And remember: external forces are never to blame.

March 9, 2013 8:47 PM

I've always thought King Missile's Failure was a pretty good depiction of the kind of intrusive, self-defeating thoughts that characterize depression. The recent FPP'd game Depression Quest does something similar. What are some other works that are reminiscent of the experience of having depression or another mental illness (as opposed to depicting characters with the illness?)
posted by kagredon to media & arts (14 answers total)

Loneliness.
posted by griphus at 9:03 PM on March 9

The Roast Beef Decision-Making Flowchart
posted by St. Sorryass at 9:13 PM on March 9 [7 favorites]

David Foster Wallace's The Depressed Person is the best summary of the guilt that comes with being depressed that I've ever read.
posted by OrangeDrink at 11:29 PM on March 9

Wasn't there a game posted to the blue a couple years back that acted as a schizophrenia simulator (more-or-less intentionally)?
posted by hattifattener at 12:59 AM on March 10

Being trans is often lumped in with having a mental illness, and dys4ia depicts some aspects of that beautifully.
posted by mismatched at 8:37 AM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Some people have proposed Samuel Delany's Dahlgren as being a representation of what it feels like to be schizophrenic.
posted by Bron at 9:29 AM on March 10

I can think of a couple of games that try to put you in another person's shoes this way: Auti-Sim, which deals with autism; and Crush, which deals with anxiety.
posted by Sibrax at 10:08 AM on March 10

Much of the work of Jason Molina does this very well for me, but often includes the hope that comes with the good times and learning to live with it.

This album in particular and these songs in particular hit on this most squarely for me: Almost Was Good Enough and Old Black Hen.
posted by cmoj at 12:05 PM on March 10

I thought Andrew Solomon did an excellent job of describing the experience of being depressed in The Noonday Demon.
posted by Lexica at 12:26 PM on March 10

The film A Beautiful Mind does a pretty good job of creating a sense of doubt about what is and isn't real, as experienced by someone with schizophrenia.
posted by Corvid at 12:39 PM on March 10

After All by Dar Williams is a beautiful song about having depression and recovering from it. (Well, it was for me at least.)
posted by maryr at 9:07 PM on March 10

I played an accidental depression simulator: The Sims 3.
A patch in late 2010 introduced a bug that caused most sims' moods to slowly deteriorate as you played. After a couple of "weeks", they couldn't clean their house, couldn't repair broken faucets, couldn't maintain friendships... and there was no rational explanation for it; when you looked at the part of the interface that shows the factors currently influencing the sim's mood, sometimes it would show only good things, and yet they were still miserable.
(I don't know if it was ever officially fixed; I use a mod that periodically corrects the mood.)
posted by Tool of the Conspiracy at 10:21 PM on March 10

For a game, try Every Day the Same Dream.

For a song, "Nitrous Gas" by Frightened Rabbit.
posted by jbickers at 7:38 AM on March 11

And since it looks like ask treads stay open for a while.
This just came out, and it is pretty great.
posted by St. Sorryass at 11:40 PM on May 10