but when it does happen, and it will, it is a truly mesmerising thing. So much so, in fact, that a slow occurrence like this can, in all truth, leave the ‘patient’ finding it difficult to understand what it was exactly that might have gone about helping them in the first place, in the end. That’s okay too. Literature lets our mind work its magic and that can only be a good thing; while getting to concentrate on one thing at a time there should be no such room for other, far less rational things. Slowly but oh so surely is the way to go. Different strokes for different folks, of course, but the written word is what we speak, something everyone is already accustomed to, and nobody likes change, right? If the art of literature can go as far as to also explain to us the turmoil associated with going through a mental illness then all the better for it. It is a weapon we can all use to our absolute advantage and the sooner we can unlock that endeavour the more understanding we will become, making us one of the same as we were always meant to be.