Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses.

Elyn Saks—who has written and spoken publicly about living with schizophrenia—urges writers, journalists, and the broader culture to resist reducing people with mental illness to clinical labels. The quote argues for representation that foregrounds full personhood: interior life, relationships, agency, and complexity, rather than a flattened “case history.” Implicitly, it critiques stigma and sensational portrayals that treat diagnosis as destiny. By calling for sympathetic depiction “in all the richness and depth” of experience, Saks frames ethical representation as both an artistic and social responsibility, one that can expand empathy and counteract dehumanizing stereotypes.