On Friday, the front cover of the Globe and Mail caught my attention. In the Arts section, there was an article dedicated to an artist\u2019s online comic that reveals her personal experience with severe depression. I grabbed the Arts section and flew out the door to catch the bus.
\nThe cartoonist is Allie Brosh and the comic is \u201cHyperbole and a Half.\u201d Allie experienced a severe bout of depression for nineteen months, which left her devoid of pleasure. From this serious illness, Allie has opened up to the world and has attracted millions of viewers each month. She uses the paint software of her Mac to draw her central character, a stick figure with a \u201cshark fin\u201d, as Allie refers to it. To \u2018paint\u2019 the depression, Allie has the stick figure where a grubby, grey sweater over a pink dress. Accompanying the brightly coloured comics are raw and descriptive emotions tied to the illness. In her piece titled \u201cDepression Part Two,\u201d she honestly states that \u201cmy experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there\u2019s a difference between not giving a f**k and not being able to give a f**k.\u201d Allie makes it clear that someone who is severely depressed is flattened to the point that one cannot express an emotion that is so \u2018normal\u2019 for others to express. Beneath this statement are six paintings of her stick figure character with the exact same expression on its face, despite the different events.
\nOver the course of four years, Allie has painted from her Mac book to shed a very real experience of having depression. It is a space to educate the public, to support those suffering from depression and to help those in recovery see their strengths. Check out www.hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.ca for yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Friday, the front cover of the Globe and Mail caught my attention. In the Arts section, there was an article dedicated to an artist\u2019s online comic that reveals her personal experience with severe depression. I grabbed the Arts section and flew out the door to catch the bus. The cartoonist is Allie Brosh and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24981,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1020240,155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mental-health-correspondent","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcmhac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcmhac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcmhac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcmhac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24981"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcmhac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcmhac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcmhac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcmhac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ubcmhac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}