Bird Brain: Comics About Mental Health, Starring Pigeons

By Chuck Mullin

When Chuck Mullin began experiencing anxiety and depression as a teenager, she started drawing comics to help her make sense of the rollercoaster. Eventually, she found that pigeons—lovably quirky, yet universally reviled creatures—were the ideal subjects of a comic about mental illness. Organized in three sections—"Bad Times," "Relationships," and "Positivity"—and featuring several short essays about the author’s experiences, Bird Brain is a highly relatable, chuckle-inducing, and ultimately uplifting collection of comics for anyone who has struggled to maintain their mental health.
 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781524859619

Book preview

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Bird Brain copyright © 2019 by Chuck Mullin. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever withoutwritten permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

Andrews McMeel Publishing

a division of Andrews McMeel Universal

1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

Bird Brain was originally published in Great Britain by Unbound.

ISBN: 978-1-5248-5961-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019940389

Editor: Melissa R. Zahorsky

Art Director/Designer: Tiffany Meairs

Production Editor: Amy Strassner

Production Manager: Tamara Haus

Ebook Developer: Kristen Minter

ATTENTION: SCHOOLS AND BUSINESSES

Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail the Andrews McMeel Publishing Special Sales Department: [e-mail].

To Mum, Dad, and Ezra—

for believing in me from day one.

To Cort—

my top tier biscuit.

To Rhi—

because I said I would. Thanks for breakfast!

To you—

for opening this book.

Contents

Introduction

Bad Times

Relationships

Positivity

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Author

INTRODUCTION

Anxiety is a wild ride. Often, there seems to be an assumption that if you’re mentally ill, you just sit around and cry all the time. There is a certain amount of that, true, but that’s not all there is to it. Sometimes, I walk around and cry!

There is also a slew of complex emotions and experiences that accompany anxiety—nerves, fear, tentative happiness, the arduous business of forming human connections, the never-ending struggle to convince yourself that you deserve to be content, and so on—usually all experienced concurrently to form an unmanageable cocktail of emotional despair.

I first started experiencing anxiety when I was around seventeen, as the prospect of jetting off to university (where I knew no one except my then-boyfriend), and fending for myself, began to loom over me like a giant blimp full of killer bees. (Side note: Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever, ever go to university solely to follow a romantic partner. It rarely works out well.) Initially, I thought I was undergoing a completely understandable case of nerves. Nerves that just permeated my entire being 24/7 and suddenly made me hate myself for every awkwardly strung together sentence that left my stupid, gross mouth.

The fact that something wasn’t right began to hit home one evening when I went with my flatmates to the university’s first freshers’ night. As soon as I entered the campus club, it was like being submerged in water. I couldn’t breathe. There were too many stimuli: too many bright lights, too much noise, and too many people. Way too many people, who I

Reviews for Bird Brain

[booklover3258 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book about anxiety.