Jasmina Mallet at Le Livre sur la Place Festival: Taking Off the Masks Around Mental Health
On September 12, 2026, Jasmina Mallet was a guest at the Le Livre sur la Place literary festival in Nancy, where she took part in a discussion devoted to mental health. Alongside writer Guillaume Sire, she addressed a question that strongly resonates with today’s public health concerns: “Everything is fine… Really? Masks, facades, false appearances… Behind what we see, there is sometimes another story: the story of health.”
The event also provided an opportunity to present Le Monde est Psy, a book co-written by Jasmina Mallet and Benoît Broyart, illustrated by Laurent Richard, and published by Hygée, with the support of PEPR PROPSY.
Behind the Appearances: Making the Invisible Visible
In our societies, mental health is still largely associated with representations, stereotypes, and misconceptions. Yet mental health conditions are not necessarily visible. A person may appear to be doing well, continue with their daily activities, work, study, and interact with those around them, while experiencing a period of profound vulnerability.
It was precisely this tension between what is visible and what remains unseen that lay at the heart of the discussion. Through stories, characters, and images, literature and graphic novels can give form to experiences that are sometimes difficult to put into words or share with others.
The conversation therefore opened up a space to question the way we view mental health: How do we represent mental health conditions? How can we tell the stories of experiences that cannot be seen? How can we move beyond clichés to better understand the people affected and the experiences they go through?
Le Monde est Psy: A Different Way of Telling Stories About Mental Health
Presented during the event, Le Monde est Psy fully embraces this approach. By bringing together text and illustrations, the book offers an accessible way to talk about mental health, its realities, and the diversity of individual experiences.
The use of the graphic novel format serves as a powerful tool for communication and public engagement. Illustrations can portray situations, emotions, and experiences that may be difficult to express through words alone. The narrative, meanwhile, gives depth to the characters and places mental health issues within human stories, with all their individuality and nuance.
This approach helps challenge simplistic representations and makes mental health a subject that can be discussed more openly, without reducing people to a diagnosis or to the difficulties they may be experiencing.
Literature and Graphic Novels as Spaces for Dialogue
Jasmina Mallet’s presence at Le Livre sur la Place also highlighted the role that literary and graphic works can play in raising awareness of health-related issues.
By bringing individual experiences to life and allowing readers to enter a character’s perspective, literature and graphic novels can foster identification, empathy, and understanding. They also create space for dialogue around subjects that can still be difficult to discuss in everyday life.
The discussion invited participants to examine their own perceptions: What do we really see in other people? What do we choose to show or hide? And how can we better acknowledge what is happening beneath the surface?
Where Creativity and Research Meet
Supported by PEPR PROPSY, the work surrounding Le Monde est Psy is also part of a broader effort to improve understanding of mental health conditions and the issues surrounding them.
The discussion at Le Livre sur la Place demonstrated the value of bringing different worlds into conversation: research, artistic and literary creation, as well as public engagement and awareness.
By giving these questions a place at a major literary event, Jasmina Mallet and Guillaume Sire helped open a discussion about an issue that concerns us all: mental health, the way it is represented, and the importance of looking beyond appearances.
