A number of the characters in Sanderson's books struggle with serious mental health issues --- depression, disassociative identity disorder, CPTSD, alcoholism, extreme self-doubt and self-loathing. One of the biggest complaints within fandom about the books is that Stormlight focuses too much on these things, in a way that people who are more interested in plot and worldbuilding often find undermines the value of the books for them.

But fandom isn't a unified thing, right? This subreddit has just under 100,000 subscribers, the largest Sanderson subreddit has around 170,000, and fandom just propelled the author to an insanely record-shattering kickstarter. There's a wide range of thought and opinion within fandom about the books, because of course there is; there are too many of us to be a monolith, even if we wanted to be.

One subset of fandom --- a very large subset of the active on reddit portion of fandom --- are people for whom the character arcs of the characters struggling with mental health issues have resonated with something in their personal experience. People for whom the art produced an emotional reaction that caused them to feel seen and understood in a way they hadn't been before, or for whom the art produced an emotional reaction that helped them better understand something in their experience. People for whom the emotional reaction they had to the art was in some way a transformative experience in their life, and specifically in the way in which they relate to their own mental health issues.

The books don't have that effect on everyone, of course. Art resonates differently with different people. And if t