The difficulty is in writing a publishable manuscript. Most authors spend about a decade and several practice manuscripts honing their craft before they are pub

The difficulty is in writing a publishable manuscript. Most authors spend about a decade and several practice manuscripts honing their craft before they are published. Publishing doesn't require working 9-5, or daily check ins, or other things that generally handicap people with mental health issues. So you'll see a lot more authors with serious mental health issue than, say, software programmers (and personally, I think this is an amazing and positive thing, in many ways. Like I said, most of these mentally ill authors are just fantastic human beings who I loved working with). Of course, their mental illness doesn't make them any less talented or brilliant. Actually, I observed the opposite--the authors I worked with who were truly genius generally struggled with some variety of mental illness. To get in contact with a publisher, generally you need to first be represented by a literary agent. This is another faucet of publishing that enables more people with mental illness to thrive in the industry. Agents can act as the professional, polished barrier between the publisher and author, which makes a publisher less likely to even realize the author has mental health issues until the contract is done and signed. Again, this has pros and cons. The pros is that a lot of amazing people with mental health struggles manage to get contracts, without publishers having the chance to discriminate. The con is that some trolls get contracts as well, without the publisher realizing what kind of person they're signing on.