This is exactly my fear. People entering with little to no knowledge of mental illness, and it being misrepresented, romanticized, etc. There is no way to police and control who enters a contest, or what type of story they write. I’m trying to think how to word it, but it seems in almost every contest, we already have at least one entry that is offensive to one community of individuals or another (LGBTQ, POC, etc). That is with contests with non-specific themes (except the Queer contest last year.) If you have a contest specifically geared towards stories involving communities that are often stigmatized, then you’re opening the door for offensive and even maybe triggering stories and lots of problems.
1 Like