A debut novel about a woman's determination to leave a mental institution heads the Mind book of the year award shortlist.

Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan, which has also been shortlisted for the Orange new writers award this week, takes a comic look at the mental health system. The eponymous heroine of the book plots her escape from the Dorothy Fisher day hospital in north London but discovers that, in the topsy-turvy world of mental health, she has to prove that she is insane before she can be considered for release.

While Allan herself spent over 10 years of her life as a patient within the psychiatric system, including time in a day hospital in north London, and draws on those experiences in the book, she is emphatic that it is not a memoir.

As she explains in an interview on the Bloomsbury website,

"At the heart of the novel, lies the problem of expression, and most particularly the gap between experience and the expression of it. The day hospital was full of extreme experience... Mental illness is a survival strategy. It is a means of reconciling the irreconcilable. At the day hospital I was constantly struck not by the frailty of those around me but by their resilience. Their experiences were unimaginable, impossible to survive... and yet here we were sharing a cigarette. In writing Poppy Shakespeare I didn't want to focus on the experiences themselves; I didn't want to write that sort of book. What I wanted to explore was how words cope with extremes of emotion and experience."

Poppy Shakespeare is the only novel on the shortlist for the award, which seeks to celebrate writing that contributes to public understanding of mental health issues. First person accounts of mental health issues within the family form the bulk of the nominees. They include Guardian columnist Michele Hanson's bittersweet tales of her mother's decline from a vibrant, bossy, hilarious fault-finder general and head chef to frail, bedridden, helpless, speechless, but still formidable old lady.

In Relative Stranger, Mary Loudon uses her sister's death from cancer following years of schizophrenia as a starting point for an examination of our ideas on sanity; Elaine Bass writes about her husband's obsessive compulsive disorder and breakdown, and her attempts to cope, in A Secret Madness: The story of a marriage.

An expert's eye on the subject is brought by Ruth McKernan in Billy's Halo. Again, it is a family-driven account of tackling a mental disorder - her father, Billy, succumbed to a mystery illness that would lead to his death - but McKern is a neuroscientist and brings her professional knowledge to bear on the subject. The result is a scientific exploration of memory, stem cells and consciousness and an accessible explanation of how the brain and body works.

Finally, two books tackle a couple of the hottest topics in mental health - happiness and stress. Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis uses modern science to scrutinise traditional wisdom; and Angela Patmore's The Truth About Stress calls into question the trustworthiness of research into stress, and argues that stress services are an unregulated industry fuelling the problem that they claim to treat.

The judges for the award include the novelists Fay Weldon, Blake Morrison and Michele Roberts and the winner will be presented with the £1,500 prize on May 16 by Stephen Fry.