So once Thanksgiving break rolls around and I finally stop playing Fallout 4 for a bit, I'm going to work on a rewrite of a story I did about a year or two ago. I deleted it, but a friend was able to respark my motivation to write it and complete it. One of the aspects of this story is that the main guy had some traumatic stuff happen to him and a manifestation of his negative emotions and guilt appears in his mind afterwards. It's more than just the little voice in the back of his head telling him he can't do something or that his circumstances are his fault; it's a literal culmination of his bad feels that essentially speaks for itself in his mind.

I understand that mental illness isn't a joke, so I was wanting to know how I could write such a factor without trivializing mental illness, depression, etc.