EW: Mostly as a way of distancing myself from the subject matter. While the story is largely based on my own experiences, if I told it exactly the way it had happened it would have taken much longer and probably wouldn’t have been as interesting. I would have had to communicate a lot of information through flashbacks and it probably would have ended up reading more like a memoir, and that just wasn’t the kind of story I wanted to tell. The other more embarrassing reason is that (at least when I started drawing the story) I’m just not all that good at drawing women! Rest assured, my next book will be about a woman. GS: There’s a real sense of frustration at the way Jeremy’s illness is handled. Do you think there are still barriers with regards to treatment and diagnosis for mental illness? EW: Oh, yes. That goes back to what I said earlier about how it’s just never discussed, it’s not a thing people ever want to talk about. This causes a lot of people to never even seek treatment, thinking “I can handle this on my own” – because a lot of times that’s the idea others put into their heads. “Snap out of it!” and so on. And if you can’t “snap out of it” on your own, that means you’re weak. It’s very frustrating. But also as I said earlier, it’s difficult for people to understand what it’s really like, so I have to try to see it from that perspective.
I’ve always had fairly positive experiences with treatment but I do get the feeling that a lot of doctors won’t take you seriously or prescribe medication unless you out-and-out admit that you’re suicidal. So that’s kind of frustrating as well. I’ve heard (I think this may have been in Psychiatric Tales, actually) that there’s also a stigma associated with psychiatric nurses, and how they’re not considered “real” nurses. And sometimes psychiatrists aren’t considered “real” doctors.
Geek Syndicate
oping a “style!” I never worried about that. A style develops naturally. Your drawings don’t have to look like your favourite artists, they should just look like YOURS! And, over time, they will. GS: What other projects are you working on at the moment? EW: I’m drawing a more conventional web comic called On The Bus, which appears in a local free newspaper every Friday. It’s basically about these little monster characters saying and witnessing awkward things. It’s just goofy and silly and I’m having a lot of fun doing it – a nice break from serious drama! Besides that, I’m also tentatively working on something wildly experimental involving classic video games – don’t want to give away more than that, other than it’ll be quite different from the usual video game comic.
On the other hand, if I’d written a story about someone having a breakdown in the 1950s or earlier it would have been a VERY different story. In those days they basically locked you up and threw away the key. Did you ever see that documentary “Mental” on BBC4 a couple of years back, about the defunct High Royds hospital in West