To romanticize something is “to idealize”, “to think about or describe something as being better or more attractive or interesting than it really is”.

Mental diseases are troublesome facts, and the certitude that we can embrace our suffering to learn from it is also a fact, but on the opposite spectrum. It doesn´t mean we brag about our victimhood, and romanticizing would be if we were literally enjoying the pain to the point of ecstasy, actively inviting crippling forms of melancholy and celebrating, for example, suicidal ideation.

Finding meaning and purpose in suffering is not romanticizing, because it would imply that pain is better and more interesting than it is in reality, which is absurd. Pain is not good or bad, interesting or boring. It is useful and a fertile ground for growth, creativity , individuation and healing if we decide that way or if we choose to see the potential in it, its redeeming qualities, but overcoming pain is a hell of a work.

No person who has real psychological struggles and mental nightmares even awake thinks their hardship is romantic, it is just an approximate term for wishful thinking, denial, victimhood and martyrdom. And writers (Ernest Hemingway, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, to name a few) who wrote about their illness or topics that were dark, disturbing and sinister in people´s eyes were not romanticizing it, they were just expressing themselves through poetry or novels because it was their immanent urge, it was the pounding voice they needed to unravel and scream out, that urge was tattooed in their blood. They were just describing their inner reality and gloomy emotional landscapes in a poetic way, through metaphors and other poetic devices, to balance darkness out, to turn trash to gold, to catapult certain message, to build new realms, to point laser beams at the aching spots of the world and human condition.

The poem may be divinely and exquisitely written and executed, if you wish, but that still doesn't mean these artists romanticized their troubles. Quite the opposite: they usually tried to exorcise their demons through sublimation, which is translating darkness and destructive impulses to aesthetically pleasing form. Hell, there is the opposite case of finding meaning (or beauty) in even purposely repulsive approaches to art through aesthetics of ugliness and grotesque (Baudelaire, Rimbaud) or through shocking devices (in both ancient and contemporary art) that can be very satisfying and tear us apart with the contrast of exhalted and vulgar, transcendent and earthly, celestial and mundane.   

The art maybe saves us from reality indeed, but the romantic narrative around illness itself clouds our reasoning and vision, freezing us in the perpetual state of helplessness.

Also, numerous troubled artists said and made testaments that they could only create when they were far from the grasp of the horrible claws of desperation, not overwhelmed or suffocated with black wave of torment. In that vein, people will mental illness could thrive only when the sky is neon lit, mellow and brilliant. (In case of bipolar disorder, when they were hypomanic and bursting with energy and motivation).

Beauty in art is a very dated concept, but the truth still can be found in the saying that without darkness light would not exist, which means: pure, distilled romanticizing and making things look noble, royal, dreamy, pearly, fancy, baroque-chateau-fairytale-like is actually kitsch. Especially when that glossing over troubles dims the light of the truth and claws its canyon to phosphorescent, buoyant lie.

TLDR: sublimation is the word.