This is not the “awareness” we need.
Why the viral drawings by Shawn Coss don’t depict mental illness in a helpful way.
It’s October; Halloween is just around the bend. I’m scrolling down my news feed on Facebook, sipping a warm coffee, when I see someone has shared some delightfully creepy drawings. I click. Each one depicts a grotesque, contorted monster, drawn in black ink, with long, skinny limbs and clawed hands. I love this kind of thing. But my enjoyment turns into horror — real horror — when I realize that the monster in the drawings is supposed to be me.
I’m referring to Shawn Coss’s depictions of mental illness, a collection of Inktober drawings that has been widely shared and praised on the web this month. Coss says that these are for “mental health awareness”, which would be fine if his work didn’t demonize the mentally ill and promote the most obvious stereotypes and misconceptions. (The bulimia victim vomiting to get “thinner”? An OCD sufferer muttering “Clean… clean…”?)
Coss’s drawings do not encourage acceptance and understanding. Instead, what they illustrate is exactly the perception of mental illness created by popular stigma and misbeliefs. Instead of presenting a compassionate view, these drawings show mental illness as scary and strange — exactly what someone who doesn’t have any experience with mental illness would tend to think.
These comments from Coss’s Facebook page, where the drawings are posted, show the kind of attitude they promote. Can you imagine telling a cancer patient that thinking about their struggle with cancer makes you physically ill — and following with “I love it!”? People who live with mental illness deserve the same compassion and respect, not to be gawked at like a Halloween freak show attraction. Coss isn’t “spreading awareness”, he’s “perpetuating stigma” — and there is a big difference.
To demonstrate this point, I want to discuss a few of the images in Coss’s collection, why they are problematic, and what a more accurate concept of each disorder would be. There isn’t enough room here to talk about every disorder portrayed; however, the ones highlighted here are not the only ones that I and other mentally ill people have found problematic.
Keep in mind as you read these that Coss is not drawing from personal experience. “I myself am not formally diagnosed with any illness,” Coss said in one interview. Elsewhere, he wrote, “I am fascinated by the brain and these mental issues.” I will say, his art is indeed that of someone who is “fascinated” with the mentally ill.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Coss’s characterization of obsessive-compulsive disorder is disappointingly unoriginal. The character clutches at its chest in apparent agony, and the words “clean… clean… clean…” are written to the left. What we have here is yet another piece of art that makes OCD all about cleaning.
Sometimes, symptoms of OCD are cleaning-related. However, to choose that as the main focus is to completely play into the popular misconception of the disorder. Everyone already knows this stereotype: that people with OCD have an obsession with tidying and neatness. The truth? Cleaning is just one of many things OCD-related thoughts may focus on. For example, one person I spoke with recently talked about struggling to finish tests on time because they needed their handwriting to be perfect. They never attempted art, because they knew that nothing they drew would be perfectly symmetrical.
The prevalence of this misconception makes it harder for people to realize that they might be living with OCD. In this 2013 article, the author says, “ It has taken me until this year to realise that OCD is what I have been living with for the last 24 years. I always thought I was simply rubbish at enjoying things, at living in the moment, at being sociable with others. But what I didn’t know, was that the constant buzz in my head is not normal or at least it’s not what everyone else experiences. This is because I understood OCD in the same way most others did (cleaning, tidying, ordering).”
Multiple people who live with OCD have told me that they live in messy rooms. They emphasize the obsessions and compulsions themselves over what those obsessions and compulsions are about.
The criticism of the “clean… clean… clean…” has reached Coss, who defended his choice by saying, “I agree, but when you have one image to portray a wide spectrum of symptoms, I wanted to use one that people commonly associate OCD with.” Coss doesn’t seem to mind that this common association is stigmatizing and inaccurate — and one that most people with OCD want to overturn.
Bulimia Nervosa
Similarly to the OCD one, this picture chooses to illustrate a very unimaginative conception of bulimia nervosa. A streak of vomit shoots from the character’s mouth to the floor, and the word “THINNER” is written in the vomit. (This is clearer in the full resolution image than the one that accompanies this essay.)
Again, a desire to lose weight or become thinner is sometimes part of bulimia nervosa. However, this is a stereotype just like that of people with OCD obsessing over cleaning. In reality, the causes and experience of bulimia are complex and personal. People who have had bulimia frequently talk about feelings of guilt and disgust, and may compare it to other forms of self-harm in that binging and purging can be physically cathartic. Bulimia is not always weight-related and may not affect a person’s weight much at all.
Further, bulimia can involve purging behaviors other than throwing up (what most people imagine when they picture the disorder). Just like the piece on OCD, this piece manages only to “raise awareness” for an already-common stereotype of its subject.
Borderline Personality Disorder
This image, thankfully, doesn’t portray the common stigma of people with BPD being manipulative and abusive monsters. In fact, this image stands out as one where the victim is portrayed as less grotesque and more human.
My main criticism of this image is that it is one of two (so far) where the artist chose to gender the character portrayed. BPD is largely thought of as a disorder mostly suffered by females, so portraying the patient here as a female — when nearly all of the other drawings don’t — only contributes to the erasure of males with BPD.
What disturbs me more is that this character seems to be subtly sexualized. Note the decision to draw the clear shape of breasts, combined with the thin bed sheet (?) over the body and how relatively “human” this character is. It reminds me of the “femme fatale” stereotype of BPD women, and it makes me pretty uncomfortable, as a person with BPD.
Other than that, I have, frankly, no idea how this drawing relates to BPD at all. BPD is characterized by deep, intense, and volatile emotions, impulsivity, black-and-white thinking, and self-destructive tendencies — none of which I see represented here, even badly. Maybe the skulls are meant to represent past traumas? Who knows.
Dependent personality disorder
Imagine that you were presented with this photo without any words or explanation. Which of the two characters would you think is the victim? The one on the bottom, standing with hands clasped and downcast eyes, seems to be the sufferer here. The woman on its back looks like a parasite.
But when you know that this was intended as a depiction of dependent personality disorder, it makes more sense that the woman is the one with the disorder. She seems dependent on the creature whose back she’s riding. This begs the question: Why is the person with DPD being depicted as a parasite? And why a woman?
This plays into another obvious stereotype: that the emotionally dependent one in a relationship is usually the women. The fact that this and the “femme fatale” BPD drawing are the only ones to depict women strikes me as implicitly misogynistic.
The author actually did address this, saying, “I didn’t choose a woman or male based on the illness/disorder. I chose the figure simply because I wanted to draw a female or a male at that moment.”
The fact is that the two disorders Coss felt like portraying as women happen to be two disorders archaically stereotyped as things only women have. His defense, in essence, is that it was a subconscious, not conscious, choice — as if that makes it support the stereotypes any less.
This essay wasn’t motivated by me, sitting at my desk, sipping my coffee all alone. I was motivated to write this because of the hundreds of mentally ill and neurodivergent folk who share these viewpoints and yet either cannot speak or are ignored or attacked when they do.
We understand that many of us relate to these drawings and identify with the feelings portrayed. In no way do I mean to invalidate that. Yet, at the same time, there are those of us who feel less human after viewing these drawings. There are those of us who feel ostracized and shocked — is this how people see us? At the end of the day, the societal misconceptions and dehumanizing imagery in these pieces throw all of us under the bus. And that needs to be called out.
A lot of us have tried messaging the artist or asserting ourselves on his page. In response, Coss has dismissed us, saying, “I’m sorry you feel that way” and encouraging us to block his page. I have not yet seen an attempt to listen to, understand, or engage in a discussion regarding our criticisms. The importance of being able to respond to and learn from criticism as an artist is an issue I won’t go into here. What’s more relevant is the fact that he’s chosen to blow off a large population of the marginalized people he claims to be helping.
We (whom he is making art about) are trying to tell him what we find problematic about his work — and we’re getting “sorry you feel that way” as the response. We don’t claim to speak for all mentally ill people. But we’re trying to speak for ourselves, and we don’t deserve to be silenced, to be ignored, to be told to “just block it then” as if we have the luxury of looking away, of choosing not to care. We deserve to be taken seriously. We deserve to be heard.
Author’s Edit: I’ve posted a follow-up to this post.
