De(MIST)ifying Depression: Dark Clouds and the Construction of Disability

This critical content analysis focuses on four recent picturebooks that depict depression: Willy and the Cloud (2017), by Anthony Brown, Meh (2015) by Deborah Malcolm, The Princess and the Fog (2015), by Lloyd Jones, and Sadly the Owl (2015) by Linnie Von Sky and illustrated by Ashley O’Mara. The analysis was enacted through the lens of critical disability studies as a critique of a medical model of depression as a biological disease that frames sorrow and sadness as pathology. Socially constructed notions of disability and images of “normal” happiness and “abnormal” sorrow were examined in the illustrations. This analysis is based in the interpersonal metafunction of illustrations and the analytical tools of focalization, pathos and effect, ambience and graduation. The lens of critical disability theory (CDT) positions disability as a social and cultural construct that is an imagined form of embodiment, usually devalued, but always inhabited by culture. The analysis attended to how impairment/disability is socially constructed and how concepts of normality are represented through illustrations, particularly in the repeated imagery of a “dark cloud” hanging over the character.