Now look, the artist once famous for The Thin H Line and Sexy Losers has created a sometimes gutwrenching, sometimes tender, often relatable series of comics about the daily struggles of life with depression. While exposing quite a few of the tragedies of depression, decidedly unclinical, depression comix instead gets into the heads of depression sufferers and the people around them. While interviewing a psychiatrist who treats posttraumatic stress disorder in veterans as well as a veteran suffering from PTSD, the Public Insight Network, WBUR, and the comics news magazine Symbolia collaborated on this piece. She started her journey toward reconciling her illness and treatment with her creative life, after she was hit with a major depressive episode. It is whenever fearing that medication would impair her creativity, when cartoonist Ellen Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she was in a manic phase and not eager to seek treatment. Eventually, allie Brosh turns her manic humor on her own depression in a pair of comics that are both deeply personal and explain brilliantly the anticipation of hopelessness, exhaustion, and selfloathing that comes with depression. Then the book consists of interviews with four near survivors fatal suicide attempts discussing their family histories, their dark thoughts, and their experiences with doing best in order to end their own lives accompanied by John Porcellino’s stripped down illustrations.
Next Day also exists as an interactive film from the National Film Board of Canada. The Next Day explores the persistant suicidal thoughts that can accompany mental disorders, rather than focus on any one particular mental illness. Look Straight Ahead is a work of narrative fiction, even if it was inspired by Elaine Will’s own experience with what she describes as a mental breakdown, unlike the other comics on this list. So, darryl Cunningham worked as a nursing assistant in a psychiatric ward and witnessed the realities of mental illnesses and their symptoms. Psychiatric Tales combines science, history, and anecdotes to demystify and destigmatize mental illness, and Cunningham’s stark artwork can be deeply affecting.