How comics helped me explore mental health and connect with others

My mental health and me

Mental health is an individual experience. We may share our thoughts and feelings, we may relate, we may have the same diagnosis or benefit from the same support; but, behind all that, we are the only ones inhabiting our bodies, we are the only ones who truly experience it. 

Which made it incredibly confusing when I, as someone who has some difficulties in communicating and self-reflecting, was made aware of outward signs my mental health wasn't good. Isn't everyone like this? I thought it was normal to think and feel like this. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I felt. The more resentful I felt, realising that those outsiders were right: I wasn't as competent as others, I wasn't as happy or stable as others. And for the first time, I wondered if I could be.

What even is normal?

nothing of myself at all. It felt hopeless at that point. It wasn't a cut to be healed. It was something which had been broken and missing from the start.

An image is worth a thousand words

I needed help, and I had no idea how to explain what I needed. If what I mean by "happy", "tired", "lazy", and "coping" was not being translated to the same meaning in someone else's head, how was I supposed to make sense of my own mind? And, even more daunting, how was I supposed to advocate for myself when I wasn't truly speaking the same language as the people around me?

That is where the comics started. Not for others at first, but for myself, to pick apart the ways in which I interpreted the world. It is said a picture is worth a thousand words, so what better way to elaborate on a word I can't define, than by drawing it? 

Giving the behaviour a face

The anthropomorphism was there from the start. I was still in that mindset that my neurodivergence and mental illness were something separate, something inhabiting my brain like a parasite. So that is how I drew them. Different people, with different patterns of behaviour, taking over parts of my brain.

lost in the details of the world. It didn't make them good, no more than they were bad before. These parts of me just became as human as my whole self, and I found it in me to give them the grace I had denied myself.

In retrospect, did making these comics help me?

It did help. I may not have gained the verbal ability to explain what was happening when I lost track of time, or how sensory pain felt, or why I needed step by step instructions for a simple task. But the comics worked as well as any further words could have. I understood myself better, and learned to be kinder to myself. I could show a comic to a GP, a friend, or a therapist, to clarify what my experience was. And they got it.

I began sharing these comics among the online communities where I would discuss my troubles and my victories with peers. Sometimes they would relate, sometimes they would disagree, but we had conversations. Some people asked for permission to share one comic or another with people in their life, it resonated with their experience so intensely.

It was a good feeling: to be heard, to be understood, and to know that, however alone I am in my own brain, I am not some uniquely troubled person, but part of a community with broadly overlapping experiences. For that reason, I feel a little guilty that I haven't worked on my comics in so long. Then again: I haven't needed to. They succeeded at helping me through a time of confusion and now I no longer need to pick apart my own thoughts and actions daily in the same way.

Maybe in the future I will face new struggles and need to return to art to make sense of my mind. Maybe I will have the time and motivation from another source and resume making comics not because I need to, but because I want to. For now, though, these anthropomorphic mental conditions hold a special place, as the tools that helped me develop self-acceptance, understanding, and community. And if that's what they remain, they already did enough.