Specters

A while back while I was doing a recreational scroll through the His Dark Materials wikia, I decided to click on the article about specters (because who wouldn’t want to read about the creepy adult-hungry dementors!) and Pullman has allegedly stated that they were meant to represent mental health issues.

This makes Will’s connection of specters to his mother concrete, because she seems to struggle with acute OCD or Schizophrenia or something along those lines. The specters are just the fast-acting version that drive the soul to death–kind of like that proverbial soul killing cubical job!

While I really like this depiction of mental illness as something out of the victim’s that sneaks up and clings to your soul, I think it’s a bit strange that specters only attack adults. I mean, sure, it’s nice to fantasize about a world where kids don’t have mental illnesses, but it’s not accurate (let me tell you I have a ton of anecdotal evidence of this).

Now that I know what Pullman was intending with specters, I feel kind of let down. As someone who struggled with mental illness as a child, it makes me think back to little me, and it certainly does not help with the visibility of these issues if YA authors write stories where the kids are 100% immune to things that many kids DO struggle with.

Well this took a serious turn! Sorry