BoJack Horseman and mental health

Netflix as a whole is a party I have been very late to. I only signed up late last year, and I only did so because my girlfriend really wanted to watch season 2 of 13 Reasons Why… a feat she did not finish, but I found myself sticking to the service and have been catching up on far too many shows that I should’ve seen long ago. One such show is BoJack Horseman. This is a show I should’ve watched long ago for one simple fact: it’s a stunningly accurate portrayal of mental health and the issues associated with it.

As someone who has suffered from some mental health issues for most of my teenage and then the entirety of my adult life, I found this particular show to resonate with me in a way that very few shows actually do. I even binged through the entire show, which is five seasons long at time of writing, in about four days. The show is depressing, the comedy is often dark, many of the characters are in some way unlikable yet weirdly likeable and the animation isn’t exactly going to be winning awards. It’s a strange mix of things, yet it all somehow works.

The characters are phenomenal. The titular BoJack Horseman, an anthropomorphised horse, who used to be a nineties sitcom actor and now struggles with personal issues, is a nuanced, three-dimensional character. He shatters the myth of wealth; he has enough money to do whatever he likes and he spends that money getting drunk and high every single day so he can numb himself to loneliness and depression. It’s a miserable take on things because he has everything he could possibly want and yet none of it manages to bring him any happiness. He is fundamentally broken and it can often be horrible to see some of the things he does. He makes constant mistakes, beats himself up over everything and ultimately makes everything worse for himself. He is, by and large, an asshole.

The show explores why this is the case. His childhood and his success contribute to the misery in his life. Yet despite that, the show tries to show us the good in him. It tries to show us that he wants to change but doesn’t know how. He’s broken, and he’s afraid of being fixed. Because what happens when he’s fixed? What happens if he fixes himself and nothing is changed? What happens when he sobers up and changes his outlook on life? What happens if the misery remains? It’s a feeling that I’ve had to deal with in my own life, and it isn’t an uncommon feeling either. It’s the same kind of thinking that leads us to believe that we are actually not broken, this is just who we are, and so there’s no point in trying to fix ourselves through therapy or anything else because when that inevitably fails then we’ll know for certain that we were the real problem all along.

That is what BoJack Horseman tells us. It understands those kinds of feelings, but it does not condone them. BoJack is often told to seek help, but he never does so. In fact, the first time he makes an actual positive change is, and this is a mild spoiler, in the last scene of season five. So we don’t even know whether there will be any positive change in him because season 6 hasn’t been released yet.

BoJack grapples with issues that his friends also deal with, because the show is not only about him even if he is the titular character. His friends include a writer who’s struggling with her personal identity and coming to grips with what she wants to do with her life, a man-child character who has no plans in life but isn’t particularly phased by it, an agent who’s staring down middle-age and has to struggle with juggling a career and the desire to start a family, and even a happy-go-lucky fellow nineties sitcom actor who clearly has issues with emotions and understanding the wants and needs of other people.

These characters struggle with depression, loneliness, self-loathing, self-pity, self-destructive behaviour, addiction, their sexualities and their childhoods. The show understands that people have neuroses. People who seem normal when you meet them have issues when you start to dig a little deeper. At the beginning of the show, we know that BoJack has issues. We know it because those issues are front and centre. Then as the show unfolds we start to learn more and more about the other characters, and their problems start to become more fleshed out and explained. Every one of these characters gets screen time to explain their personal lives, and the cast is a robust, well-rounded selection of characters.

Even smaller characters (a bit of a spoiler here), like a late love interest for Mr. PeanutButter (because yes, those are the kinds of names you’ll find in this show) who first seems to be a ditsy, young girl. But as she continues to date this older man we get to see that she’s worried about the relationship; she wants to be perfect for her new boyfriend and she feels the pressure growing as Mr. PeanutButter continuously and selfishly brings up the faults of his exes. She knows their faults and struggles with plugging up her own faults because she wants to make this man happy. Mental health does not only mean depression, it means mental health in everyday life.

Our mental health can be affected by everything, and that includes relationships. Even when relationships are going well they can cause a massive amount of stress because there is so much pressure for a relationship to last long. The pressure is on us at all times to be happy, to be perfect, to be undamaged, but that will not necessarily happen. BoJack Horseman may be a show about rich Hollywood types, but the struggles of an anthropomorphised horse and dog, an asexual man-child and strong, independent women can be applied to so many people. This show is relatable to someone like me on so many levels, and it has clearly resonated with many more people than just me.

The show is also well-made, well-written and well-paced. It’s a well-produced piece of entertainment, and delivering something this heartfelt through an entertaining medium is the kind of work that deserves to be praised and held on high. This show might just teach people a thing or two about their own mental issues. It will be confrontational, and it will be rude, but that’s also the nature of the world. Sadly, we can’t escape many of these things and so I elect to face them head-on. Bring me your unhappiness and your depression. Bring them front and centre so I can see them and understand them. I can’t sympathise with what I cannot see, and BoJack Horseman shows it all. It’s an uncompromising show rife with unhappiness, but there’s something comforting about that. If someone was able to write something that resonated so strongly with someone like me then perhaps they understand what it’s like. They understand that despite our places of privilege we are allowed to be unhappy. We are allowed to feel to feelings the BoJack feels, but we should also understand that this is not the way it should be. Just because we can sympathise, does not mean it’s right. We have to try and do better.

Video games and mental health

How can video games possibly relate to mental health? It’s a question worth asking, but before we move into the actual answer to that question it’s important to first look at mental health itself. There’s a lot of stigma relating to mental health, and the vocabulary that we use for people who struggle with their mental health is entirely the wrong vocabulary. Words like “crazy” or “insane” don’t help anyone; they only further worsen the problem. It’s because of the diverse range of voices over the centuries that have called various individuals “mad” or “nuts” or “psycho” that we are in the problematic situation we now find ourselves in.

To be mentally ill is a lot more common than we would want to believe. We want to believe people are mentally ill when they act paranoid or claim to see aliens. These are indeed forms of mental illness, but mental illness encompasses far more. It includes bi- and unipolar depression, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders (not to be confused with psychopathy), addictive disorders, anxiety disorders, et cetera. They’re a wide variety of problems and they can range from minor to severe.

It’s important that we understand mental illness if we are going to understand the place of video games alongside them. Now, first of all, video games should not be seen as a cure in any way whatsoever. They could help to treat certain disorders, but it would generally be best to seek actual psychological help. Sometimes therapy works, sometimes pills are needed. There are many different forms of treatment and there are plenty of online resources that can be found to help with this. But for the purposes of this article, and because it’s a phenomenal source of information on video games and mental illness, the Checkpoint Organisation, and more specifically the series they put out on YouTube, will be the primary reference. Everything I say here has been said better by them and the entire series is worth a watch. So go have a look if you are interested.

Now that that’s over and done with, we can focus on the purpose of this article. As stated before, there are proper therapies and treatments for various mental illnesses, but video games can be used as an aid to them. They can be used to either help with treatment or as a means of learning about mental health. And those two possibilities are what I want to speak about today, because video games can be used for two things when it comes to mental health: it can educate and it can help.

Let’s first start with the more specific sounding term: educate. How can video games educate us about mental health? Well that’s rather simple. Video games can be used to force our direct engagement with the lives of people who are struggling with a mental illness, because unlike something like movies, which involves passively consuming information, video games thrust us into the lives of people with mental problems and then gives us an active role in their lives. Let’s take an overt example: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

This game features a protagonist who is suffering with psychosis, meaning that she sees and hears things that are not there. She may be the constant victim of visual and auditory hallucinations but that does not somehow make her less of a person. She struggles but she perseveres. The game is also a stunning representation of the illness in action. Very few games can be said to accurately reflect a schizophrenic character and exhibit them with nuance and compassion. By creating this game and this character, the developers set about educating a public that may not have been aware of this kind of problem. They may not have initially set out with the goal of educating the audience, as this is an action-adventure, slash-em-up game that won a couple awards (and not some hastily cobbled together educational game), but they still managed to educate people regardless of any intention.

Other games include Night in the Woods, a game with a character who’s struggling with anxiety and depression, and maybe some psychosis too. Then there’s Life is Strange, Neverending Nightmares and Town of Light. Many games exist, mostly of the indie variety, that set about realistically portraying a mental illness or creating an atmosphere that mimics the illness itself. All of which leads to representation and education; it teaches people about these mental illnesses and so hopefully helps reduce the stigma around them. These illnesses are genuine problems that many people are forced to contend with on a daily basis throughout their lives, and so every bit of information that could be used to decrease the public’s ignorance should be seen as a net positive.

But, as was stated earlier, it’s not only through education that video games can aid with mental illness. They could also potentially help people who are suffering with the problems themselves. How so? Well there are two ways that video games can help: representation and direct treatment.

Representation, which is also a part of education, can be immensely helpful to someone struggling with a mental illness. Many people who are mentally ill live in places that still refuse to acknowledge the reality of mental health problems. Many ignorant people still refuse to believe that mental illness exists; they believe it’s just a fault in character, that you need to work harder and forget about the bad feelings or sometimes someone, such as a parent, might feel that the only way to fix you is by physically beating it out of you.

Mentally ill people have a tough time finding accurate representation of their disorder, especially if it’s a rarer one. Depression is probably the most represented of all the mental illnesses, but even then it can be poorly represented, such as by portraying it as angst and belittled as a teenage malady that you’ll one day “get over”. So imagine having schizophrenia, and you never find a video game that accurately portrays your condition. In fact, some people end up thinking that characters like Vaas, the psychopathic murderer from Far Cry 3, is schizophrenic and you, rather than try to explain it properly to them, rather recoil from social interaction because it’s easier that way.

It’s easy to become socially isolated when you know that nobody really understands you. So that little bit of representation you find in Hellblade, that tiny sliver of recognition, can work wonders for your personal self-worth and self-image. It may not heal your condition, but it can make the condition slightly easier to deal with. Imagine a world in which everyone actually understands schizophrenia. Imagine a world in which those people don’t need to live in fear of being called crazy or freak, in which they don’t need to fear being discriminated or being the victim of violence. It would be a slightly more pleasant world to live in.

Then there’s the other aspect to the helping nature of video games: direct treatment. This could be more or less common depending on who you are. You see, some games adopt mechanics that are particularly well suited to treating certain issues. Take for instance, obsessive-compulsive disorder. This mental disorder can enforce certain repetitive compulsions because of some kind of obsession, and this can be immensely damaging to normal functioning. However, what if you could play out these kinds of compulsions in a game that emphasises routine and repetition? A game like Stardew Valley? A calm game that involves doing the same thing over and over, a game that features a persistent day-night progression system with a never ending loop; it’s the kind of game that lends itself to calm, repetitive play.

Or what about puzzle games? They can offer a sense of distraction as they take up tons of brain processing power, and by distracting yourself you can get through a depressive episode. Whereas games like Flower, with its calm melodious gameplay, can aid in anxiety. These games are not necessarily treatments, but they can help some sufferers. Not to mention the fact that there are some actual games being designed specifically for use in treating mental illness.

Video games are far-reaching and all-encompassing. There are games of every sort. Some of them help, some of them don’t. Some teach us, some reinforce negative stereotypes. Video games, like every artistic medium, can be used as a means of healing and education for mental illness and for aiding mental health in general. I know they’ve helped me, and maybe they could help a few other people too.