This past Friday, October 10, I recognized World Mental Health Day the way my forefathers intended: anxiously staring at my computer, threatening myself with verbal violence in order to complete more than two tasks, and being too depressed to cave to any such threat.
Animation is one of the best ways to describe feelings too big to write down verbatim. If someone asked me for a high-level crash course on the ways in which my ADHD, anxiety, and depression manifest, I might point them toward Tigger from the Hundred-Acre Wood, Dory from Finding Nemo, the Depression Kitty from Big Mouth, or even Maya Hawke’s Anxiety character from Inside Out 2 – I haven’t seen the latter, but it’d be worth the lie if I didn’t have to further explain my mental illnesses through pop culture.
While some of these portrayals are more nuanced than others, I think it’s nice to have a world where, from children’s animation to raunchy adult cartoons, we can laugh together about mental health and find strength in our shared experiences through a digestible medium.
But for those with the Chili’s Triple-Dipper, three-piece cocktail of ADHD, anxiety, and depression that I have, we know that highlighting the bouncing around, the panic attacks, the fatigue, and the short-term memory issues don’t quite cover the spectrum we’re living on.
When will we see a Pixar fish with true brain fog? A Disney prince with executive dysfunction? Will Big Mouth ever introduce a Mania Moose?
I guess my point to all this is: now that media representation has, for better or worse, flowed through television drama and into the world of hand-drawn stories, now that conversations about mental illness are for Netflix bingers and Oscar-bait consumers alike, when will we start to be patient with the symptoms we don’t understand?
Stories by Bailey 