CREATING MENTAL HEALTH COMICS

After leaving my job as a high school art teacher in 2018, I began putting all of my energy toward creating a graphic work that speaks directly to kids and addresses the following:

-Stigma about mental health
-Emotions and thoughts
-Anxiety
-Depression
-Good and bad coping mechanisms
-Addiction
-Suicide
-Resources for treatment
-How to be an ally

This was not the first time I’d worked with these ideas. In 2008, I created a web comic from my notes after attending a McLean Hospital workshop. Readers told me that the ideas were more approachable in comics form. I revisited the comic in 2017 and published it as a paper pamphlet for distribution, this time calling it Snake Pit: Notes on Adolescent Depression and Suicide. The act of sharing this comic opened meaningful conversations with clinicians, educators, and parents who wanted to support the mental health needs of kids.

After creating Snake Pit, I realized that I hadn’t written and researched everything that I wanted to talk about in mental health. It occurred to me that I needed to shift the voice away from visual notes directed at the adult working with kids and more toward speaking directly to a child audience.

As an artist, I love making comics as a pure form of expression, but as an educator I am struck by how useful the medium is. The comic format is well-suited to conveying a large amount of information in a condensed manner. There are bookshelves of evidence proving that the comics medium is exceptionally adept at conveying the experience of mental distortions and disorders.

I also know this topic personally because, as a young person, I battled my own anxiety and periods of depression. I wanted to make a book that I would have wanted to read as a kid, something which would have made things a little easier for me.

Since Snake Pit led me to this path, I’ve put out a comic called Let’s Talk About It: A Graphic Guide to Mental Health and the annual appeal for The Center for Cartoon Studies which discusses more simply how drawing and mental health can come together. Finally, I am currently working on a longer, more ambitious comic which addresses these topics for Workman Publishing.