Bailey Gomes, left, president of Northern Michigan University student organization Platform Personalities, interviews author John Green. (Journal photo by Alexandria Bournonville)

MARQUETTE — Author, philanthropist and online personality John Green came to speak at Northern Michigan University on Monday night.

After walking through downtown Marquette, he noted that the Upper Peninsula is “stupidly, stupidly beautiful.”

“Between Lake Superior and the endless groves of evergreen trees,” he said, “it’s unfathomably gorgeous.”

NMU student group Platform Personalities hosted the event as part of the continuing NMU campaign focusing on wellness in body and mind overseen by President Brock Tessman.

Green has written many books featuring the struggles young adults experience relating to their mental and physical health, including “The Fault in Our Stars,” “Looking for Alaska” and “Turtles All the Way Down.”

“I do think it’s really important to prioritize mental health,” he said. “The thing I found most helpful is to remember that everybody has mental health. Mental health is not something that you only have if you have a diagnosed mental illness in the same way that health is not something you only have if you have a physical illness.”

Though many of Green’s own experiences are the basis for his books, many critics have accused the author of romanticizing mental illness in his novels — something Green said he had no intention of doing.

Platform Personalities President Bailey Gomes, Green’s interviewer, prodded him to speak more on the topic.

Glorifying an illness or a disease doesn’t positively help the intended target, Green noted, adding it’s just as bad as intentionally stigmatizing someone for their illness or disease.

“The Fault in Our Stars,” published in 2012, follows two young cancer patients who grapple with the concept of mortality. While Green has never had cancer himself, much of his knowledge came from working with children and young adults diagnosed with the disease.

“We romanticize people with cancer,” he said. “We think of them as being these brave fighters, and of course it takes a lot of guts to deal with cancer, but it’s not like you chose to run into a house that was on fire. You got sick and now you got to deal with it.”

His focus, he said, is more on the individual person and not their mental or physical illness.

It was after the release of “The Fault in Our Stars” movie in 2014 that Green sank into a major lapse in creativity, exacerbated by his own personal struggles with depression, anxiety and OCD. He said he even fell for the “lie” that society tells creatives that, “If I stop taking my medication, I would be able to feel the full range of human emotions again and I would be able to write a great novel.”

It didn’t work.

Instead, he began to take actions to heal, started a new medication and processed his feelings and experiences in what would become his 2017 novel, “Turtles All the Way Down.”

Contrary to most depictions of characters with OCD, Green wanted to describe the pain he felt without it being glamorized. He described that his OCD isn’t comparable to that of the detective from the TV series “Monk” or the iconic Sherlock Holmes.

“I wanted to find some kind of form of expression for this terror (I was feeling). It was like I was living inside a horror novel,” Green said. “It’s like that movie ‘Saw’ but it all takes place inside of one body.”

His advice to the college-aged crowd was to embrace literature — both writing and reading — as a way to combat loneliness and heal from emotional wounds.

“Stories are one weapon in that battle against loneliness. They make me feel less alone in the deepest places, the places that maybe I can’t even articulate or that I’m scared to say out loud … and they make me feel like I’m not alone in that,” Green said. “My hope is always that for the right reader at the right time, my books can play that role that those books played in my life.”

Alexandria Bournonville can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 506. Her email address is abournonville@miningjournal.net.