The article discusses four selected American novels that directly or indirectly breach the subject of mental health disorders. Since mental health awareness has been on the rise the past two decades, one of the possible ways of analysis is to focus on the authenticity of the presented mental disorders and attempt to uncover whether they are supposed to reflect their real-life counterparts or whether they have been augmented, potentially inserted into the story, for a specific role within the narrative. While speculative fiction has the freedom of conjuring imaginary diseases, it is important to realize the effect it may have on the general public when one such fictional illness receives the name of an existing one, possibly tainting the image and vilifying the disorder in the eyes of the reader. The aim of the article is to uncover the truthfulness of presented disorders within four characters from pre-selected, albeit well-known, publications, applying modern literary perspective on the matter.