What Harry Potter Had to Tell Us About Mental Health

To the naked eye, the Harry Potter books and movies series were about magic, but to those who look more closely, they can learn so much about mental health from it as well.

(P.S. Spoilers!)

The Harry Potter series for a lot of fantasy books fans, or even fiction books fans, might be one of the best book series of all time. With it being filled with subliminal messages such as “blood supremacy of magical people,” and Voldemort wanting to get rid of non-magical people, aka No-Majs, or Muggles as the Brits love to call them. That sounds a lot like Hitler wanting to get rid of anybody who is not of Aryan race.

There are some messages however that might be more personal to some people. I’m talking about the messages that have to do with mental illnesses. There are many parts of the Harry Potter books where one might find instances that sound like effects of a mental illness.

When J.K. Rowling suffered from depression due to the difficulties she faced in life, she was writing the Harry Potter series, and it was during that time that she came up with the character for “Dementors”. The word is said to come from the two words Dement and Torment, both feelings one gets during a depression.

During the third Harry Potter series, Harry is being haunted by Dementors that surround Hogwarts in order to protect it from Sirius Black. Every time the Dementors haunt Harry, and get him, he feels weak. When Harry asks his professor why the Dementors make him feel that way, his professor answers saying “The Dementors affect you worse than others because there are horrors in your past that others don’t have.” With this, J.K. Rowling has simply put the reason why so many of us are haunted by depression. We’re constantly reminded of our past, which we can’t seem to let go off, and it grows inside of us, sucking all the life out of us, and replacing it with sadness and misery. “They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, and drain all the peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them.” “You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.”

We can see how this closely resembles symptoms of depression. There are even instances of people in the books saying “I felt like I’ll never be happy again,” whenever Dementors are close by, whereby a lot of people who have depression are convinced it’s true. They believe they will never have happiness a day in their lives.

This isn’t the only thing that J.K. Rowling has described in the book with something relating to mental illness.

In the fifth book, Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, Harry is possessed by Voldemort, and Voldemort controls Harry’s thoughts, and feelings. Harry tries to fight off these thoughts, and feelings that Voldemort is putting into his head. We can see it from the first few chapters (and by first few chapters I mean somewhere up until chapter nine). Harry keeps having these mixed feelings here and there in the first few chapters, not knowing how to control them. He doesn’t know where these feelings are coming from, and later it gets worse and worse. It’s basically Voldemort talking and putting ideas in his mind, sort of like somebody with anxiety would have. At some point, Harry tells Sirius “I just feel so angry all the time,” which is mainly caused by Voldemort controlling him from inside his head. This can be seen in the book better than the movie since we get to know what Harry is thinking.

We later even see how Voldemort gets into Harry’s mind to force him to do something very irrational, trying to go and try to save Sirius. We can see how Voldemort (anxiety) puts irrational thoughts into Harry’s mind in order to force Harry to do the most irrational things, and at the end, only Voldemort gets what he wants.

We do see Harry defeating this feeling of anxiety when Voldemort penetrates his mind at the Ministry of Magic and tells Harry that he is weak and that he is going to lose. Harry, however, beats Voldemort by telling him that he’s the weak one, and that he will never know love or friendship, and that Harry feels sorry for him.

The Harry Potter book series is amazing in that way. How everything is hidden in the details, and how so many instances, and actions, and the writing, in general, can mean something different to different people. And that different people can read the same text differently.